Homeless Deaths

This chapter addresses responses to the increasing number of people dying whilst experiencing homelessness. It examines how the social neglect and disappearance that characterise homeless deaths have been contested by a range of creative memorialising processes and commemorative acts, including the Guardian’s Empty Doorway Series, the Dying Homeless Project, and the annual memorial at St Martin-in-the-Fields for people who have died whilst homeless in London. Attentive to the structural violence and structures of feeling that have galvanised the need for such memorialising practices, it explores how memory work is leveraged as both a highly personal mode of remembrance and a space to recalibrate mourning into modalities of critical resistance and activism. Offering a cultural analysis of a range of memorial modes, including public archiving projects, secular services, and performative vigils, it investigates how these initiatives seek to honour those who have died whilst homeless, generate opportunities to process collective loss, and build coalitions of support to sustain activist campaigns. The chapter is particularly concerned with examining the spatial, performative, embodied, and affective dimensions of these interventions.