Abstract
Some scholars have argued that those affected by ‘existential’ forms of waiting and boredom lack agency, that they lack the capacity to act. This paper seeks to counter these ideas by focussing on the relationships between time and agency in homelessness. Using data drawn from ethnographic fieldwork in Glasgow, Scotland, it shows the ways in which participants used different tactics and strategies to manage their experiences of time and argues that these constitute forms of temporal agency. Even in situations of temporal confinement, people act, and their actions are temporally orientated. Using examples from the field of homelessness, this paper contributes to the debate about the relationships that exist between time and agency. It introduces the idea that the segmentation and de-segmentation of time, through a range of means, can be used as agentic ways of actively managing the experiences of existential waiting and existential boredom, respectively. While acknowledging the impact of social structures on those who experience homelessness, it argues that recognising and respecting the agency of individuals, and the ways in which they exercise it within these circumscribing structures, can deepen our understanding of how time and agency interact. Moreover, this understanding can be used to improve policy and practice by better contextualising the actions of those impacted by social structures.
We enter the lounge of the hostel, which is a square room and dimly lit. A TV is mounted high behind us, on the same wall as the door we’ve just entered. Eight pairs of black, padded seats - fixed to each other two at a time by a small connecting table, occupy most of the room. Some single seats line the far wall. All seats face the TV and, in the row nearest to it, a man wearing glasses who looks to be in his thirties sits alone watching a film. There's a bottle of cider on the small table connecting his seat to the one next to him. In the second row from the back, the guy we met at the front door is next to another with a further two sitting behind them. The worker with me discusses with the group at the back their current issues, including substance use, health, and housing applications. I am brought into these conversations by some men who recount to me their experiences in this hostel as well as other experiences, like a recent hospital admission. After about 30 minutes, I notice that the room has a skylight. It catches my attention because we are on the ground floor and, so, I wonder how that's possible. It happens that the building has a courtyard into which this room extends. I hadn’t noticed the skylight at first because it had been almost completely covered, but a small sliver of natural light caught my eye. When I mention this to the group, one of the men tells me it had been ‘covered up to give it more of a pub feel. You know, so you can’t tell what time of day it is’. I ask why this might be desirable, but no one offers a response.
The above vignette hints at how the men that I met experienced time, but not in a way that is easy to apprehend. Hage (2012: 305) suggested that the hidden realities of others exist in the world around us and can show up in our own, ‘giving enough of themselves to tell us they exist but [that] are nonetheless impervious to easy capture’. The passage of time, as signified by the changing light of the day, appeared as something that had to be managed in this situation. Does blocking out the sun act as a defence against the passage of time? If they have an abundance of time, is being aware of its slow passage unbearable for these men? Are they actively producing a stretched present and, if so, to what end?
Both boredom and waiting can be seen as forms of temporal confinement, where those affected can feel stuck in the present. However, as I argue later, waiting is future-orientated while boredom is focussed on the present.
Some scholars have argued that those affected by ‘existential’ forms of waiting and boredom lack agency, that they lack the capacity to act. In this paper, I seek to counter these arguments by focussing on the relationships between time and agency in homelessness. Homelessness can be seen as a site of temporal confinement where, much like the prisons and refugee camps explored in other studies, individuals may feel left behind or stuck (Burraway, 2021; Jefferson and Segal, 2019). Using data drawn from 8 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Glasgow, Scotland, I will show the ways in which my interlocutors used different tactics to manage their experiences of time and argue that these constitute forms of temporal agency. Flaherty (2012) calls this ‘time work’, a concept that he uses to describe the ways in which individuals seek to modify, manipulate, or otherwise change their experience of time. Specifically, I introduce the idea that the segmentation and de-segmentation of time, through a range of means, can be used as agentic ways of actively managing different time experiences with each having a different temporal ‘tone’ (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998).
In the next section, I review literature on the interrelated concepts of boredom and waiting to highlight the ways in which some scholars have differentiated between situational and existential categories of these and their relationships to agency. I then introduce the concept of ‘stuckness’ (Jefferson et al., 2019), which relates to the quality of a confined life, before discussing Emirbayer and Mische's (1998) analysis of agency and outlining the concepts of segmentation and de-segmentation.
