On Our Terms: Exploring Lived Experience Advocacy Movements to End Homelessness in Canada

In Canada, people with lived experience of homelessness are increasingly positioned as central contributors within housing and homelessness research, advocacy and policymaking. Despite growing institutional commitments to inclusion, lived experts encounter implicit and explicit practices and attitudes that marginalize their knowledge and constrain their participation. These practices also serve to suppress the political and transformative potential of lived knowledge. This dissertation explores ways that lived experts navigate and resist limiting institutional frameworks. Drawing on ethnographic research undertaken with lived experts between 2021-2025, this study explores federal housing policy advocacy through collaboration with the Canadian Lived Experience Leadership Network (CLELN). This research centered on CLELN’s efforts to develop On Our Terms: 6 Principles for Engaging People With Lived Experience in Advocacy, Research, and Policymaking, an advocacy tool challenging extractive and exclusionary engagement practices in the housing and homelessness sectors. Guided by Institutional Ethnography as a methodological and theoretical framework, and informed by feminist, disability justice, Indigenous, queer, and lived experience scholarship, the analysis presented in this dissertation traces how everyday experiences of lived experts are coordinated against institutional processes and power relations. Findings demonstrate that, while “inclusion” is invoked in policy and advocacy spaces, the material reality of engagement remains uneven and often harmful. Lived experts explicitly seek changes to the systems that contribute to homelessness, which may be undermined by institutional frameworks that preserve the status quo operation of the housing system. This research documents methods lived experts use to “work the system in a way it doesn’t want to be worked” to advance their own goals and sustain their communities in institutional spaces. Through moments of mutual aid, loving and caring practices, and refusal, lived experts engage in strategies that sustain their political goals and community wellbeing in environments that can (often unintentionally) undermine these goals. This dissertation contributes to critical ethnographic scholarship and community-based housing research by highlighting how lived experience advocacy operates within and against heavily financialized housing systems, underscoring the need for structural transformation. This work offers critical insights into practices that can advance relational, transformative, and caring engagement with lived expertise.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph D

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Anthropology

Grantor dc:publisher

The University of Western Ontario

Year dc:date.issued

2026

Author dc:creator

• Nelson, Alexandra

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Beckett, Greg
• Baruah, Bipasha

• Homelessness
• lived experience advocacy
• housing policy
• community engagement
• activist research
• Canada
• auto-ethnography
• institutional ethnography

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14721/39650

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:uwo.scholaris.ca:20.500.14721/39650