Left out in the Cold: Care, Neglect, and Homelessness in Anchorage, Alaska

In the Summers of 2022 and 2023, Anchorage, Alaska closed all low-barrier emergency homeless shelters, forcing approximately 250 people to camp, unsheltered, throughout the city. The city’s actions spawned a crisis as people were left without food, water, or medical services, yet also sparked massive volunteer mobilization of mutual aid. This ethnographic study is based on three months of fieldwork grounded in participant observation at 3rd & Ingra, a large homeless encampment on the edge of downtown Anchorage. I studied three groups of people–policymakers, nonprofit employees, and volunteers–in order to understand how each of these groups conceptualizes homelessness and justifies their approach to addressing it. My thesis explores the entanglement of care and power under neoliberalism; using Anchorage as a case study, I detail the state’s withdrawal from providing social services, and the corresponding responses enacted by nonprofit organizations and volunteers. This project draws attention to the role that biopower plays in state action, and how it serves to individualize and medicalize homelessness. I also discuss how care provided by volunteers helps people survive neglect, and challenges neoliberal rationalities. By investigating care, power, and their entanglement within homelessness management, I illustrate the limits and possibilities of collective survival practices under neoliberalism.