Working for Citizenship in the Liminal Space: Social Reproduction in the Emergency Family Shelter System

Family homelessness remains an endemic social problem in Canada. Parents residing in the family shelter system must continue raising their children, although they lack the means afforded by housed and employed parents. Despite government efforts to enact anti-poverty strategies such as affordable housing and social welfare, free market hegemony has contributed to the neoliberalization of social policy. The historical development of the current welfare state regime shows that the residual nature of social welfare in Canada depends on a high degree of familialization. The purpose of this exploratory research is two-fold: an exploration of how the political economy of social welfare shapes the lived experiences of parents practicing social reproduction in the family shelter system and how these parents' social rights are configured within the Canadian welfare state. I answer my research questions by adopting a narrative analysis of interviews with 23 homeless parents in the Greater Toronto Area. I apply life course theory to show how the respondents' narratives of their lived experiences in the family shelter system uncover linkages between their social reproduction activities and the political context that structures them. I conceptualize the Family Residence as a liminal space and the Residence clients as liminal citizens, defined as those in receipt of social welfare and subjected to state surveillance. The analysis of the interviews uncovers three findings. First, homelessness results from compounding deprivations as a result of market-based poverty that subsequently leads to extreme social exclusion. Second, the difference between housed and homeless parents is that homeless parents face a triple burden in that they are expected to fulfill their responsibilities as clients in the family shelter system, obtain housing to transition out of the shelter, and carry out social reproduction. Third, social rights remain deeply familialized and therefore contribute to intensified social exclusion for homeless parents without adequate state support. The research concludes with a policy recommendation that embraces the housing as a right framework to inform a robust anti-poverty strategy. This research yields two major contributions. First, my findings complement the literature that centres citizenship in liberal welfare states as an analytical framework in the study of modern poverty. Second, I conclude that the Canadian welfare state commits to familialization rather than universalism in order to uphold liberalized capital markets.