Graham Pruss, PhC
Dissertation Colloquium
"Vehicle Residency: Displacement, Disaffiliation, and the Nomadic Turn"

Over half of the people who sleep on the streets of Seattle and King County inhabit a vehicle. The number of people who sleep in vehicles throughout King County rose by 383% from 2008 to 2018 - nearly quadrupling from 881 to 3,372. However, there are almost no programs offering parking spaces to connect vehicle residents with services that “end homelessness.” Why?

To answer this question, Graham Pruss presents his eight-years of ethnographic research in Seattle. Pruss shows how vehicle residency can be an adaptive response to displacement, and how mobility is weaponized to disaffiliate vehicle-homes. His archival research documents vehicle residency as a growing response to unaffordable housing in communities across the country, suggesting the possibility of a social nomadic turn: an emergent culture of a “New American Traveler.”

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