Children & Society
Volume 38, Issue 3 pp. 759-773
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Open Access

Homeless youth-led activism and direct action: Lessons from a participatory research project in Tio'tia:ke/Montréal

Jayne Malenfant, 

Corresponding Author

Jayne Malenfant

Department of Integrated Studies in Education, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Correspondence

Jayne Malenfant, Department of Integrated Studies in Education, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada.

Email: [email protected]

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Mickey Watchorn, 

Mickey Watchorn

Youth Action Research Revolution, McGill University, Montréal, Canada

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Naomi Nichols, 

Naomi Nichols

Department of Sociology, Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada

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First published: 23 April 2023
https://doi.org/10.1111/chso.12734
Citations: 2

Abstract

This article explores the involvement of youth with lived experience (LE) in activism and research aimed at addressing youth homelessness in Canada. Based within a youth-participatory action research project in Tio'tiá:ke/Montréal, Canada, we reflect on how young people described their own activist organising, as well as the practical ways we may harness actions that homelessness youth are already doing to create communities and solidarity. The authors are members of Youth Action Research Revolution (YARR), a research team primarily made up of youth with LE of homelessness. We position the analysis at an intersection of our own experiences and 63 interviews with youth aged 16–29 conducted by YARR from 2018 to 2021. Conceiving of participatory, youth-led research as a form of direct action we outline lessons learned from our own research and LE. Young people within our team and participants in YARR's research shared critiques of State systems while outlining the work that they undertook with their peers to act on issues of housing precarity, often eschewing activism aimed at State processes or institutional reform in favour of direct action. This article proposes a mode of fostering youth-led, socially just change around homelessness—one that shifts conversations from inclusion to solidarity, and recognises the radical potential of research by-and-for young people. The authors conclude that research and advocacy on homelessness is always inherently political for young people with LE, and that harnessing the direct action that youth already do to survive is not only a socially just form of mobilising, but can contribute to broader activism towards housing justice.

Youth homelessness impacts a significant number of adolescents, with at least 6000 young people experiencing homelessness any night across in so-called Canada (Gaetz et al., 2016). Homelessness is an issue that disproportionately impacts youth who face existing and intersecting harm in State systems, namely Black, Indigenous, newcomer youth, youth with disabilities, LGBTQ2S youth, youth with mental health struggles and substance users (Sauvé et al., 2018). The number of young people who navigate housing precarity is likely much higher than research suggests, as youth are more likely to experience ‘couch-surfing and rough-sleeping than shelter stays’ (Sauvé et al., 2018, p. 5). Current State responses mean that youth also face unique forms of institutionalisation, stigmatisation and criminalisation while experiencing housing precarity, including in the form of child welfare and criminal justice involvement (Barker et al., 2014; Chesnay et al., 2013; Nichols et al., 2017; Plaster, 2012). State and policy responses to youth homelessness often act in paternalistic ways, mirroring colonial and white supremacist structures, and refuse youth agency and knowledge (Cruz, 2014; Krueger-Henney, 2016; Tuck & Yang, 2014) in ways that amplify harm. We highlight the work youth with lived experience (LE) of homelessness do to resist this harm, build community, and mobilise experiential knowledge in order to organise and act on systemic injustices that impact their communities.

In the absence of equitable access to State institutions (Bey, 2020; Nichols et al., 2017; Thistle, 2017), youth with LE often have no choice but to mobilise to acquire the resources they need for their own survival and engage in political action. To address youth homelessness, building from the work of young people most impacted by housing precarity is key (Levac et al., 2022). However, much of the mainstream advocacy on housing justice within a Canadian and international context relegates youth to committees, advisories or to simply share their ‘stories’ (Cataldo et al., 2021; Yarbrough, 2021). In this way, their true contributions ‘go unnoticed because youth are still seen as junior partners of the social movement’ (Kelley et al., 2014, p. 88). Within models of participation, advising and ‘inclusion’ (Gonzales et al., 2021) in research, the transformative potential of youth activist work is often quashed (Cruz, 2014; Gillen, 2014). Youth activism that occurs within narrow structures of youth councils or advisories can strip it of radical potential, instead limiting actions to those sanctioned by adults and professionals in a given field. These actions often fail to question or resist State systems, rather positioning engagement with State policies and processes—for example through civic engagement, letter-writing and awareness campaigns—as the most fruitful way to enact social change. Despite this, youth are already building movements to address the needs of themselves and their peers. Through examining our own practices as a team primarily made up of youth with lived experience of homelessness, as well as the experiences of youth participants in our work, we explore ways of fostering youth-led, socially just change around youth homelessness—one that shifts conversations from inclusion to solidarity, centres revolutionary work against unjust systems, and recognises the radical potential of research by-and-for young people.