Agency, boredom, waiting, and stuckness
Situational and existential boredom
Boredom creates frictions in how time is experienced; it can create temporal ruptures, forcing individuals into slower rhythms, creating too much time (Pickering, 2016). It has been categorised by some as a universal experience, which is generally unpleasant (see Marshall et al., 2020; O’Brien, 2014). Despite this claimed universality, boredom as a concept resists clear description and analysis. Boredom is practically indefinable because it lacks the positiveness that is typical of most other phenomena. It is basically to be [understood] as an absence – an absence of personal meaning (Svendsen, 2005: 45).
Boredom is not a trivial issue, especially for those who lack the resources to effectively combat it (Marshall et al., 2020). Some scholars have identified boredom as a situation where thoughts and dispositions can become fearful. Boredom is threatening because it ‘proves to be a place where the inflicted entertain death’ (O'Neill, 2014: 24). Stevenson (2014: 130) asks ‘[m]ight the real problem not be that boredom bends towards death? That none of us can escape?’ The frictions in time that boredom creates can generate a sense of foreboding, fear, and anxiety.
Boredom is a perennial and serious issue for those affected by homelessness (Marshall et al., 2020) where time can feel stretched and individuals can feel trapped with the past in the present, with little prospect of a future that is different. The inability for some to experience progress as the realisation of a future that is different from their present creates a friction in the flow of time. Mains (2017: 39) found such a stretching of time among young Ethiopian men who were unemployed arguing that ‘boredom emerges specifically out of a failure to actualise expectations of progress’, rendering time and experience unmeaningful.
Similarly, Jefferson and Segal (2019) argue that the confinement of time comes not only from attempts to control it (such as with clocks and calendars) but also from its endlessness, which can be linked to an inescapable and tiring struggle. For the people living in Sierra Leone and Palestine, who were the subject of Jefferson and Segal's (2019: 106) studies, time pulsated unpredictably between promise and threat; the ‘immanence of the past in the present’ combined with an inability to see a future that that was different from the present, leaving their participants ‘strung out’ and ‘stretched’.
Others have found similar expressions among populations experiencing homelessness. Burraway (2021: 371) described a form of ‘temporal bracketing’ affecting participants in his ethnography of street homelessness in London. He argued that his interlocutors experienced an endless present bracketed on one side by a difficult, often traumatic past, and on the other by a future that had ‘all but been evacuated of meaningful possibilities’ (Burraway, 2021: 372), which they articulated as boredom.
Situational and existential waiting
Although not coterminous with boredom, waiting has considerable conceptual overlap as demonstrated in the breadth of literature where authors and/or their participants connect the two (see, e.g. Burraway, 2021; Jefferson and Segal, 2019; Pickering, 2016). Like boredom, waiting can create a stretched present by forcing people into slower rhythms (Pickering, 2016). It is also considered a universal human experience (Hage, 2009) that, nonetheless, remains resistant to description or analysis (Schweizer, 2008).
Dwyer (2009) extends Svendsen's boredom typology by differentiating between situational and existential waiting. The former is situated in the world, within time, such as waiting for a bus, a lover, or to be rescued. Situational waiting may be experienced differently depending on the context such as being irritating, exciting, or terrifying in the examples just given. Individuals may choose to take actions to bring about that for which they wait, or they may wait quietly and patiently, deferring any action until it is seen as possible or necessary. This activity/passivity waiting dichotomy has been questioned by Bissell (2007) who argues that waiting is a social and performative act that requires considerable personal resources, even when sitting relatively still. How to position one's body, or where and for how long one's gaze can be fixed, for example, are considerations during waiting situations that make them more active than they appear.
According to Dwyer, existential waiting sits apart from the world and out of time. Existential waiting involves the whole being of an individual being bounded by an uncertain future where their ‘own sense of viable practice [is] committed to present circumstance framed in relation to past experience’ (Dwyer, 2009: 21). Existential waiting, therefore, entails being trapped or stuck in the present by an uncertain future, acting only in the present according to what has been experienced in the past. Being encompassed by an uncertain future can feel like a loss of agency for the individual: ‘that he or she lacks the capacity to act’ (Dwyer, 2009: 23).
Waiting can also be thought of as a means through which power and domination are wielded. For example, Auyero (2010) shows the ways in which indeterminate waiting is used in a welfare office in Argentina to subjugate those trying to access vital resources. He argues that their dire need forces their compliance with a system that requires them to demonstrate their deservingness through waiting patiently and without protest.
