Urban Foraging and Harm Reduction
In addition to gaining additional understanding about social justice initiatives and intervention research design, I'll need to get much better educated about the current literature on homelessness. In the absence of real data, I feel hostilely predisposed against the idea of homelessness as an intrinsic scourge. I want to tease out the notion that some homeless people are essentially urban gatherer-hunters but that many of them are operating in space where they have little or no understanding of the ecological contexts in which they are trying to operate. By inventorying ecological resources and working to educate the population of unsheltered people in those contexts, we'll be proposing a kind of harm reduction strategy that will empower people to make more and better decisions about how to extract resources from not only the social landscape (via social services, food pantries etc) but the physical landscapes as well.