On today’s show, host Carlos Dávalos speaks with scholar, Danny Parker, about her on-the-ground research on unhoused folks in Madison. Often we’re presented with a very top-down picture of civic infrastructure, but Parker reports from the front lines and focuses on the lived realities of the most vulnerable in our communities.

Parker’s early ethnographic work took place in Madison. She spent years sitting on sidewalks with unhoused people, eating and going to the hospital with them, and watching how the world responded to the people she was with. Based on her comparative analysis of Madison and rural Appalachia, she says that though things aren’t perfect in Madison, she’d rather be unhoused here because at least she would have a chance.

She says that Madison officials meet regularly with outreach organizations and that those organizations hire peer advocates to build trust with people living on the street who may trust a case worker. Sometimes these processes break down, but at least they exist and there is an expectation of dialogue. Parker adds that journalists should be paying attention to issues facing unhoused folks and when they do they should give them a voice, like a recent piece in Tone Madison. 

They also talk about systemic issues like the lack of affordable housing and the criminalization of poverty. On top of these issues is societal stigma, which Parker says she saw on a daily basis. While she was in Madison she would see her colleagues at UW-Madison pass by unhoused folks on the street and not even acknowledge them. Then at a committee meeting they would announce their support of “marginalized communities.” Parker wants this kind of hypocrisy to end. She says that “everyone is connected to everyone else, and we all get hungry.”

Danny Parker is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. Her research examines the role communication ecologies play in the reproduction of poverty and the development of political identity. She is an ethnographer who chronicles the lived experiences of extremely impoverished rural and urban communities by living among them and documenting their everyday lives.

Featured image: a view of State Street via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).

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