Agency, stuckness, segmentation, and de-segmentation
In the conceptualisations above, those affected by existential forms of boredom and waiting are rendered unable to act to effect a change in their condition; they lack agency. They could be described as stuck, confined within time. However, I argue that individuals can and do act in these situations of temporal confinement and that their actions are temporally orientated.
Jefferson et al. (2019) introduce the concept of ‘stuckness’ and define it as being experiential, that it relates to a quality of a confined life in terms of how it is lived and made sense of. This invites investigation into how the confinement of stuckness is felt, thought about, and acted upon by those affected by it.
In later sections, I explore experiences of stuckness, including existential waiting and boredom, and the ways in which participants felt, thought about, and acted upon these experiences. In doing this, I set out to resist the idea that those affected by them lack the capacity to act; instead, I align more closely with the views of Emirbayer and Mische (1998) who argue that even habitual action is agentic. They hold that agency can only be understood if considered within the flow of time where action is taken in the multiple, overlapping temporal and relational contexts within which actors act. In this way, the past, the present, and the future all influence the actions that individuals take (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998).
They propose a chordal triad of agency that has iterational (past), projective (future), and practical-evaluative (present) elements. While all three elements are present in any empirical action, a dominant ‘tone’ is present. For example, iterational or past-orientated action, including the habitual, involves agentic recall and selection from past repertoires but also involves the future in the expectations of what those actions will accomplish when they are implemented in the present situation. While agency can never get free of the structures within which it is executed, ‘empirical social action will never be completely determined or structured’ (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998: 1004).
I use the concepts of segmentation and de-segmentation to describe the ways in which participants acted to manage experiences of existential waiting and boredom. Existential waiting, in the sense of not knowing if, when, or how a change or goal will happen, can stretch the present out into an indeterminate future. Nonetheless, the expectation of a future change meant the agency of my interlocutors had a future tone and they found ways to take the present apart, to shrink it down into smaller, more manageable segments by planning and focussing on specific actions.
Where individuals had little expectation of a changed future, a stretched present was experienced as existential boredom and agency took on a present tone. Rather than stretching into the future, the endlessness of present time was concentrated into the experience of every second and minute. This required a different form of time work where sleep and substances were used to de-segment it, to remove the minutes and the hours, to enter another form of time or to remove it from consciousness temporarily.
It is important to acknowledge the role of social structures in contextualising, shaping, refining, and limiting the agency of actors. Indeed, many prominent sociological and anthropological theories of social practice emphasise the reciprocal, interdependent, and mutually constitutive nature of relationships between actors, their actions, and the social worlds in which they act (see, e.g. Bourdieu, 1977; Giddens, 1979; Lave and Wenger, 1991). However, I argue that recognising and respecting the agency of individuals, and the ways in which they exercise it within these circumscribing structures, can deepen our understanding of how time and agency interact. Moreover, this understanding can be used to improve policy and practice by better contextualising the agentic actions of those impacted by social structures.
Research context, methods, and ethics
I conducted the fieldwork in Glasgow, Scotland between November 2017 and June 2018. Since devolution in 1999, approaches to homelessness in Scotland have diverged from the rest of the UK, with Scotland's homelessness policy and legislation having been lauded as some of the most progressive in the world (Goodlad, 2005; Shelter Scotland, 2011). Glasgow has the highest number of homelessness applications of any local authority in Scotland and an acute lack of temporary accommodation (GCC, 2024).
I conducted 193 h of participant observation, the details of which were recorded in fieldnotes. I also conducted five semi-structured interviews (two of which were walking interviews), which lasted between 60 and 120 min and explored various aspects of participants’ experiences of homelessness. I analysed the data thematically using a combination of inductive and deductive approaches (Braun and Clarke, 2006). I used reflexivity extensively throughout and after fieldwork (see Burns, 2020) as a means of situating myself and my knowledge claims; although I recognise that this approach is limited by its assumptions that both the self and the research context are knowable and made transparent through its use (Rose, 1997).