ENDING YOUTH HOMELESSNESS UNDER CAPITALISM AND THE SETTLER-COLONIAL NATION STATE

While we want to highlight the necessary work of youth activism aimed at ameliorating experiences in response to State institutions, particularly under capitalism and settler-colonialism in Canada, we question whether efforts to end homelessness can succeed under systems built on inequity. Can we end homelessness under capitalism, when housing is increasingly seen as a commodity? There is limited scholarship suggesting that homelessness is a necessary aspect of capitalism, both within Marxist (Wilson, 2019) and anarchist frameworks (Spade, 2020), suggesting we must disrupt capitalist systems in order to address homelessness. We also question the possibility of ending homelessness under a settler colonial context like so-called Canada, where we carry out our research. Thistle (2017) outlines 12 dimensions of Indigenous Homelessness, including multiple forms of historic and ongoing displacement from traditional territories, and disconnection from ‘All my Relations’ (p. 24). Many First Nations, Inuit and Métis scholars have drawn attention to the intrinsicality of Indigenous homelessness on stolen land, suggesting that Canada is made possible through the creation of homelessness for Indigenous communities, nations, and youth (Logan, 2021). While we see youth-led activism and research as important tools of resistance to everyday injustices by the settler-colonial State (Ansloos et al., 2022; Tuck & Yang, 2014), we believe that young people can also directly dismantle capitalist and colonial systems, and unsettle their inevitability in collective ideas of social change (Friedel, 2015).

We echo critiques in the literature that discussions of youth activism can flatten, or assume how youth conceptualise action (Aguilar-San Juan, 2006). We believe that youth resistance is an important part of youth activism—resistance which is always in complex relationship with the State and ‘in context, in a place, between real people’ (Tuck & Yang, 2014, p. 8). Following Tuck and Yang (2014), we must be wary of the generalisation of resistance, instead focusing on learning from young people what resistance means to them in a given time and place. Further, in our work together, we have pushed back on conceptualising activism as an individual event (such as signing a petition or a march), but rather understand how activism is a part of everyday actions (Chatterton et al., 2010) that make up the lives of youth. This everyday activism can be understood as a form of direct action, which ‘demands and means working toward active participation in alleviating social problems’ (DeLeon, 2012, p. 133)—suggesting youth can have immediate and ongoing impacts on the systems that shape their lives. We believe that those theorising youth activism—ideally, at least in part, young people themselves—are well served by using a broad definition of action, one that recognises the need for resistance and action (direct, or otherwise) in the everyday trajectories of young people navigating unjust State systems.

In our work together, as well as with youth in Tio'tiá:ke/Montréal, young people consistently highlight the imperative for action, whether it is conceived of as activism or not. Youth noted that within mainstream avenues for social change there is a lot of talk but very little action. This echoes frustration from other groups with lived experience of homelessness (Paradis & Mosher, 2012; Pitawanakwat et al., 2022; Schwan et al., 2022), particularly in the face of increased commodification and financialisation of housing (Birchall, 2021), ongoing dispossession of communities from land (Pieratos et al., 2020; Schneider, 2022) and sustained (or increased) mobilisation of State violence against encampments and marginalised communities (Luscombe & McClelland, 2020; Olson & Pauly, 2021). However, within the social structures outlined above, we must think of how research itself can serve as direct action against the State, with youth leading the way. Despite limitations in much research and advocacy on homelessness, we know that research with an activist orientation can hold significant potential to contribute to social change and action—we have experienced it in our work together. As such, this article provides examples of youth testimony from our qualitative interviews as well as the ways that we organised activism into the day-to-day activities our research team. As a team made up of adults and youth, it is important to us to highlight not only the outcomes of our project, or ‘findings’, but to make visible the ways that youth activism was integral to the nature of our work together—infused in our methodologies, relationships and engagement with youth participants throughout.

Positionality, methodology and methods

As authors who are connected to State systems in multiple ways, we want to position how we enter conversations about homelessness, youth activism and the settler-colonial State apparatus of Canada. Mickey is a Two Spirit, genderqueer young person from London, Ontario, of White, Haudenosaunee and Mi'kmaw descent. They have worked as a researcher with non-profit and academic organisations across so-called Canada, and have lived experience of homelessness. Jayne is a settler of French, Scottish and Cree ancestry who continues to work in Tio'tiá:ke/Montréal. They are from Kapuskasing, Ontario, have lived experience of homelessness, and currently work as a researcher, educator and community organiser across formal and informal settings. Naomi is a white straight woman and setter of Irish and German ancestry. She used to work in Montreal with Mickey and Jayne, but now lives in Nogojiwanong/Peterborough Ontario where she is an associate professor.

This article begins with research and findings that emerged from a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) project, carried out by the YARR team. Our other YARR colleagues, Laurence, Maxime and Shayana, were integral in shaping our understandings of youth experiences of housing, State systems and homelessness, as together we undertook qualitative data collection with youth to ask about their trajectories through educational, criminal justice, healthcare, housing and child welfare systems. Our work with YARR drew on methodologies that encourage research for (youth) activism. Building from a YPAR framework, which may be seen as a ‘radical epistemological challenge to the traditions of social science’ (Fine, 2008, p. 215), YARR employed methods grounded in direct action against historical marginalisation and ongoing commodification of LE through research (Graeber, 2009; Raekstad & Saio Gradin, 2020). YPAR provided tools to resist ‘training young people to mimic the behaviours of adult researchers’ (Mirra et al., 2016, p. 2), instead fostering youth leadership in order to ‘challenge traditional paradigms, texts and theories and foreground the experiential knowledge of young people’ (Akom et al., 2008, p. 12). While YPAR provided key groundings in fostering youth action (Mirra et al., 2016), we do not see youth participation as inherently activist. Actions, as they are often conceived within Y/PAR projects, without a critical lens, may reinforce ideas that activism is only valid if it adheres to what is deemed feasible or attempts to reform unjust systems in ‘depoliticized’ ways, rather than change them (O'Byrne, 2012). In order to bolster this critical lens, we employed YPAR in conversation with other methodologies which mobilise LE for social change and activism.

Institutional Ethnography (I.E.), which aims to approach the ‘object of our inquiry…as activity, rather than an entity’ (Smith, 1990a, p. 90), further grounded the YARR team in activism. This orientation to action can be seen as key to organising meaningful research for social change with youth (Tuck & Yang, 2014). Following an I.E. approach, we argue that a key condition for meaningful youth activism is recognising that youth are experts of their own lives (Smith, 1990a) and that research should be useful to their efforts to live the lives they want. We also draw from anarchist methodologies, which aim to always foster action as everyday activism (Chatterton et al., 2010). An anarchist approach is focused on facilitating direct actions (Graeber, 2009; Lima, 2019), making shifts that ensure power is wrested from (State) systems of housing injustice. Anarchist methodologies may be seen as one approach to activist-based research that position process as action, and necessarily ask us to see our academic work as activism in itself—not a tool to facilitate activism. This framing not only asks us to think of the actions we can do in our everyday lives, but grounds activism in the LE of young people. The research questions discussed here, guiding YARR, were aimed at collectively understanding young people's experiences with State systems:
  1. What are young people's experiences with State systems and how have these experiences shaped/been shaped by conditions of housing instability?
  2. What institutional and social junctures do youth identify in their stories as points of system promise and/or points of system failure?

In order to take the time needed to honour young people's significant State involvement, we adapted a three-stage institutional history interviewing approach (Prasad et al., 2006). We addressed the first two questions through 67 interviews with 38 young people, aged 18–29, who were currently or formerly homeless. All young people were living in Tio'tia:ke/Montréal at this point in time, and youth were recruited either through the a partners organisations' day centre or through the youth researchers' peer networks.

Youth activism within the YARR team

Our understandings of youth activism were developed through our research work together. Direct action was a key aspect of our work from the beginning. Drawing from Jayne's work in community organising, and Naomi's previous research with youth (Nichols, 2014, 2018), the project was organised to directly attend to the realities of youth who were participating. This included trauma-informed and equitable engagement with youth with LE in research (Lived Experience Advisory Council, 2016), such as ensuring that payment was adequate and accessible, that we were accounting for additional labour, such as emotional labour (Petrone & Rogers Stanton, 2021), and that young people were able to participate in the ways that were meaningful to them (Akom et al., 2008). We believe this ethical commitment to one another, drawn from mutual aid principles, can significantly bolster collaborative research with youth. This included building strong bonds of trust, and ‘having each other's backs’ (Cahill et al., 2014, p. 135) not only in research meetings, but also in hospitals, police stations, navigating healthcare and applications to schools, moving and securing housing, art shows, shared meals and other aspects of our everyday lives. This was not simply a case of adults supporting and mentoring youth; rather, our team developed deeply reciprocal relations through which we all changed and grew as a consequence of the more than 2 years we spent working together.

We reject the inevitability that research as (youth) activism (Chatterton et al., 2010) must follow a predetermined path toward or adhere to attempts to enact social change that ‘locates power and control outside of communities, and requires them to appeal to the logics of the State to get piecemeal gains’ (Tuck & Yang, 2014, p. 126). In addition to rejecting activism that followed ‘logics of the State’, our research together also aimed to create anarchist structures that acted as if we were ‘already free’ (Graeber, 2009, p. 13). Indeed, most of our direct-action occurred within our team. We did this by listening to and learning from one another, without passing judgement; showing up for one another each week; sharing material resources; checking in regularly; and showing each other care. We did not take the hierarchies of State institutions, which serve to maintain power in classed, (cis)gendered, racialized, colonial and ableist ways, as a given or an inevitability.

Speaking with youth for action/revolution: Young people's experiences with and actions against the state

Youth, within our team and participants, rejected a view of activism or actions as necessarily separate from everyday life (Cahill et al., 2014; Noguera et al., 2006). Rather, in terms of describing overt ‘political’ acts, or activism, youth framed their actions as part of broader efforts to secure stable housing for themselves and their peers, and build strong communities. While many youth critiqued State systems, not all youth framed themselves as activists.

  • Casey, a white anglophone man
  • … I just get pissed off, I tell them to go fuck themselves, pigs, and I get sucker punched in the face, and then get beaten. And now I have—all of my ribs have been broken multiple times thanks to them…You've seen my ribs. Like, you have seen the damage. All of my ribs have been broken multiple times and are now disfigured.

  • Interviewer
  • From the cops?

  • Casey
  • Yep.

    • Many critiques of the State were anchored in negative experiences with police, including violent engagements and harassment. However, youth saw policing as only one part of a broader apparatus of harm within State institutions, including the child welfare, housing, healthcare, legal and education systems—systems, as Thomas shared, that were best to avoid because ‘they have so much power over people…you never knew what could happen’. Following neoliberal narratives based in individualism (Watson & Cuervo, 2017), young people often internalised notions of self-blame for their own homelessness, eclipsing the responsibility of State structures aimed at ensuring housing stability and security. Despite these narratives, youth carried through critiques of the State. Echoing similar literature on youth activism (Cruz, 2014) youth we spoke with knew through their everyday realities that State systems, including housing, are not made to serve them, and often do them harm. Youth also described reluctance to see narrowly defined channels of activism as leading to significant change; young people were critical of the potential for change that could be brought about by appeals to electoral politics, policy reform and letter-writing to State officials. Each young person who described their work as activist in nature included frustrations and critiques of limited narrow pathways to social change within State systems, instead emphasising the importance of creating strong networks of community, mutual aid, and direct action against the State. In the everyday work that youth are doing, direct action to build new structures of care (Nelson, 2020) is part of young people's urgent work to immediately ameliorate the conditions of themselves and their peers (Lima, 2019).

    The following provide snapshots from youth we interviewed who spoke explicitly about activism—across the spectrum of demonstrations, direct actions, and appeals or working the system—as a key part of their trajectories of homelessness. We include any demographic or identifying information that young people provided us in order to situate their experiences described within State systems that are built on racial, (cis)gendered, and classed norms.

  • Julia
  • Doing Leftist Shit

    • Julia, a Jewish trans woman, saw her experiences with homelessness as steeped in activism, or as she put it, ‘doing a lot of radical organising…and leftist shit’. Julia was the only young person we spoke with who shared experiences organising with specific organisations, and who pursued activist connections as she moved around different cities across Turtle Island. Julia also spoke about the difficulties that can present themselves while attempting to engage in ‘big A activism’ while homeless, and her attempts to bridge access between activists who are housed and those she met through shelters and sleeping rough. However, she said ‘it's hard to coordinate a protest with homeless people’, because they are already undertaking significant labour to ensure day-to-day survival, or have limited access to internet or phone communication. Julia also emphasised that it can be difficult to focus on any single aspect of homelessness since ‘there was way too much stuff to do for organising homeless issues’. Much of Julia's work was to encourage non-homeless allies to take on the labour of organising demonstrations and protests, while highlighting the everyday work other homeless youth had to undertake to survive. Despite trying to coordinate activism with others experiencing homelessness, Julia said she often felt alone in organising spaces, and referenced issues of tokenism and representation:

    I was the only homeless person on that committee, which felt shitty, but it was also cool, because it was like, “Look at all these people who aren't homeless that like, give a shit about us.” Which is—it's like, double-edged, because I also felt really, like, they didn't tokenize me or anything, but I also felt that it was shitty that there was, I hate the word representation, but that there was no, I don't know, I just hated being the only homeless person.

    Julia's experiences of being the only homeless person within activist groups mirror issues of tokenism and isolation broadly in other spaces characterised by moves to embrace the ‘inclusion’ of people with LE in homelessness advocacy and activism (Edwards & Alexander, 2011; Guta et al., 2013). Julia saw her own access to activism and organising as distinctly related to becoming involved at a young age (13), seeing early youth activism as related to ongoing involvement in actions and causes. She explained that the terminology, culture, and expectations placed on those joining activist organising could create a significant barrier for other homeless youth. Additionally, she said that homeless youth often have ‘other shit to worry about’. Julia's observation is a reminder that homeless young people are surviving and resisting State oppression and violence in ways that should be conceived as everyday activism (Chatterton et al., 2010), even though their work is often framed as outside of what is considered to be ‘organising’ or activism by others.

  • Leah
  • There's always a fight against the government

    • Leah, a queer white woman, described a lengthy history of engaging in anti-capitalist demonstrations, with a particular emphasis on mobilising around police and government evictions of encampments. In contrast to Julia, she described participating in activism organised by and for people living in encampments and navigating homelessness, and emphasised the possibility in inter-generational actions. In particular, she emphasised that having adults allow her to participate as a youth strengthened her ability to act on housing injustices. She grounded her description of activism within her own experiences living in ‘tent cities’ in different urban centres across Turtle Island:

    I have always been up for homeless rights and stuff. Most of the [actions] I have taken part in was for housing and homelessness…with all the tent cities and stuff. There's always a fight against the government for it, so I always like to partake in that because I was living in a tent city a few times. It really sucks when the government is trying to kick you out of your home, your community.

    Leah described efforts to create collective spaces autonomous from State control, where community (made up of people experiencing homelessness) could dictate how temporary housing was set up, how decisions were made and how safety was regulated. While these were seen as imperfect (e.g. if others sleeping in the tent city did not respect community rules), Leah also framed these local actions as a direct resistance to the alternative: government controlled seizure of their possessions and displacement. Leah did not trust the government to ameliorate conditions for homeless youth, but hoped that collective organising and increased resources for youth would help. At the time of our interview in 2019, Leah was advocating for a shift from increased policing in shelter spaces and public areas toward more trauma-informed social services (Reynolds, 2020), anticipating the broader activist call to defund or abolish police (Jacobs et al., 2020; Vitale, 2018), and shared that the support she received as a young teen to enter activist spaces bolstered her skills to advocate in ongoing ways.

  • Rowan
  • Pets and Political Squats

    • Rowan, a White, francophone, bisexual, cis-woman who had grown up in the suburbs, explained her housing arrangements as connected to political action. While she had lived in squats since leaving home in her teens, some were overtly ‘political squats’. She described these as different from squats she had experienced throughout her adolescence, where there was little political focus and an emphasis on survival—finding a space where those who were often barred or unable to access other housing could sleep and, as she described, use drugs together. In these spaces, Rowan was often the only youth. Rowan, who saw her drug use as detrimental to her physical and mental health, believed these spaces were not conducive to either her own or the community's wellbeing. While Rowan continued to use drugs, she felt more supported in political squats—mainly with other youth—where there was a shared goal of building community, mobilising resources and planning actions, and where she framed daily life as aimed at organising mutual aid. She did not see shelter spaces as supportive or accessible, or amenable to fostering agency, community or organising. In particular, Rowan critiqued the ways that shelters failed to account for the importance of companion animals—important to young people who may be lacking strong relationships (Leblanc, 2018)—as leading youth to build or participating in alternative housing options, both those aimed at activism and otherwise:

    Like, for me, and pretty much all my friends that are homeless with me, or everything, we all have a dog, or more than one dog, and I found that the biggest problem is that there's not enough help for people that have a dog. And like, for all of us, our dog is like our best friend, my baby, my everything. I would die for my dog, you know? More than any of the people I know…I never sleep in shelters, because I always have my dog and I prefer to sleep in the street.

    Rowan's experiences link to broader critiques of the lack of agency afforded to people staying within the current shelter system. It also highlights prevailing anthropomorphism, and a lack of recognition of the importance of companion animals in housing and homelessness services (Leblanc, 2018). Rowan described the freedom in navigating different types of informal housing in the form of squats, where she could hear about the ‘good ones’, or political squats, through word of mouth, as providing an alternative system to institutional homelessness services.

  • Lucas
  • Protests are all good and stuff, but they are not changing shit

    • Lucas, a White, straight youth who grew up in a middle-class neighbourhood, emphasised the need to think broadly about what is considered activism. He also brought attention to the price that was paid by those who were resisting or engaging in activism against State systems—criminalisation, harassment from police and exclusion from systems such as schools. He saw a shift toward direct action as the way forward for anti-capitalist work, emphasising the work that marginalised groups had long been doing at personal expense:

    I think that's where we're trying to go—basically, the underground, the rebels, I would call the anti-capitalist, anti-society kind of people. We're kind of realising that to fight it, protests are all good and stuff, but they're not changing shit. So, we have to do it ourselves…I think most people are going to continuously attack it because they attacked us, you know? They jailed us. They jail activists. They jail people who don't fit in the mould. They beat you.

    Lucas faced experiences of police brutality, both from anti-capitalist demonstrations as well due to increased visibility during experiences of homelessness. Lucas faced the most harassment by police while undertaking graffiti work, which he saw as a political act against increased gentrification, which he described as a key process in making housing inaccessible to himself and others who needed it. Lucas also linked gentrification to increased State violence, and saw resistance to gentrification as needing to be ‘direct action, whether it's graffiti or not’. While he shared his experiences of engaging in everyday activism, he also referenced his privilege to do so with greater safety than many of his peers, as a white man. Lucas referenced the ways that systems of racism, which he saw as inherent to the State, organised his own privilege and access in schools, where Black peers would face disproportionate punishment and exclusion. During experiences of homelessness, Lucas had connected with friends who were Indigenous, and saw Indigenous movements led by Land Defenders (Muxlow, 2021) as integral to justice for all—requiring settlers to follow Indigenous leadership. Lucas ultimately saw his work doing art, as well as plans to contribute to intentional, ‘off-grid’ communities outside of the city as creating a life outside of capitalist expectations for himself and his peers.

  • Benny
  • ‘DIY or Die’

    • Benny, a bisexual, Swedish-Armenian anglophone who grew up in a suburb, described his activism work as direct action and was dedicated to building networks to support his community to act as if they were ‘already free’. He often engaged in marches as an act of support or solidarity with peers—in tandem with diverse actions that made up a spectrum of activism for Benny that followed DIY and anarchist principles (Malenfant, 2018). Having had encounters with police throughout his childhood, Benny described a series of strategies for maintaining the safety of his communities’ peers when having to engage with police. In one instance, he described receiving warnings at a protest that had drawn riot cops. Rather than leave, he recounted, ‘I turn to my friend, I'm like, “you ready to get arrested in solidarity for your friend? And he just looks at me with a big sigh and says, yeah, and we did’. Benny knew this move would lead to police involvement, possible violence, and arrest. While he and his friend were taken into a police van and faced violence from officers, Benny explained that he employed strategies to stay calm—hoping that this would lead to less violence for him and his friends. This fit into Benny's broader philosophy of ‘DIY or die’, with much of his everyday work dedicated to building networks of solidarity against/surviving the State.

    One aspect of Benny's activism was attempting to create community-led responses to violence or conflict that was impacting youth:

    I've been in groups of punks that are going out in the night in public areas where shit's gone down, and basically like neighbourhood anarchy watch. So I did that for a while, and we find belligerent people. Like, we don't want the cops involved. … I've intimidated drug dealers before that have been poisoning my community to try and get them to stop. It's not just anyone for doing drugs, but if you're going to have a drug dealer that's enabling people to [think] they're hopeless…they're now heroin junkies just because he's a seller and he's going to push everything on you.

    Benny described filling gaps in State services, from educating peers about social theory, ‘playing little social worker’ and supporting peers' material and mental needs. He further described organising a ‘dumpster diving crew’, as well as going into well-known drug houses in order to carry out naloxone training, speaking with people, and distributing food. He described this as harnessing ‘the power’ of his peers, and guiding other homeless youth into ‘true anarchy’. Benny described plans to scale up these networks and being “very proud” of his work, particularly in that it did not need to follow or answer to the logics of State funding, bureaucracy, or rules.

    DISCUSSION & CONCLUSION

    Writing this article required us to reflect on how our everyday experiences—of housing precarity, of working together as a research team, and as scholars with different and shifting access to State systems—may or may not fit into traditional notions of activism. Through understanding the work that young people undertake to support their communities, as a direct result of their experiences of the failures of State systems, we demonstrate how the development of collective political consciousness, creating communities of care and material support, and acting as if we are already free can contribute to more radical and expansive conceptualizations of youth activism. Young people's own descriptions of their activist work demonstrate the importance of recognising the myriad things young people are already doing to improve their own and others' lives. Conceptualizations of youth activism developed and shared by members of YARR and participants, position political organising for housing justice as intimately connected to youth actions to ensure their communities are surviving. This work necessarily takes place within State systems that fail to appropriately care for young people throughout their lives, and often actively harm them. Young people know through their experiences that social change requires building new systems.

    For much of our lives, direct action and the development of community supports were what kept us safe and alive. Young people we spoke with echoed these experiences. This leads us to position youth-led direct action work as integral to any effort to address social and housing injustice. As researchers, we see the ways that enacting and combining activist methodologies can directly foster youth leadership (Akom et al., 2008) in housing justice. We recommend that others who wish to act on social issues impacting youth to undertake direct action research to in solidarity with young people. This must begin with listening to and believing young people as experts in their own realities. While research often fails to centre youth leadership, we see the impacts that our own work has had on all members of our team. Returning to our critique of attempts to nd homelessness in so-called Canada and Québec, as a team made up of both settler and Indigenous researchers, our work continues to explore issues of homelessness and displacement with guidance from First Nations, Inuit and Métis activists, knowledge keepers, and researchers, particularly within a decolonizing framework (Battiste, 2011; Whetung & Wakefield, 2019), and is grounded in a necessity of not only illuminating State structures of harm but actively disrupting them.

    We continue this anti-capitalist and anti-colonial work in tandem with learning from young people, including youth like Julia, Leah, Rowan, Lucas and Benny, and imagining new structures where youth can lead efforts to address social injustices. In order to challenge epistemic, social, and economic hierarchies, we must disrupt existing power dynamics, which fall along racial, gendered, ableist and classed lines, within all fields, including frontline work, policy-making, and research. We must create spaces where a range of lived experiences are mobilised, in solidarity, in order to transform structures of injustice, and centre care in collaborative work to address social issues. It is essential to reflect on how the methods we use to make social change contribute to or resist subsummation into the very structures we hope to fight against. In doing so, we can build new ways of supporting youth across fields, disciplines, and work. We are also dedicated to carrying out this work because we know the cost of not doing so—we have lost and continue to lose many members of our communities to State violence and the impacts of homelessness. Our own lived experiences, with homelessness, research and activism, have shown us that direct action against harmful State systems may be our only hope for housing justice.

    FUNDING INFORMATION

    This project was funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council and the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation.

    CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT

    We have no conflicts of interest to disclose.

    Endnotes

  • 1 Throughout the article we speak about the apparatus of the Canadian State, but aim to centre the multiple traditional territories and lands that make up what is now known as Canada.
  • 2 While we use pseudonyms for research participants throughout this paper, we include the real names of youth co-researchers, based on a shared agreement with the research team and their visibility throughout outputs from this project.
  • 3 While many youth homelessness services conceptualise youth up to the age of 25, we opted to employ a broad understanding of ‘youth’, up to age 29, particularly given the long trajectories of transitioning to adulthood that many youth with experiences of homelessness navigate. We also were open to interviewing youth aged 16–18, but no youth under the age of 18 participated in the research.
  • 4 For example, payments to co-researchers had to take into account the amount allowed under the province of Québec's social assistance programme, otherwise receiving payment for research work may have led some members of YARR to receive less income overall.
  • 5 Examples include critiquing State control of public spaces like sidewalks, the amount of power held by police, or the failure of the State child welfare system to support youth.
  • 6 For an in-depth exploration of the historical differences between homelessness advocacy and direct action and activism in so-called Canada, see Schwan (2016).
  • 7 While framing housing as a human right was not always a direct appeal to the State, it was an ongoing point of action both for participants and members of YARR, including the development of a zine on Housing as a Human Right developed by and for youth with LE.
  • 8 Naloxone is a medication used to r.everse opioid effects or overdoses, used increasingly in response to the drug poisoning crisis (Humphreys et al., 2022).

    • Biographies

    • Jayne Malenfant is currently a M3C Fellow at McGill University in Tio'tia:ke/Montréal, Québec. Their work focuses on the intersections of youth and lived experience engagement, homelessness prevention, and education. They are a member of Youth Action Research Revolution.

    • Mickey Watchorn currently works in Ontario and is a member of Youth Action Research Revolution. They have been a community researcher for several years, working with youth-serving organizations. Their focus is on issues of Indigenous resistance, homelessness and housing, and building communities of resistance.

    • Naomi Nichols is a Canada Research Chair in Community-Partnered Social Justice, and Associate Professor at Trent University in Nogojiwanong/Peterborough, Ontario. Her work explores equity, housing rights, and institutional experiences, including the child welfare and criminal justice systems. She is a member of Youth Action Research Revolution.

    DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

    The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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