Riabchuk A. Structural factors and social representation of homelessness.

This thesis addresses main structural factors of social reproduction and representation of homelessness in contemporary Ukrianian society. The author has conducted a consistent analysis of structural socio-economic causes and created a typology of social representations of homelessness in Ukraine. Furthermore, the author has demonstrated the influence of normative judgements on the formation of social policy towards vulnerable social categories in historical retrospective and in contemporary society; and confirmed with empirical evidence the role of key social agents (mass media, government authorities, NGOs) in creation and reproduction of social perceptions about the homeless. In the first chapter "Theoretico-methodological foundation in homelessness research" the author has conducted literature review and analysis of existing sociological studies of homelessness in post-soviet societies, that were classified into two categories: instrumental and critical. This review has revealed that the few sociologists who write about this issue tend to focus on homeless individuals. They do list at least some of the major structural causes of homelessness, such as: lack of affordable housing, lack of decent employment opportunities, flawed social policies towards the most vulnerable. But they spend most of their time defining homelessness, estimating the number of people on the street in a given city, classifying them, or producing ethnographic accounts of a typical day of the street homeless. These accounts contribute in many important ways to our understanding of the problem, but they take as a given the structural causes of homelessness during transition from a planned to a market economy, which the author has problematized in this thesis.