A Stone in the Brook: Aesthetics of Home in the Narratives, Memory, and Arts of Homeless Persons from a Southern Shelter Community

A Stone in the Brook: Aesthetics of Home in the Narratives, Memory, and Arts of Homeless Persons from a Southern Shelter Community Public Deposited

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Creator

Sirah, Kirandeep Singh
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of American Studies, Folklore Program

Abstract

The Inter-Faith Council (IFC), the organization that runs the emergency homeless shelter for men in Chapel Hill, this year marks its golden anniversary. This important anniversary offers the organization an opportunity to reflect on its role in providing emergency shelter for homeless persons. This thesis explores the diverse aesthetic dimensions of home and the ways residents of the shelter establish a sense of place, identity, belonging, and community, and examines how memories, arts, and narratives can help us to better understand how home is crafted in the mind, through imagination, and through physical manifestations in and around the shelter. This work also offers recommendations for how men from this shelter, its supporters, and the wider community might go further in fostering a sense of home as IFC begins to build a new emergency men's homeless shelter in Chapel Hill. Although focused on specific narratives of residents of one shelter community in the South, the project aims to reverse the invisibility of homeless persons by connecting notions of home to the wider community of displaced persons throughout an ever-changing world.

Date of publication