Comics about homelessness educate and create community connection

When Portland State University instructor Kacy McKinney got the idea to create a series of comics featuring PSU students with lived experiences of homelessness and housing insecurity, her goal was to change the narrative around homelessness. The project—which has blossomed into a 80-page printed comic collection and two gallery showings—has done that and much more. 

“There are so many harmful stereotyping and stigmatizing narratives swirling around in the city around homelessness and poverty at this moment,” said McKinney who is a faculty member in the Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning at PSU. “I hope that people will see that this is a powerful intervention, that it is pushing back against this dehumanizing language that we're using—and policies—by offering these authentic and beautiful works of art that share the complexities of what it is to experience homelessness and who experiences it and how.”

Besides challenging misperceptions about homelessness, these comics have also been an opportunity for undergraduates to develop research skills, a source of catharsis for students sharing their stories, the backbone for a rewarding collaboration with Street Roots, a thought-provoking art collection for local galleries and a powerful teaching tool.  

A learning–and teaching–opportunity

Thanks to a grant from PSU’s Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative (HRAC), McKinney was able to hire two undergraduate research assistants, Shaun Hardy and Kimberléa Ruffu, who were intimately involved in the comics project. They helped choose the artists and participants, interviewed participants with McKinney, transcribed the interviews and turned the interviews into a confidential document that was shared with the artists. 

Hardy and Ruffu learned a technique called ethnographic cartooning, which uses a combination of in-depth interviews and a back-and-forth editing that includes frequent check-ins with students to make sure the stories reflect the storytellers.

The research assistants also taught McKinney a thing or two—such as how to best frame questions for the undergraduate participants—and helped her spot potential ethical troubles. 

“They kept me in check in a way that feels really good as a researcher,” she said. “It helped a lot with my unlearning of the unhelpful practices that I was trained in. I think it made the research better and it helped us build better rapport with the participants.”

Together McKinney, Hardy and Ruffu chose 10 current and former PSU students to pair with artists to tell their stories. Almost 60 current and former students applied to share their story. About one in six PSU students have experienced homelessness, according to a 2020 HRAC report. 

A chance to fight stigma and to heal

From the start—and throughout the creation of the comics—the team made sure that the students who shared their stories knew that the comics would eventually be available to the public. This allowed students to choose which details to include—or change—in their stories and whether or not they wanted to remain anonymous. Some students were eager to have their name attached to their story while others chose pseudonyms and changed identifying details for professional or safety reasons.

Daniela Ortiz Mendez experienced housing insecurity growing up and continues to feel its impact. She answered the call for students to participate in the project as a way to fight against the stigma of homelessness. 

“I need to stop being ashamed of my childhood and what my reality might be,” she said. “I want people to see me and hear my story.”

“We should stop looking down on homelessness and look at the real reasons why we have homelessness,” she said. “I hope people see that housing instability has many different faces and many different realities.”

Each comic tells a story from a student’s perspective. Themes range from surviving domestic violence and healing from PTSD to finding community and safety. They center the voices of individuals from historically marginalized groups—who are disproportionately represented among people experiencing homelessness—including people of color, individuals with disabilities, and LGBTQAI+ individuals.

For some of the participants, seeing their story as a comic was a form of catharsis. 

“I can't quite describe the feeling of being seen so thoroughly in such a unique and beautiful way, through one of my favorite mediums by such a talented artist,” said one of the student storytellers. “I feel overwhelmed and grateful to have had the chance to heal and be validated in this way.” 

Collaboration with Street Roots

The 10 comics are now collected in an 80-page bound book that will be available for purchase from Street Roots vendors until all 4,000 copies are sold. McKinney knew from the start that this was how she wanted the comics to be distributed and secured a grant to cover the costs. 

“We've been excited all along to make sure that the proceeds all go to vendors and that people get to connect with the vendors when they buy the comics,” said McKinney.

Street Roots is also publishing interviews with eight of the comic artists.  

Kaia Sand, executive director of Street Roots, said the collaborative effort was a beautiful and thoughtfully carried out project, which they are proud to be a part of.

“This publication lifts up visual forms of storytelling to honor ten people and their diverse experiences of homelessness sleeping in shelters, on couches, under the stars, against a backpack on the MAX, on a slide in the playground, inside apartments in disrepair,” said Sand. “Here, in this luminous gathering of visual stories, we say, please do listen. Please do pay attention. Please do read — and care.”  

Gallery showings 

The comics will also be available to view—in larger form—in two free gallery shows this month.

On Feb. 12-13, they will be on display at Daren Todd’s The Downstairs Gallery. “The gallery is really in line with the mission of this project,” said McKinney. “He’s really about making space in a beautiful gallery for less heard voices and less heard stories and really supporting particularly LGBTQAI+, BIPOC and disabled artists. We share this fundamental desire to make space for artists from these backgrounds and artists who are people with lived experience of homelessness as well.”

The Changing the Narrative Exhibit will run 5 to 8 p.m. Feb. 12 and by appointment 12-8 p.m. Feb. 13. The exhibit was made possible by the Center for Urban Studies in the Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning at PSU.

A second gallery show for the PSU community will run from Feb 15-28, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day, at PSU’s Native American Student and Community Center.

This space has a special connection to one of the stories on display.

“One of the comics, the last one in the show, has an image of the Native American Student Community Center in the comic as a space that was meaningful for that student,” said McKinney. 

Teaching tool

Now that the comics are published, McKinney has also been able to use them in the classroom, particularly in her course Community and the Built Environment. 

In a class about disability justice and design justice, McKinney shared a comic in which a student talked about having a disability and what that meant in terms of how she was able to navigate housing instability.

In another class that focused on libraries as public spaces, McKinney shared a comic by an Indigenous student that talks about her mixed experiences with the public library. On the one hand, the library was safe and a place where water was always accessible when there wasn’t running water at her reservation. On the other hand, she was sometimes made to feel really unwelcome and told that she had been there too long. 

“We used this comic to talk about the complexity of what those spaces offer and don't offer,” said McKinney.

McKinney said students in the course have been enthusiastic to learn from the comics and the experiences of their peers. 

“This is who we want to be hearing from. This is the way we want to be doing it. This is accessible. This is exciting. This is meaningful,” said McKinney. “That's what I hear from them.” 

Next steps

McKinney is now working to create an accessible website featuring the comics and is hoping to publish the comics as a trade book, possibly alongside the artist interviews from Street Roots. And she’s hoping to expand the series. She knows there are plenty more stories to tell and artists interested in helping to tell them; more than 75 artists applied for the original project. To contribute to the next phase of the project, visit the project’s fundraising page. 

Stefanie Knowlton contributed writing and reporting for this article.