Young, Queer and Trans, Homeless, and Besieged: A Critical Action Research Study of How Policy and Culture Create Oppressive Conditions for LGBTQ Youth in Toronto's Shelter System
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation is about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, and queer (LGBTQ) youth and the shelter system. This work focuses on the denial of home and safety to queer and trans youth. Over approximately two years, different groups of people came together to discuss what is holding up and sustaining the homophobia and transphobia in the shelter system, how homophobia and transphobia occurs and is managed in the shelter system, and how broader policy issues serve to create oppressive contexts for LGBTQ youth. This is a Critical Action Research study that was informed by Critical Ethnography and Institutional Ethnography. In order to investigate what disjunctures occur for LGBTQ youth in the shelter system and how those disjunctures come about, this dissertation draws upon one-on-one interviews with LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness, shelter Executive Directors, City of Toronto management, and training facilitators; focus groups with frontline shelter staff; and training observations. This study suggests that it is both the excessive bureaucratic regulation and the lack of necessary bureaucratic regulation in highly significant areas, that play a key role in creating the disjunctures that occur for queer and trans youth in the shelter system. This dissertation describes the findings of this study in five major themes, which include: Homophobia and Transphobia in the Shelter System, LGBTQ Youth Invisibility, Inadequate, Invasive and Otherwise Problematic Rules, Lack of Knowledge, and Inconsistent Conformity to Formal Rules. A Digital Storytelling project was created with one youth and was used as a Knowledge Mobilization strategy for this study. The film helped generate extensive media attention and facilitated change in the shelter system, at the City of Toronto, and at a policy level. This research study has made it possible for the voices of LGBTQ homeless youth to be heard in the context of a critical public health and social justice problem. Detailed policy and practice recommendations and changes to the Toronto Shelter Standards are provided at the end of this dissertation and are meant to help Toronto's shelter system become safe, accessible, and supportive of LGBTQ youth.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.036 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".