Abandonment in Real Time Book Proposal
Abandonment in Real Time
Institutional Recognition and Premature Death Among the Homeless
Book proposal for Doing Modernity
1 Overview
Abandonment in Real Time examines how people experiencing homelessness can remain exposed to serious harm despite repeated contact with organizations established to help them. It follows the relationship between recognition, documentation, access, and continuing responsibility across outreach, shelter, emergency medicine, treatment, case management, and housing services. Its central question is how institutional recognition can fail to become sustained care and protection.
The Santa Barbara County Homeless Death Review Team’s report for 2017 provides a starting point. Among the 44 decedents identified in that report, 33 had made a combined 124 emergency-department visits in the year before death. These figures establish substantial contact with medical services; they do not establish what caused any individual death or whether a particular intervention would have prevented it. They raise a question about what happens between episodes of treatment and the conditions to which people return.¹
The book argues that abandonment can emerge from locally accountable institutional work under conditions of scarcity and fragmented responsibility. A referral can be properly recorded without producing access. An eligibility decision can follow the rules while leaving urgent need unresolved. An episode of medical treatment can end while a person remains without a safe place to recover. Understanding these outcomes requires examining how encounters, records, transfers, and delays accumulate over time.
The analysis develops six recurring operations: Conditional Recognition, Burden of Legibility, Documentary Sorting, Documentary Sedimentation, Temporal Mismatch, and Administrative Death. Together they offer a framework for tracing how recognized need can lose its institutional force. Their sequence is an analytical model, rather than a universal pathway or a sufficient explanation of mortality. Housing scarcity, illness, violence, substance use, and unequal access to treatment remain consequential throughout.
Grounded in Santa Barbara, the book brings organizational ethnomethodology into dialogue with institutional ethnography and political sociology. It develops Critical Interactionism as an approach to studying how inequality takes practical form in interactions and documentary processes. Memorial practices frame the inquiry, connecting institutional analysis with the lives and relationships that administrative records often fail to preserve.
2 Public description
Why can substantial service provision coexist with persistent premature mortality among people experiencing homelessness? What allows a person to be repeatedly encountered, assessed, treated, and referred while remaining without the continuity of support needed to become safe?
Abandonment in Real Time follows the institutional circuit through which help is offered, organized, delayed, and sometimes withdrawn. Wayne Martin Mellinger examines how professional obligations can be fulfilled within individual settings while responsibility for a person’s longer trajectory remains dispersed. The problem becomes especially acute when access depends on documents, reliable communication, transportation, and the capacity to wait—resources that homelessness itself makes difficult to sustain.
The book develops a six-operation account of institutional abandonment and examines its documentary, interactional, and temporal dimensions. It asks how records acquire authority, how people must make themselves intelligible to services, and how administrative schedules can conflict with survival and bodily urgency. It also considers how workers resist these processes and what organizational arrangements would give their recognition practical effect.
Framed by Santa Barbara’s Longest Night Homeless Memorial Vigil, the book connects sociological explanation with public witness. Its practice-oriented appendices explore ways to sustain recognition, reduce administrative burdens, and establish continuity across institutions. Two original poems contribute to its account of memorialization. The prose specifies the mechanism. The poem preserves the person.
3 Argument and contributions
Recognition and sustained responsibility
Abandonment is defined here as a patterned withdrawal of recognition, resources, or relational inclusion that leaves a person exposed while organizations can account for their own actions. Institutional holding means sustained responsibility with practical traction: keeping a person’s needs actionable across time and across organizational boundaries. It requires resources and arrangements that allow recognition to result in care, treatment, or housing.
This formulation connects organizational practice with political economy. Scarcity shapes eligibility rules, available placements, workloads, and the time workers can give to individual situations. Organizations then make consequential decisions within those constraints. The book examines these decisions without treating frontline workers as the sole authors of the conditions in which they work or assuming that all procedural action produces abandonment.
