I used to be homeless. That experience shapes my science

From ScienceMag:

Checking emails between flights at the airport, I was excited to see long-awaited reviews for a paper I had submitted with my Ph.D. adviser. It was an editorial in which I proposed a framework for identifying and mitigating conflict between urban coyotes and people experiencing unsheltered homelessness. Based on my thesis research, it contained more of my heart and soul than any I had previously written. But the reviews were resoundingly negative. I appreciated the valid scientific criticisms, but I struggled with comments questioning our qualifications and expertise. One in particular froze me: “The authors are naïve about homelessness.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

Following a tumultuous home life, I spent my late teenage years and early 20s in and out of homelessness, sometimes living on the street, camping illegally, and living in a car. I earned a 2-year college diploma while working full time and living in an unheated camper without water or power through Canadian winters. I finished my undergraduate degree while working as a wilderness guide, camping through the summers and retreating to a different moldy basement bedroom each winter. Some combination of stubbornness, inertia, and a genuine curiosity about the natural world kept me going. I loved time outdoors, watching animals. I wanted a job where I could ask and answer my own ecological questions.

By the time grad school was an option, it was an obvious choice—after all, I would get paid for it! I accepted a position studying the effects of urbanization on coyote behavior. Fieldwork for this project led to the editorial.

It wasn’t easy to write. My sentences struggled to capture the enormity of the problems I had observed. In my fieldwork, I’d seen coyotes scavenging from encampments, eating low-quality food that would make them sick. Elsewhere, I’d collected coyote scat infected with a potentially deadly tapeworm, knowing the people in the encampments could be exposed but would struggle to access health care. These observations mingled with memories I wish I didn’t have. The unique smell of dumpster diving in a sleeping city. Laughing and braiding the hair of a friend who later died violently in the streets. I pushed those memories away to write as cleanly and objectively as possible.

Homelessness took things from me, but it also gave me things. I am observant. I am resourceful. I am phenomenal at camping. I thrive in bad weather. These skills have helped me walk so many worthwhile roads—as a professional wilderness guide, a recreationist comfortable solo camping in wild places, and, crucially, as an urban ecologist. I am comfortable conducting fieldwork in urban spaces where others might not be. It’s exactly this aptitude that let me notice the things I had described in my paper, which was eventually published at another journal.

I can’t know exactly what the reviewer who accused us of naïvety was thinking, but they seemingly never imagined an author of such a piece might have firsthand experience of homelessness. That assumption shook me: It suggested someone with my history did not belong in academia. It was not the first time I have felt that way. I recalled the way fellow grad students had expressed fear of a man sleeping in the entrance to a university building, and an urban ecology safety briefing that focused on the dangers of homeless people rather than on ways to communicate with or support people in need.

Many of the life experiences that bring diversity to science are invisible, or are sufficiently personal and taboo that we don’t talk about them—abuse, poverty, rape, addiction, a schizophrenic family member, a history of homelessness. Our assumptions about who researchers are and what their past lives looked like create an isolating landscape of erasure—an environment where certain histories are assumed to be absent, keeping the people who hold those histories from feeling they belong.

For years, I worked hard to hide my history of homelessness. Now, I am more neutral—it was a challenging and sometimes unpleasant chapter, like puberty, or, more recently, learning Bayesian statistics. I am committed to not letting my history define me. But I also don’t want my colleagues to assume no scientist could have a past like mine.

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