PhD Oral Exam - Mohammad Abdalreza Zadeh, Individualized Program

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

We cannot address a social problem like homelessness holistically without understanding its complexity. While homelessness is a complex social construct with a wide range of parameters, dynamic interactions, and a high level of uncertainty, two profound disconnects exist at the macro-policy and micro-local levels in approaching the problem. Macro-policy level decision-makers, including politicians and policymakers, wield influence over legislative frameworks and resource allocations that shape national or regional responses to homelessness. In stark contrast, the micro-local level amplifies the voices of unhoused individuals, grassroots organizations, social workers, and community advocates who confront homelessness directly within their local contexts. In this PhD journey, I explore the common ground between macro-policy and micro-local approaches to make sense of the complex nature of homelessness. Grounded in the theories of space and complexity, I conduct a multi-theoretical approach, bricolage, to collage the fragmented pieces of policy and local levels together and synthesize them creatively. At the macro-policy level, in a co-authored paper, I delved into narrations of homelessness among thirty-eight members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) through a Chronotropic lens. The findings reveal the dynamism, diversity, and assortment of dimensions related to time, space, and body in the analyzed narratives, highlighting five main perspectives: viewing homelessness as an issue of security, vulnerability, quantification, inclusivity, and human rights. At the micro-local level, I had a transformational journey with Le Collectif Comm-Un, a grassroots organization built on the cornerstones of self-advocacy, healing, and community engagement to approach homelessness in the Milton-Parc neighborhood of Montréal. Applying a heuristic lens, I observed that my one-and-a-half-year engagement with the Le Collectif Comm-Un community shifted my focus from understanding homelessness to examining the sick society I come from. My dialogic Comm-Un experience illuminated homelessness as a form of protest against the dominant political-economic system, capitalism, which reproduces everyday social injustice.

Finally, conducting a comparative analysis of findings from macro-policy and micro-local investigations, I found that the common ground between policy and local scales is a space characterized by heterogeneity, dynamism, and uncertainty, requiring collective praxis and interdisciplinary approaches. This space incorporates dualities like objectivity/subjectivity, formality/informality, individual/social, fixed/dynamic, vulnerability/human rights, and social identity/human interaction. Using theories of Carnival, embedded design, and insights from the Comm-Un community, I conceptualized this common ground, embracing all the dualities, with an imaginary spatial concept called Soup City. In Soup City, different actors from various levels of the macro-policy and micro-local spectrum meet to build human connection, suspend social hierarchies, decentralize knowledge production, challenge social norms, celebrate the power of community, and fuse their diverse intentions, resources, ideas, power positions, knowledge, strategies, worldviews, and stories. I, as a bricoleur and Comm-Un member, represent the Soup City space as a social game and art-informed participatory action research method for understanding the complexity of homelessness. I argue that we cannot make sense of the problem of homelessness without ongoing collective defining the problem, collective imagination, collective planning, collective action, and collective evaluation. No one can define and end homelessness except everyone. It takes a village!