The six operations
Conditional Recognition. Need becomes institutionally actionable when a person meets the conditions under which an organization can recognize and respond to it.
Burden of Legibility. The person seeking help must assemble documents, tell an intelligible account, demonstrate eligibility, and sustain the forms of communication that access requires.
Documentary Sorting. Records and assessment categories distribute people among priorities, programs, waiting lists, and grounds for exclusion.
Documentary Sedimentation. Earlier descriptions accumulate and acquire authority in later decisions. A record can preserve an interpretation after the circumstances that produced it have disappeared from view.
Temporal Mismatch. Institutional schedules, the demands of daily survival, and bodily urgency can diverge. Waiting, deadlines, and interrupted contact may undermine the conditions needed to obtain help.
Administrative Death. A person’s claim ceases to be actionable within a particular institutional process, even though the person and the need continue. This is an administrative condition, distinct from biological death.
These operations may recur, overlap, or be interrupted. The analysis asks which are present in a trajectory, how they relate, and where an alternative account better fits the evidence. It distinguishes institutional processes that prolong exposure from claims about the cause of a particular death.
Documents and institutional memory
The book examines how records organize decisions across dispersed settings. Documents preserve some information while simplifying or omitting the circumstances in which it became meaningful. A description of unsuccessful contact, for example, can travel more readily than knowledge of the obstacles to that contact. Under these conditions, coordination can reproduce fragmentation: documentary information circulates while relational knowledge and continuing responsibility do not.
Time and access
The analysis distinguishes institutional time, survival time, and embodied time. A program’s processing schedule, the need to secure food or shelter today, and an illness requiring urgent attention may impose incompatible demands. The Access Infrastructure Assumption names the expectation that applicants possess a working phone, an address, identification, transportation, and time for repeated processing. The book examines what happens when procedures rely on capacities that the intended population cannot reliably maintain.
The Temporal Covenant describes the expectation that present compliance will lead to future stabilization. Repeated delay and interruption can weaken that expectation. The analysis asks when what services describe as low motivation or disengagement may instead reflect a person’s experience of the opportunities actually available. This interpretation requires attention to particular circumstances rather than becoming a general explanation for all refusal or withdrawal.
Accountability and interruption
The book distinguishes accountability for episodes from responsibility for trajectories. Completing an assessment, making a referral, or ending a treatment episode can satisfy local obligations without establishing who will respond to continuing need. The practical question is how institutions can preserve responsibility across transitions, with sufficient authority and resources to act. Practitioner resistance, relational continuity, and successful transitions are relevant to identifying the conditions under which the proposed operations can be interrupted.
Witness and mortality
Memorial practices and community records of the dead contribute a form of counter-documentation: they preserve names and relationships that may have no continuing place in service records. The book examines this practice alongside the limits of witnessing. Knowing a person’s trajectory does not necessarily confer the authority to change it. Social autopsy supplies an orientation for reconstructing the conditions preceding a death while keeping administrative exclusion analytically distinct from medical causation.
4 Theoretical and methodological approach
Theoretical position
Organizational ethnomethodology provides the principal foundation. Garfinkel’s work on practical reasoning, Zimmerman’s studies of welfare intake, and Cicourel’s analysis of organizational information direct attention to how institutions produce the facts on which they act. Dorothy E. Smith’s institutional ethnography explains how textual practices coordinate activity across settings. These traditions support an analysis of institutional categories as practical accomplishments with consequences for access and obligation.
Critical Interactionism is developed through this dialogue. It asks how inequality is accomplished in concrete interactions and how those interactions are organized by material constraints, institutional rules, and documentary authority. Political sociology situates the inquiry within housing insecurity, uneven resource distribution, and the governance of marginality. The book’s contribution is to connect these conditions with the sequences through which particular claims remain actionable, become delayed, or lose institutional support.
Santa Barbara is a sustained site of inquiry rather than a representative sample of all homelessness systems. The book develops questions for comparison with psychiatric care, hospital medicine, criminal justice, and elder care. Such comparisons concern the organization of obligation, documentation, and transitions; they are not presented as findings already established across those sectors.
Sources and scope
The project draws on Mellinger’s involvement in Santa Barbara’s homelessness services since 2007, his experience of homelessness, public records, practitioner recollections, public sociology, and memorial materials. Its empirical focus is adults experiencing prolonged homelessness, particularly where mental health and substance-use challenges overlap. It does not offer a comprehensive account of family homelessness, youth homelessness, or the experiences of survivors of domestic violence.
These materials support different kinds of claims. A public mortality report establishes aggregate patterns within its definitions and reporting period. A recalled encounter can illuminate practical reasoning without supplying a recorded transcript for conversation analysis. Documentary examples can show how a category operates, but their interpretation depends on provenance, context, and the relationship between the record and the events it describes. The analysis must preserve these distinctions rather than treating all narrative material as equivalent evidence.
Reconstructed or composite narratives, where used, require explicit identification and an account of how they were assembled. They can clarify an analytical problem but cannot stand as independent evidence of a particular person’s trajectory. Quotation or reproduction of private records requires an established basis for their use and appropriate privacy protections. The book’s methodological argument rests on keeping these obligations visible in the relationship between evidence and explanation.
5 Proposed contents
The book is organized in four parts, with a preface, thirteen chapters, a conclusion, and supporting appendices. The sequence moves from the public problem and its political economy to the analytical framework, the institutional processes it examines, and the organization of accountability.
Preface — Witness, Experience, and the Problem of Abandonment
Part I — The Problem
Chapter 1 — The Longest Night
Chapter 2 — Homelessness in Santa Barbara: A Political Economy of Care and Abandonment
Part II — Theory of Abandonment
Chapter 3 — Critical Interactionism: Structure in Action
Chapter 4 — The Career of Disposability: Interaction, Moral Economy, and the Organizational Production of Abandonment
Chapter 5 — The Phenomenology of Abandonment
Chapter 6 — The Organization of Abandonment
Part III — The Machinery of Abandonment
Chapter 7 — The Institutional Circuit
Chapter 8 — Documentary Production and the File-Case
Chapter 9 — The Burden of Legibility in Practice
Chapter 10 — Temporal Mismatch and the Organization of Delay
Chapter 11 — Street Outreach and the Limits of Recognition
Part IV — The Limits of Accountability
Chapter 12 — Witnessing as Practice
Chapter 13 — The Limits of Institutional Accountability
Conclusion — The Names: From Sequence to Consequence
Supporting material
Appendix A: Conceptual Framework and Key Terms; Appendix B: Glossary of Terms; Appendix C: Practices of Interruption; Appendix D: “I Saw the Best Souls of My City”; Appendix E: Beyond Abandonment. Endnotes, bibliography, and index complete the proposed structure. The two reference appendices serve different purposes—conceptual relationships and quick definitions—and may be consolidated during revision.
6 Chapter summaries
Preface — Witness, Experience, and the Problem of Abandonment
The Preface opens at the Longest Night Homeless Memorial Vigil and introduces the question that organizes the book: how extensive institutional contact can coexist with continuing exposure and premature death. It locates the inquiry in the author’s sociological training, work in homelessness services, and experience of being unhoused. These positions provide access to different aspects of institutional life while requiring scrutiny of the claims each can support. The Preface establishes the relationship between witness and analysis, introduces Critical Interactionism, and explains why the inquiry follows people’s trajectories across settings. It also sets out obligations to the people whose lives inform the book and to the workers whose practices it examines.
Chapter 1 — The Longest Night
Chapter 1 places the memorial vigil within Santa Barbara’s history of public witness and community efforts to remember people who died while homeless. It considers how names, lists, and memorials preserve forms of recognition that differ from administrative records. The county’s 2017 death review supplies the empirical starting point: substantial emergency-department contact among people who subsequently died. The chapter asks what those aggregate findings establish and what further reconstruction would be needed to explain particular trajectories. It introduces abandonment as a withdrawal of sustained institutional holding and distinguishes this problem from stigma, exclusion, and inequality. The chapter closes by delimiting the population, sources, and questions addressed in the book.
Chapter 2 — Homelessness in Santa Barbara: A Political Economy of Care and Abandonment
Chapter 2 situates the institutional analysis within a wealthy coastal community shaped by unequal access to housing and public space. It examines how homelessness becomes visible to residents, visitors, donors, and outreach workers, drawing on civil inattention and nonperson treatment to understand unequal recognition in everyday encounters. In dialogue with Santa Barbara studies by Rosenthal and Wakin, it considers the relationships among housing affordability, the retreat from public provision, and the organization of services. The chapter then turns to the development of local homelessness governance. It asks how an extensive care apparatus can coexist with persistent exposure, and how political-economic constraints become the working conditions of particular organizations.
Chapter 3 — Critical Interactionism: Structure in Action
Chapter 3 develops the book’s theoretical approach through organizational ethnomethodology and institutional ethnography. It examines how intake, assessment, referral, and closure are accomplished through situated reasoning, and how documents allow decisions to operate across settings. The chapter distinguishes the knowledge needed to process a case from the resources needed to navigate the process as an applicant. It asks what happens when documentary memory persists while relationships do not. Critical Interactionism connects these practical accomplishments with scarcity and unequal institutional authority. The chapter explains the framework’s analytical commitments, identifies the kinds of evidence relevant to them, and treats institutional fragmentation as a problem to investigate rather than an explanation that can simply be assumed.
Chapter 4 — The Career of Disposability: Interaction, Moral Economy, and the Organizational Production of Abandonment
Chapter 4 turns the analysis toward the author’s own participation in an encounter of care and relational rupture. A recalled interaction serves as a sensitizing case for examining expectations of reciprocity, recognition, and provision. The chapter asks how participants can act within coherent but incompatible understandings of what the encounter requires. It then explores the relationship between these interactional processes and institutional practices of verification, eligibility, and conditional re-entry. The aim is to examine how care can become contingent within relationships as well as organizations. Because the encounter is reconstructed from recall, the chapter uses it for conceptual exploration rather than presenting it as a transcript supporting fine-grained conversation-analytic findings.
Chapter 5 — The Phenomenology of Abandonment
Chapter 5 examines the experience of living within repeated assessments, delays, and conditional offers of help. It distinguishes moral, interactional, institutional, and documentary recognition, asking why being known to a worker or agency may not yield an actionable route to stabilization. The chapter considers how trauma, mental distress, and substance use affect the practical demands of access without treating them as uniform experiences or sufficient explanations of homelessness. It examines waiting, trust, and future orientation, including the possibility that repeated interruption changes what applicants expect from services. The analysis also distinguishes trajectories marked by extensive institutional contact from situations in which limited access or system absence is central.
Chapter 6 — The Organization of Abandonment
Chapter 6 presents the six-operation model and explains the relationships among conditional recognition, legibility, sorting, sedimentation, temporal mismatch, and administrative death. It asks how an initially actionable need can become grounds for delay, reduced priority, or closure, and how prior records shape subsequent encounters. The chapter distinguishes an analytical sequence from an inevitable pathway: operations may recur, diverge, or be interrupted by resources, discretion, and continuing relationships. It also separates the loss of an actionable claim from the medical cause of death. This chapter consolidates the framework used in the following analyses. It closes with “Until the Rain Decides What Counts,” an original poem concerned with the accumulated weight of these processes.
Chapter 7 — The Institutional Circuit
Chapter 7 follows the connections among outreach, assessment, emergency shelter, medical treatment, housing queues, and case closure. Its organizing question is what changes as a person returns to a setting already carrying a documentary history. Drawing on loosely coupled organizations and the distribution of responsibility, it examines how locally warranted decisions can leave a trajectory without continuity. The analysis pays particular attention to transfers: what information travels, which obligations end, and who becomes responsible for unmet need. It asks how an earlier unsuccessful episode can affect later access and identifies conditions that might interrupt repetition, including relational continuity, institutional flexibility, and coordination that carries practical responsibility as well as records.
Chapter 8 — Documentary Production and the File-Case
Chapter 8 examines how records constitute the person on whom institutions act. It traces the translation of situated accounts into administrative facts and considers how uncertainty, context, and sequence can be lost in that translation. Drawing on Zimmerman, Cicourel, and Smith, it asks how records acquire authority through institutional provenance and repeated use. Documentary sedimentation describes the persistence of earlier interpretations in later decisions. The chapter also investigates documentation as a means of rationing scarce opportunities, alongside workers’ efforts to preserve circumstances that standardized categories may omit. Administrative death is developed as the exhaustion of an actionable claim within a particular process, while the person’s circumstances may remain unresolved.
Chapter 9 — The Burden of Legibility in Practice
Chapter 9 approaches institutional access from the applicant’s side of the encounter. It examines demands for documents, coherent narratives, appropriate emotional presentation, and memory of previous service contact. These requirements can be especially difficult when daily survival is unstable. The chapter asks how disclosure and silence are interpreted, whose account can correct a misunderstanding, and how an encounter becomes recorded as successful or unsuccessful engagement. It distinguishes relational knowledge from institutionally actionable knowledge and considers burdens on workers as well as applicants. Its contribution is to show how the work of obtaining help is distributed, and why competent performance in an assessment does not necessarily produce access to the resource being sought.
Chapter 10 — Temporal Mismatch and the Organization of Delay
Chapter 10 examines the conflict among administrative schedules, the demands of survival, and bodily urgency. It considers waiting lists, recurrent contact requirements, expiring opportunities, and transitions between temporary accommodation and longer-term support. The Temporal Covenant names the expectation that compliance now will lead to stabilization later; the chapter asks how interrupted access affects that expectation. Waiting is treated as practical work that requires communication, memory, transportation, and endurance. The analysis investigates when schedules become impossible to synchronize and how records can preserve an earlier condition after circumstances change. Its central question is how delay can prolong exposure and increase vulnerability, and what institutional arrangements could maintain continuity while people wait.
Chapter 11 — Street Outreach and the Limits of Recognition
Chapter 11 examines outreach as a practice of establishing recognition in settings where people may otherwise be ignored or treated primarily as public problems. In dialogue with Robin James Smith’s interactionist research, it asks how workers learn to notice, approach, and sustain contact. Outreach is also situated within documentation and assessment requirements, producing a dual task of care and information collection. The chapter investigates when knowledge acquired through repeated contact can influence decisions elsewhere, and when it remains confined to the outreach relationship. Worker frustration becomes analytically significant where recognition exceeds available authority or resources. The chapter considers how person-serving records and channels for practitioner testimony might strengthen the practical effects of outreach.
Chapter 12 — Witnessing as Practice
Chapter 12 analyzes witnessing as a position created by temporal continuity, institutional location, and relational persistence. Workers and people with lived experience may see trajectories that appear only as separate episodes to other participants. The chapter asks how this knowledge is received, translated, or excluded in decisions about care and housing. It examines the gap between knowing a person’s circumstances and possessing the authority to interrupt a damaging process. The analysis then turns toward the book itself: ethnographic witness can specify institutional mechanisms and make them contestable, but publication does not itself provide housing or continuous care. The chapter develops obligations of fidelity, accountability, and reflexive scrutiny within that limitation.
Chapter 13 — The Limits of Institutional Accountability
Chapter 13 asks how institutions could sustain responsibility for persons across episodes, transfers, and changes in eligibility. It brings together the preceding analyses of documentary authority, conditional obligation, time, and closure. The chapter distinguishes completing a locally defined task from securing continuity of support and examines how obligations expire through procedural action. It considers organizational arrangements that attach responsibility to trajectories, including resources, relational continuity, and authority across boundaries. Comparisons with hospital medicine, psychiatric care, criminal justice, and elder care are proposed as questions for further inquiry. The chapter’s wider contribution concerns how accountability is organized and what would make unresolved need remain a practical institutional responsibility.
Conclusion — The Names: From Sequence to Consequence
The Conclusion returns to the memorial vigil and the relationship between institutional categories and the lives they represent. It brings the six operations together without treating them as an exhaustive explanation of every death. The analysis connects political economy, governance, organizational practice, interaction, and bodily vulnerability, asking where evidence supports a link and where further investigation is needed. Memorialization provides a form of public accounting alongside official records. The conclusion argues that program improvement and structural change must address continuing responsibility as well as individual episodes of service. It closes by asking what communities and institutions would have to sustain for recognition to become a reliable basis for protection and care.
Appendices
Appendices A and B organize the conceptual framework and provide a glossary for research, teaching, and practitioner use. Appendix C develops six practices of interruption: sustaining recognition; sharing the work of legibility; preserving context in records; responding to time as consequential; maintaining continuity across gaps; and attending to the erosion of future expectations. These practices are considered alongside the resources and institutional authority needed to make them effective.
Appendix D presents “I Saw the Best Souls of My City,” a witness poem written for the Longest Night Homeless Memorial Vigil. Its accompanying discussion considers poetry as a form of counter-documentation and memorialization. Appendix E, Beyond Abandonment, addresses structural transformation and civic responsibility, connecting the institutional argument with the author’s public sociology. The appendices provide distinct forms of reference, practice, and witness; their final arrangement remains adaptable to the book’s publication format.
7 Readership and teaching
The primary readership is sociology, especially scholars and graduate students studying organizations, urban poverty, inequality, and qualitative methods. The book brings the practical organization of services into a discussion of homelessness and premature death, offering a sustained example of how interactions and documents connect with political-economic conditions. Organizational ethnomethodologists and institutional ethnographers are a particularly relevant audience for its account of categories, records, and accountability.
A secondary readership includes social work educators and practitioners, public health researchers, and those involved in homelessness governance. The discussions of access, discharge, waiting, and outreach connect institutional analysis with problems encountered in practice. The appendices support this readership without presenting individual workers as capable of overcoming resource scarcity by better intentions alone.
The strongest teaching uses are advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in institutions and organizations, urban poverty and inequality, and qualitative or ethnographic methods. Selected chapters may also serve courses in medical sociology, homelessness and housing policy, and social work. The six-operation model gives readers a framework for examining a trajectory, while the methodological discussion supports scrutiny of how different sources warrant different claims.
8 Comparable books and intellectual antecedents
Comparable books
Josh Seim’s Bandage, Sort, and Hustle: Ambulance Crews on the Front Lines of Urban Suffering (University of California Press, 2020) examines ambulance work within the governance of urban suffering, including relationships with emergency departments and police. It is a relevant comparison for readers interested in frontline labor and institutional fragmentation. Abandonment in Real Time places its emphasis on continuity across services, the accumulation of documentary categories, and temporal barriers to housing and care.
Michele Wakin’s Hobo Jungle: A Homeless Community in Paradise (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2020) examines the history and lived organization of an encampment in Santa Barbara. It provides a strong local and substantive comparison for readers of homelessness ethnography. Mellinger’s book builds on this body of Santa Barbara research while focusing on the encounters, records, and transitions through which service obligations take effect or lapse.
Forrest Stuart’s Down, Out, and Under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row (University of Chicago Press, 2016) investigates the relationship between policing and everyday poverty. Its audience overlaps with urban sociology, ethnography, and the study of institutions governing marginality. Abandonment in Real Time focuses on the organization of care and housing access across settings, with particular attention to documentation, delay, and accountability for trajectories.
Craig Willse’s The Value of Homelessness: Managing Surplus Life in the United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) examines the organization of housing insecurity and the homeless services industry. It is a relevant comparison for readers concerned with homelessness governance and political economy. Mellinger’s proposed contribution is an interactional and documentary account of how access and obligation are organized in particular service processes.
These comparisons locate the book within an established scholarly conversation about urban suffering, homelessness, frontline institutions, and governance. Its distinguishing emphasis is the relationship among recognition, documentary accumulation, institutional time, and sustained responsibility.
Intellectual antecedents
David Sudnow’s Passing On supplies an organizational precedent for studying dying as socially organized. Dorothy E. Smith’s institutional ethnography provides a foundation for analyzing texts and coordination, while Goffman’s work informs the examination of interaction, recognition, and institutional encounters. The book draws from these traditions to study a dispersed circuit of organizations rather than a single enclosed institution.
Eric Klinenberg’s Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2002) links mortality with urban social organization. Abandonment in Real Time brings this orientation to recurring exposure and service transitions. João Biehl’s Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment (University of California Press, 2005) provides an important account of abandonment and subjectivity; Mellinger’s book complements that inquiry with a focus on sequential and documentary processes in a local service ecology.
Wacquant’s political sociology situates urban marginality within wider distributions of power and resources. Snow and Anderson, Bourgois and Schonberg, Lyon-Callo, and Gowan inform the study of homeless lives, care, and moral classification. Rosenthal’s Homeless in Paradise is a central antecedent for Santa Barbara. The book works in dialogue with these accounts and seeks to make the relationship between structural conditions and practical institutional decisions more explicit.
9 Author
Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D., is an independent sociologist, social justice writer, and former street outreach worker based in Santa Barbara, California. He earned his doctorate in sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1990. His training in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, including work with Don Zimmerman and Harvey Molotch, informs his attention to institutional reasoning and the organization of everyday interaction.
His involvement in homelessness services began in 2007 and has included outreach, case management, substance-use counseling, homelessness prevention, and participation in community governance. He has experienced homelessness on three occasions. These experiences provide access to both service work and the practical demands of seeking help, while making reflexive scrutiny integral to the analysis.
Mellinger has written regularly for Noozhawk and maintains Doing Modernity and Our Neighbors on the Streets as platforms for public sociology. His work with the Longest Night Homeless Memorial Vigil connects research on institutional life with sustained public remembrance. Abandonment in Real Time brings together sociological inquiry, practitioner experience, and public writing on homelessness and accountability.
10 Manuscript status and publication plans
An advanced manuscript has been drafted, comprising a preface, thirteen chapters, a conclusion, and supporting appendices. Revision is directed toward condensation, conceptual consolidation, reference verification, and final editorial preparation. The final length and arrangement of supplementary material will be determined in relation to the publisher’s format and editorial requirements.
The book has not previously been published as a volume. It develops themes explored in the author’s public sociology and journalism, and includes original poetry prepared for memorial settings. Previously published material incorporated into the book will be appropriately acknowledged, with permission where required.
The proposed revision period is nine months following agreement on scope: substantive revision and condensation in months one through five; source and reference verification and final editorial preparation in months six through nine. Final indexing would follow the publisher’s production schedule.
Source note
¹ Santa Barbara County Homeless Death Review Team, Deaths Among People Experiencing Homelessness in Santa Barbara County, 1/1/2017 to 12/31/2017, “Access to Services,” printed page 11. The report identifies 44 decedents, including two whose deaths occurred outside the county but who had received substantial county services during the preceding year. Its emergency-department table reports 124 visits by 33 decedents in the year prior to death.
Santa Barbara County 2017 Homeless Death Review Team report
Bandage, Sort, and Hustle — University of California Press
Hobo Jungle — Lynne Rienner Publishers excerpt
Down, Out, and Under Arrest — University of Chicago Press
The Value of Homelessness — University of Minnesota Press
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