Participants were predominantly individuals who were experiencing homelessness but also those working in homelessness services. Of a total of 77 participants who were experiencing homelessness, almost three-quarters were male and all but three were white. Given my recruitment strategy of targeting places and services where marginal homelessness is experienced, including rough sleeping, this is broadly representative of that population in Scotland (see Fitzpatrick et al., 2019) although recruitment was likely also influenced by my own gender and ethnicity (male, white). All participants were aged over 18.
Ethical approval for this study was granted by The University of Glasgow's College of Social Science Ethics Committee. I was guided by ethical codes of practice including that of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK, and by critical writing on ethical topics (e.g. Aldridge and Charles, 2008; Murphy and Dingwall, 2007; Pickering, 2018).
I treated informed consent as a process and I negotiated and renegotiated this with participants throughout fieldwork (ASA, 2011; Murphy and Dingwall, 2007), especially for key participants with whom I developed a lasting relationship and where there was a risk of role diffusion. I pseudonymised all data including fieldnotes and interview transcripts to ensure confidentiality.
In the next section, I explore what it might mean to be ‘stuck in homelessness’, what influences feelings of stuckness, and the ways in which individuals think about, feel, and act in relation to it.
Stuck in homelessness?
You’re never really able to settle. You’re in limbo. Stuck. Waiting. And you don’t know what's happening or when it will happen (Liam, 09/01/2018).
Sometimes these issues are attributed to the system such as a lack of availability of permanent tenancies (GCC, 2024) or to failings by the local authority (SHR, 2018). At other times, they are attributed to individuals such as people having complex needs or refusing to engage with services (see Scottish Government, 2018). While these discussions and debates relate to individuals being stuck in homeless spaces, they are fundamentally temporal in nature being defined by the length of time spent in a space or the number of occasions that spaces are returned to over time. However, those who were homeless that I met expressed their stuckness in ways that aligned with Jefferson et al.'s (2019) concept: it was experiential. They felt stuck and this feeling related to both time and agency.
Most of my interlocutors who were experiencing homelessness expressed a desire to be permanently housed; however, some were also able to identify aspects of homelessness that were attractive to them, or at least more attractive than some of the alternative options available at particular times. The following quote comes from an interview with Matthew, a key participant who, aged 40, had experienced multiple episodes of homelessness since leaving foster care at 16. It's like you get trapped in the system and, this is one of the points I want to make, it's like, essentially the system itself, the way it's set up, it doesn’t actually help you, it traps you in it! I’m not saying you can’t get out of it but, like, it's how long it takes to get out of it […] once you've been in that situation, now this is one of the things that I think people don't realise - when you're on the streets you actually have a lot of freedom. A hell of a lot of freedom! (Matthew, 01/06/18).
This can be compared to the freedom that Matthew felt when he was on the street. For him, freedom was associated with agency – with being (or feeling) able to do what he wanted. It is within this context that he explained his repeated episodes of homelessness over the years. In contrast to Auyero's participants, he was sometimes unable to tolerate the confining stuckness he felt in some places and would either voluntarily leave or lose his place because he breached the rules.
Not everyone saw services as places of confinement, and some actively sought some restrictions on their agency. Bobby, a man in his mid-40s, explained his options for moving on from a short-term residential service with me. When discussing the possibility of long-term residential rehabilitation for his alcohol problems he expressed conflicting views about agency. As we sat drinking coffee in the sitting room of the resident area, Bobby told me that he felt too vulnerable to be in his own place without support and that he worries that he’ll ‘end up back on the drink’. He said he likes the idea of somewhere where he’ll get breathalysed as he feels this will help him stay sober. As the conversation progressed, there was an apparent conflict he was trying to resolve. At one point he raged about being treated like a child in services and the lack of freedom, but this was countered by an apparent fear of freedom, at least at this stage in his recovery.
For both Matthew and Bobby, time and agency were important features of their experience. This included the length of time that agency had to be sacrificed and how agency was curtailed using time (such as curfews). They also feared too much time and too much agency. All of this impacted on how stuck they felt or were prepared to feel, and on what actions they felt they could take to address their stuckness.
During fieldwork, participants took action to resist, subvert, or otherwise change their experiences of time. Some sought to control time by using activities, schedules, and routines to maintain a sense of progress through cyclical rhythms. Others who felt stuck in a stretched present used different strategies. These different experiences are analysed in the next two sections. The first examines how time could be managed and used by individuals, or controlled by service demands, through segmentation. The second explores the ways in which individuals attempted to remove time from their experiences by de-segmenting it.
