Afterword: The Practice of Ethical Research Interviews with Homeless Youth

Abstract

One of the implications of this book is that research narratives are influenced by, and must engage with, the social and political context which they investigate. In this afterword I reflect on the ethics of the research on which this book was based, showing how the ethical conduct of homelessness research is made problematic by the very power relationships that the research sets out to understand and disturb. This afterword is offered not as a coherent argument about what it means to do ethical homelessness research, but as a reflection on the difficult process of being ethical whilst researching with very disadvantaged and stigmatised young people. It explores how the symbolic economy of youth homelessness contributes to the formation of researcher and participant subjectivities in research interviews , and shows that ethical conduct in research is a constant process that is often ambivalent and sometimes troubling for researchers. Ethical research cannot merely be designed in advance, but is an intersubjectively negotiated and embodied experience that takes place within the symbolic economy of youth homelessness.