Creating “Real Change”: Examining Discourses in Anti-Panhandling/ Alternative Giving Campaigns

• In Event: 40821 - Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 7. Governing Homelessness

Abstract

An increasing number of Americans are falling into homelessness, a number that has been on the rise since 2016. Cities and local non-profit organizations are on the frontlines of managing housing crises and are particularly charged with managing visible homelessness. In addition to hostile architecture and legal apparatuses (i.e. public camping bans), some cities have partnered with non-profit organizations to host “alternative giving”/ anti-panhandling campaigns to control visible homelessness. This paper focuses on these campaigns as a distinct strategy that complements and reinforces other mechanisms of control. By design, alternative giving campaigns urge individuals to donate their spare change to non-profit organizations rather than to people panhandling. Found across the United States, these campaigns tease the possibility of a capacious and transformational type of change if only we stop giving to panhandlers and redirect those spare coins to non-profit organizations instead. This project is motivated by two questions. Firstly, in their efforts to divert money away from panhandlers, how do campaign organizers – cities and non-profit organizations – construct the problem of panhandling and appeal to the public for funding? Secondly, what can these anti-panhandling campaigns add to public discourses on houselessness? By analyzing 32 anti-panhandling campaigns, I show that although campaigns are cast as helpful to unhoused residents, organizers draw on a variety of strategies that further stigmatize an already vulnerable population. Furthermore, it is the very grammar of care and concern for this population that can occlude these efforts. Alternative giving campaigns ultimately provide a vehicle through which cities and non-profits mobilize the public to “crowd-source” for its citizenship projects, lending symbolic and tangible supports. Furthermore, I place alternative giving campaigns within a broader rubric of hostile architecture and diminishing legal protection to provide a fuller picture of the forces shaping the environment that unhoused residents navigate.

Author

• Madeline Yu Carrola, The Ohio State University