Segmentation versus ‘killing time’
Killing time is often described in similar ways to Fuller's (2011) ‘timepass’: the undertaking of activities to use up excess time. While the time to be used up may be short or long, this expression is often used where the time to be used is relatively short and the activities undertaken unimportant and unproductive (Fuller, 2011). As such, killing time is a tactic that can be used in circumstances of situational boredom or waiting. Some of my interlocutors were killing time in this way.
For example, Roger, a short man in his late 40s who wore burgundy Doc Martins, detailed how he killed time between the closing and opening times of the Winter Night Shelter (WNS). 2 He said that he liked the WNS and refused various attempts by support workers to move him on to another form of accommodation. Arriving at 10 p.m. when the service opened, he would remain after it changed over to a day service in the morning. When the building closed at 3 p.m., he had to ‘kill time’ until it opened again at 10 p.m. He did this by going to various places including shopping centres, supermarkets, museums, and libraries. Knowing exactly the length of time he had to kill; Roger's waiting was situational, and he would seek out different places where he could wait this time out.
For others, the wait was existential and required a different approach, including finding patterned ways to segment time into more manageable blocks. Eric was a tall, gregarious man in his late 50s who suffered from schizophrenia and sometimes wore thick glasses that seemed to change the appearance of his face completely. When I first met him in early 2018, he had been living in emergency bed and breakfast accommodation for about 4 months. He expressed hope about getting his own place back in the East End of the city but could not be sure if or when this would happen. Because of this future orientation, he had to control time until his situation improved, and he did this by establishing regular activities and routines to segment his days and weeks, which he explained in February 2018. As the bus made steady progress down Great Western Road, Eric glanced between me, other passengers and out of the window as he explained his usual routine since being in the B&B. We were heading to a day centre and I had asked him if he went here every day. ‘Most days, aye’ he adjusted his glasses and started pointing his right index finger into his left palm. ‘Get up, eat something I have in the room like a roll or crisps, listen to the radio for a bit and then I head in here to see who I can see… well, Monday to Saturday that is. Sunday, I lie in and don’t usually go out at all. Every couple of weeks I go over to the [Community Mental Health Team] to see my CPN (Community Psychiatric Nurse) and get my depot injection (slow-release anti-psychotic medication).’ He spent some time giving me his assessment of the services and the service users there before saying ‘sometimes I visit people at the [Glasgow] Royal [Infirmary] if they’re in there or just get on a bus with my pass and go exploring. I went up to East Kilbride last week.’
In analysing the boredom of homeless people in post-communist Bucharest, O'Neill (2014, 2017) argued that his participants were not only excluded from the labour market, but also from being able to use consumption as a defence against their boredom because of their economic marginalisation. This under-consumption, he argued, is tantamount to an exclusion from urban life, which has been more and more defined by practices of consumption. Exclusion from consumption meant exclusion from social life in the city. While economically marginalised, Eric had found ways to be part of social life in the city through the consumption of services. His regular attendance at day centres and health appointments, as well as his consumption of transport services using his bus pass, allowed him to defend himself against his existential wait and his agency was an important factor in making this tactic effective.
For others, service demands felt confining in that they acted against their agency. Liam reflected on his experiences in a supported living environment where he felt that his time was being segmented against his will. Everything revolves round the service, the staff, the other folk in there, EVERYTHING! Everything felt so regimented. 10 minutes here, 15 minutes here. Have to be there at this time or here at that time. Tonight, I’m doing nothing. I’m going to chill out and just watch TV and go to sleep. I haven’t been sleeping great with all the stress (Liam, 9/1/18).
De-segmentation: removing time
Existential boredom also created a stretched present, although one where there was little expectation of a future change. This was expressed in stark terms by some: When you’re homeless, a day feels like 10 months! (Alistair, 15/11/17). Every day feels like a week! (Liam, 9/1/18).
Sleep was one way of removing time and it was used by others in the same hostel as the group of men blocking out the sun in the opening vignette of this paper. Idil, a Somali man in his late 20s with whom I had only a fleeting encounter, told me how he had coped being in the hostel for 2 years – ‘It's ok, I just sleep’. It was a problem for another participant, Larry, to be ‘stuck in one of those rooms [in another hostel] completely bored, unable to sleep because of the noise of the trains’. Without sleep, Larry had to endure each passing moment of boredom, and he longed for an escape, a way to merge the hours and minutes into a period of unconsciousness.
Another tactic was to use substances to manage these types of time experience as was detailed by Colin, a 26-year-old man with very short red hair, in an interview in early February 2018. The interview took place in a residential service where he was being detoxed from alcohol, and he was reflecting on his experiences of being in emergency hostel accommodation. Trapped in the present with the past, and with little expectation of a future that was different, Colin used alcohol to de-segment time and counteract his existential boredom. Colin: […] I went in there, you can't, there's no kinda, social area. You can't mix with the people, you're not allowed in their rooms, things like that. So, it's basically, right, you're stuck in, you're stuck in your room. You're, there's no TV or anything like that. It's a bed and chest of drawers and that's it, do you know what I mean? So, you're sitting there bored and, erm, that, that and I suffered fae social anxiety as well and agrophob… is that agoraphobia, agra, agra…? Andrew: Being outdoors? Colin: Aye, going outdoors and big crowds of people. An all they [the staff] would say to you is ‘oh, why don't you go and take a walk about Botanic, erm, the Botanic Gardens’ and I'm like that ‘are you joking’? Weans
3
running about, big crowds, and like that ‘naw, I'd have a pure massive panic attack’. So, the first thing… obviously there was a wee Londis across the road, just the furthest I would go is back and forward, back and forward… Andrew: Just, literally across the street? Colin: Literally across the street. Erm, a litre of vodka, two bottles of red wine and I would just sit and get pished. And that's all I would do…
Another participant, Jeremy, detailed a similarly traumatic past including his experiences of being in care as a child, sleeping rough, and his stays in the hostel that was the context for the opening vignette. For Jeremy, boredom, or an abundance of time with nothing to fill it or distract him, meant his attention also settled on past experiences and present circumstances. His description of being stuck in a traumatic present that is plagued by a traumatic past, with the expectation of a traumatic future sounded brutal and was the reason that he just ‘drank and drank and drank’.
The experiences of both Colin and Jeremy echo those of Burraway's (2021) participants who he argued experienced a form of temporal bracketing, with a painful past and the expectation of a painful future sitting either side of a stretched and painful present. Burraway (2021) contends that substance-induced blackout is a form of temporal work that allowed his participants to let time and agency slip by, facilitating a temporary escape from unmanageable memories and their effect on self in the present. He goes on to argue that there is a paradox or an irony, in that those who achieve this temporal transformation are unable to reflexively access it and that the circumstances that precipitated the transformation come back to the fore on the regaining of consciousness and memory (Burraway, 2021).
Is this paradoxical? Those impacted by existential boredom may actively seek some respite in the full knowledge that the relief is temporary. Perhaps there is only a paradox in this behaviour if one assumes that those taking such action do so in the belief that this will provide some long-term or sustainable change in their circumstances. Apart from those who expressed suicidal ideation in relation to their consumption of large quantities of substances, I could see no evidence of this among my own interlocutors or in the accounts Burraway gave of his. It certainly seemed to be the case that some individuals perceived a lack of alternative options to remedy their immediate situations and the social structures within which they acted shaped the choices that were available. However, might we view the agency of others through biases in terms of the actions they take as well as the circumstances that they find themselves in?
We can compare the actions of Eric from the previous section to those of Colin and Jeremy here. Segmenting his time by busying himself with appointments and bus trips, Eric was trying to manage his experiences of time as were Colin and Jeremy who were getting intoxicated. There is also routine in the rhythms of their drinking. Colin went back and forth, back and forth across the street while Jeremy got up and did it all again the next day. The usefulness of alcohol, however, was to de-segment time; to take away the moment-to-moment action and achieve some escape, even if only for a while. Their agency had a dominant present tone that was orientated towards achieving something in the present for the present, rather than to manage time until a future change or goal could be achieved.
Conclusion
The stuckness of my interlocutors was not solely related to their homelessness. They did not measure it in the length of time they had been without a home, or in the number of times they had slept rough. It was experienced in the quality of confined lives and how these were lived and made sense of. While some described feeling trapped in time and in spaces, they were not passive victims of their stuckness; they thought about their confinement, and they took actions to achieve a wide range of ends. Arguments can easily be made about the impact of some actions on individuals’ own and others’ health and wellbeing, but not about the fact that they acted.
In exploring time and agency in homelessness, we begin to uncover some of the complexity in the relationships that exist between them. The ways in which individuals enact their agency are temporally orientated. While different participants had different temporal tones to their agency, all drew on past experiences and future expectations in deciding how to act in their present circumstances. Existential waiting created too much time in the present but had a future orientation in the sense that something will or should happen, even if how or when remains unknown. As such agency had a dominant future tone that was geared towards managing present time through segmentation until the future goal or change was achieved. In contrast, existential boredom lacked an expectation of a future that was different from the present. Time's endlessness was concentrated into every moment, making the present seem to stand still. In these circumstances, agency had a dominant present tone where action was taken to manage the present in the present by de-segmenting time. Where time was being segmented or de-segmented against individual wishes, such as through service demands or indeterminate waiting, this erosion of agency could also create a feeling of stuckness, which in turn required action. Therefore, time and agency exist in reciprocal relationships where experiences of one have implications for the experiences of the other.
It is, of course, important to acknowledge the socioeconomic marginalisation of those affected by homelessness and the ways in which this marginalisation affects their experiences and the choices that are, or are perceived to be, available. Indeed, it was clear in many of their accounts that the past experiences of my interlocutors had been shaped by the social structures within which they occurred. These experiences, in conjunction with their present social circumstances and limited access to resources, acted to narrow their options for action and sometimes diminish their expectations of change. There is no escaping the impact of these social structures on the actions of the men discussed in this paper. However, I argue that it is also important to recognise and respect the agency of individuals and to understand the variegated ways they seek to exercise some power and control in their lives, including the ways in which they seek to influence their experiences of time. Through this recognition and respect, we can develop a deeper understanding of the ways in which time and agency interact in experiences of homelessness or in other temporally confining situations. This understanding can inform policy, practice, and service design by contextualising the actions of individuals using (or not using) services, by considering the ways in which individual agency can be supported and maximised, and by offering viable routes to futures that are both hopeful and have explicit timeframes.
The data and analysis presented in this paper offer only a snapshot into parts of the lives of some people that I met during fieldwork. Because of the nature of the study, all the participants were experiencing homelessness or working with those that were. As such, I can make no comparison on issues of stuckness with those not experiencing homeless other than to those in the temporally confining situations that have been described in the wider literature. Most of my participants were male, and I did not feel that I had sufficient data from the women that I met to draw out similarities or differences in this paper. We know that women experience homelessness differently, often in more hidden ways (see Fitzpatrick et al., 2019). As such, gender may be a significant factor in the experience of stuckness and is an area for further investigation.
Finally, it is also important to recognise that this research was conducted in 2017–2018 and much has changed since then. During the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020–2021, governments, local authorities, and other organisations in the UK collaborated to provide self-contained accommodation to all those who were sleeping rough or living in communal accommodation (Scottish Government, 2020; Shelter, 2021). While not perfect, this was an impressive display of the types of action that can be taken quickly with the right resources and political will. However, homelessness in Scotland has since risen higher than pre-pandemic levels with some arguing that this shows a clear impact of the widely discussed cost-of-living crisis in the UK (Jessel, 2023) alongside a national housing emergency (Scottish Parliament, 2024). This emergency is acutely felt in Glasgow where large numbers of households are stuck in temporary accommodation due to a shortage of social housing (GCC, 2024). Without similarly ambitious actions to those taken at the start of the pandemic, there will undoubtedly be many more individuals attempting to manage their temporal confinement. Policymakers, service providers, and researchers should do all that they can to understand and improve this situation to alleviate the impact on those affected.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my PhD supervisors Professor Keith Kintrea, Dr Lucy Pickering, and Dr Kate Reid at the University of Glasgow and also colleagues who gave feedback on earlier versions of this paper: Dr Alice Early, Dr Lucy Pickering, Professor Ruth Emond, Dr Jane Cullingworth, Dr Peter Matthews, and Dr Melanie Lovatt. I also appreciate the journal peer reviewers for their helpful and constructive feedback.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research on which this paper is based was undertaken for my PhD, for which I had a scholarship from The Urban Studies Foundation.
