Walking With Women: Exploring Hidden Homelessness

Oxford is a city with an extreme gap between the most deprived and the most privileged. The gap is expressed geographically as the University of Oxford and its Colleges occupy large sections of the city which ordinary residents will seldom set foot in. Responding to the ESRC Grand Union DTP brief Walking with Women: Exploring Hidden Homelessness, I plan to use our movement through the city as a pedagogical process. The first step is participating in the women's learned movements around the city, which are often safety mechanisms to stay hidden. The second step is to accompany them in walking as they want, including inside the University of Oxford as and if they feel. I hope they may feel some breaking down of boundaries and greater ownership of their city which, in turn, might reveal additional narratives and experiences.

These interviews will produce recordings and transcripts for us to work collaboratively to turn into a script in the vein of the oral history community theatre 'from below' which focuses on fictionalising ordinary people's stories and sharing them in the local area. However, before we start work on the performances, I plan to use the radical pedagogic tool of zine-making. There are several aims to including this as a preliminary stage: it will empower the women to take
ownership of their stories, help them learn to experiment and take creative risks, and give them the opportunity of distributing their words through their community unmediated by my creative input.

The community theatre events will draw on all of these materials to bring Oxford women's stories of hidden homelessness to light. As a researcher, I anticipate having two process-based research questions: how best can we communicate women's stories of hidden homelessness to educate the wider Oxford community? And how can they contribute to influencing policy? With the aim of answering these and considering a further methodological question - to what extent can a creative, collaborative method resolve both previous questions? - I will be researching and evaluating the common themes and challenges in these women's lives, particularly where their relationship to education and the University of Oxford itself is considered. How might this project facilitate a new way for the hidden homeless women to experience education?

I hope my DPhil will influence policy to support hidden homeless women and aid prevention as well as making an intervention in pedagogical practice which aims to meaningfully platform hidden homeless women's voices.