Embodied Governmentalities: A Multiscalar Analysis of Homelessness Politics in Münster and Dortmund.

• Applicant: Dr. Tobias Breuckmann
• Subject Area: Human Geography
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 576971422

The reality of life for many homeless people in the city leads to illness and even premature death. In addition to displacement and violence, it is also social welfare institutions and social work organizations that actively (re)produce homelessness and precarious living conditions for homeless people. These urban interventions and their manifestations materialize in the context of homelessness policies on several scales. The aim of this project is to analyze the effects of homelessness policies across these scales using the examples of Münster and Dortmund. On the one hand, the project aims to identify how social, housing, and security policies in the city affect homeless people and impact their bodies, but also what strategies those affected and civil society groups develop to improve their situation. On the other hand, the aim is to understand how homelessness policies materialize at multiple scales and how they influence institutions and practices at other scales. The project contributes to the still young field of critical geographical research on homelessness in Germany by, first, contributing to a better understanding of the power effects of governing practices in this field and, second, expanding research on homelessness by including participatory research, which has been little developed to date. The combination of feminist theories of embodiment, critical geographical research on governmentality, materialist state theory, and power-sensitive scale analysis makes it possible to capture the negotiation of institutional and urban power relations at different spatial levels and to empirically trace them from the state to the body.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants