About Me
My name is Benjamin Owens, and I'm PhD student and urban and economic geographer in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. My doctoral research examines the relationship between housing and labour in the context or urban youth homelessness. How do shelter environments shape unhoused youth’s experiences of formal and informal work? On the other hand, how does the work that unhoused youth perform—including formal, informal, and socially reproductive work—reconfigure shelter geographies, or the ways shelter spaces are used and made meaningful? This work builds on my years as a researcher in the youth homelessness sector, where I was involved in a variety of participatory, community-engaged, and mixed methods projects on housing, harm reduction, and youth homelessness prevention.
My work is animated by literature on the spaces and places associated with urban homelessness, particularly research that reveals the structural forces shaping (in)access to public space and housing, and decolonial research on the ways unhoused people persist, create community, and make life amid these conditions of structural violence. I also draw extensively from the subfield of labour geographies, particularly scholarship that troubles narrow conceptions of labour as formal and waged to consider the array of precarious, informal, and socially reproductive work that people engage in to both generate income and reproduce life.
In addition to my work with unhoused youth, I also maintain research interests in gender, sexuality, and labour in deindustrializing cities dating back to my MA and work as a researcher on the Work and Inclusion Project. My master's thesis, later adapted into an article for Work, Employment, and Society, demonstrated how customer violence can act as a form of labour control, disciplining non-normative gender and sexual expression in low-wage services. Subsequent research in this role considered the effects of work and deindustrialization on mental health, employing both qualitative and quantitative methods.