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The Hidden Resilience of Street-Involved and Homeless Sexual and Gender Minority Young Adults Who Engage in Sex Work
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- Author / Creator
- Hankey, Jeffrey R.
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This dissertation explores innovative and nuanced conceptions of resilience useful to understanding this construct, process, and outcome in a diverse population of street-involved and homeless sexual and gender minority (SGM) young adults. These young persons deal with significant adversity and trauma and have engaged in sex work as one coping and problem-solving strategy. Accordingly, I consider how these individuals are positioned within a sociocultural ecological model that conceptualizes resilience as a complex, non-linear biopsychosocial and cultural process and outcome. I expand possibilities for understanding resilience by employing qualitative interviewing using a natural conversation model embedded in a queer critical posthuman methodological framework to examine how street-involved and homeless SGM young adults navigate and ascribe meaning to daily life in community and institutional contexts that affect their capacity-building, adaptation, and perseverance in the face of stressors and risk-taking.
With this study, I employ a multifaceted sociocultural ecological lens and engage in queer critical posthuman theorizing, shaping my methodology as I investigate mainstream psychological notions of normative development, coping, and capacity-building, and challenge dominant cultural narratives around agency and choice. Such theorizing highlights the interlaced subjectivities and life circumstances of multifarious SGM young people who often find inventive and unconventional means to cope with severe hardship. Qualitative interviewing aligns with a sociocultural ecological approach to enhancing the wellbeing of SGM young adults, providing a thick, deeply contextualized description and rich understanding of their experiences, promoting their visibility and empowerment as change agents.
Research participants were recruited from the Community ~ Hope ~ Empowerment ~ Wellness (Chew) Project, an inner-city intervention and outreach project serving homeless and street-involved SGM young people in Edmonton. Data for this study are comprised of eight interviews: six interviews with five current or former Chew Project clients ages 25 to 38 and two interviews with the Chew Project’s full-time lead intervention and outreach worker. In all, five primary themes emerged from the data: Stressors and Risks; Harm Reduction; Building and Recognizing Assets; Atypical Coping and Problem-Solving Strategies; and Hopefulness and (Hidden) Signs of Thriving. Bringing these conversations and themes to light, this study examines how street-involved and homeless SGM young adults with particular intersectional subjectivities and positionalities (e.g., queer, Indigenous, homeless) build assets that enable them to survive and thrive under unique challenges. The notion of hidden resilience evokes how the vulnerable young participants in this study, when seeking to overcome severe hardship, have resorted to non-normative behaviour that reflects adaptive, if atypical, coping such as engaging in sex work. This study is premised on the perspective that fostering resilience in helping young people who are struggling to survive and thrive requires approaches focused on asset-building as a basis for overcoming adversity and trauma. The ultimate goal of this study is to influence effective social policymaking and engaged practices focused on enhancing positive outcomes for vulnerable SGM young people.
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- Graduation date
- Fall 2020
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
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- License
- Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission.