National Resource Center for Alaska Native Elders

Homelessness - Travis Hedwig

Attitudes towards aging among Alaska Natives with histories of chronic homelessness in Anchorage, Alaska

Project Introduction

Research will examine the ways in which lived experiences of homelessness challenge stereotypical assumptions about healthy aging. Travis will work with RurALCAP to identify Alaska Native people in Anchorage who are from rural communities and have histories of chronic homelessness and interview them about their attitudes towards aging.

Working with this population will offer critical insight into sociocultural constructions of aging and the ways varying forms of vulnerability, marginalization, discrimination, and social exclusion entrench inequalities that create and perpetuate disparities in health outcomes. Specifically, Travis will incorporate the concept of temporal horizons, to explore ways in which conditions of material inequality in the present create anxieties and social pressures about the future that shape health and well-being in important ways.