Using Community-Engaged Arts-Based Methods to Explore Housing Insecurity in Rural-Urban Spaces

Abstract

This article explores how community-engaged, art-based research methods can enrich our understanding of homelessness, with a specific focus on housing insecurity in rural urban communities. Drawing on a digital storytelling project in Dufferin County, Ontario, involving twelve storytellers- ten with lived experience of homelessness - we explore the complexities of homelessness that are often neglected in official narratives of housing and home. We argue that the dominant methods of documenting homelessness - enumeration through point-in-time (PiT) counts - provide a limited understanding of homelessness and can contribute to the invisibility of these problems in rural-urban spaces. We explore how a participant-led critical engagement can help make visible experiences of housing insecurity as a form of homelessness, and direct focus to the intersection of individual circumstances with structural factors, pointing to key areas for policy change.