Erin Gaede was awarded the Master’s Thesis Award by the Rural Sociological Society for her Master’s thesis titled “Housing Insecurity in America’s Dairyland.”
Abstract:
To explain the stigma around homelessness and housing insecurity, scholars tend to rely on urban samples and focus on the hypervisibility, what I call the physical hypervisibility, of people sleeping in public spaces, on park benches, and public transportation. Unlike in urban contexts, people experiencing housing insecurity in rural areas are often unseen: they are doubling up with friends and family, living in their vehicles, abandoned buildings, and state parks. As such, rural housing insecurity is often referred to as “hidden.” This hiddenness gives us reason to suspect that theories built on hypervisibility and urban samples cannot fully account for the stigma around homelessness and housing insecurity across different geographic contexts. Based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork and 37 in-depth interviews in five rural counties in Wisconsin, this paper finds that the relationship between stigma and rural housing insecurity hinges on its social hypervisibility. In the absence of public services and infrastructure, people experiencing housing hardships in rural areas rely on the strong ties of their dense social networks, making their struggles known to others, even when they are not directly observed, such as in urban contexts. This social hypervisibility then facilitates stigma by shaping people’s relationships, behavior, and opportunities to climb out of poverty. These findings indicate the need to further examine how the experience of stigma, poverty, and housing insecurity vary across different geographic contexts.