University-Community Partnerships: An Action-Humanities Approach to Addressing Homelessness

This dissertation is a study of the function of the 21st century Canadian university and how it engages with communities to address social issues such as homelessness. The study looks at university projects that address homelessness, scholarly literature, websites, and primary data as collected through a survey sent out to project participants across Canadain order to answer the main research question, What role should the 21st century university play in addressing issues of homelessness? The guiding thesis of this dissertation is that in order to address these issues, and to design positive and progressive homelessness-related projects, universities could address homelessness using an interdisciplinary array of resources, taking on an action-humanities approach, which facilitates empowerment of people with lived experiences of homelessness and engages students and faculty in a pedagogy of social responsibility.