Families on the Edge

An intimate account of rural New England families living on the edge of homelessness, as well as the practices and policies of care that fail them.

Families on the Edge is an ethnographic portrait of families in rural and small-town New England who are often undercut by the very systems that are set up to help them. In this book, author and medical anthropologist Elizabeth Carpenter-Song draws on a decade of ethnographic research to chart the struggles of a cohort of families she met in a Vermont family shelter in 2009, as they contend with housing insecurity, mental illness, and substance use. Few other works have attempted to take such a long-term view of how vulnerability to homelessness unfolds over time or to engage so fully with existing scholarship in the fields of anthropology and health services.

Research on homelessness in the United States has been overwhelmingly conducted in urban settings, so much less is known about its trajectory in rural areas and small towns. Carpenter-Song’s book identifies how specific aspects of rural New England—including scarce affordable housing stock, extremely limited transportation, and cultural expectations of self-reliance—come together to thwart opportunities for families despite their continual striving to “make it” in this environment. Carpenter-Song shines a light on the many high-stakes consequences that occur when systems of care fail and offers a way forward for clinicians, health researchers, and policymakers seeking practical solutions.Acknowledgments vii
Prelude xi
1 Introduction 1
2 Becoming Homeless in Rural New England 17
3 Life on the Edge 45
4 Paradoxes of Care 71
5 Shattered Families 97
6 Toward Security Following Homelessness 121
7 Conclusion 137
Epilogue: Notes from the Pandemic 147
Appendix: Family Housing Trajectories 149
Notes 153
References 159
Index 173“Families on the Edge is a gripping exploration of the way homelessness and its aftermath is experienced by families in a rural area of New England.”
—Ethos

“Carpenter-Song’s writing is lucid and evocative, which makes the book a good choice for undergraduate courses in medical anthropology, cultural psychiatry, psychological anthropology, and social work.”
—Medical Anthropology Quarterly

“Elizabeth Carpenter-Song’s Families on the Edge offers a gripping, tragic, and analytically powerful account of five families’ experiences of housing insecurity in rural New England. It fills an important gap in our local and national understanding of homelessness. It fundamentally challenges the theoretical and policy relevance of homogenizing these families’ experiences with those of the urban, unsheltered, marginalized, and frequently racialized people who comprise both the literature and public imagination.”
—Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry“This searing, intimate ethnography of five rural New England families, struggling with homelessness, disabilities, and financial insecurity, analyzes ‘paradoxes of care’ of state and healthcare services that lead to dismantling families, and concludes at decade’s end with successful post-homeless security, and a passionate call for nonpunitive compassionate services.”
—Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine, emerita Harvard Medical School, Harvard University
 
“At long last, a fiercely argued ethnography that refuses the reductive simplicities of ‘homelessness.’ There for the long haul, Families on the Edge captures the distinctive contours of rural precarity: its hardscrabble intimacies, makeshift economies, oft-hapless social assistance, and fraught, hazardous moral project of parenting.”
—Kim Hopper, Professor of Clinical Sociomedical Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia UniversityElizabeth Carpenter-Song is currently Research Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth College. Her work has been published in journals ranging from Ethos to Psychiatric Services to Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless.