Speech and Rhetorical Studies Commons^™

Unsheltered & Undeserving: How Chronically Homeless Individuals Are Discursively Constructed In Newspapers, Jacinda Howard

MAIS Projects and Theses

Homelessness arose as a public problem in the 1980s and led to the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act, the country’s first and only legislation to acknowledge homelessness and direct resources toward addressing it. The act has since inspired a national movement to end all types of homelessness by 2020 and chronic homelessness by 2015. A permanent supportive housing model known as Housing First, which provides government subsidized apartments and case management to chronically homeless individuals, is poised to play a crucial role in the movement. Given this, nine newspaper articles published in Tacoma, Washington’s The News Tribune and written …