Analytical (Interpretive) Assignment Guidelines

All academic analytical writing contains an intellectual argument or thesis, evidence to support the position, and a critical examination of various parts of the topic as well as an analysis of the topic as a whole. Analytical (interpretive) writing also should answer the “so what? what is the significance of this?” questions. Other questions that may be relevant include:
– Why did this happen?
– How did this happen?
– Whom does this affected?
What are the short and long-term implications of this?
You need to explain why your analysis is relevant and why should I, as a reader care?

The goal of this assignment is to develop and utilize analytical thinking and writing. You want to push past the superficial and dig more deeply in to the underlying reasons that may explain what you observed.

Review your descriptive essay. Using bold face type weave your analysis into your descriptive essay. You are trying to take apart a scene, interaction, event etc. to examine and

better understand it, to excavate or clarify the meaning of what you have observed and consider why it is significant. Look for patterns, themes, or contradictions. Focus on logic and try to offer evidence or possible explanations to justify/support your analysis. Your tone should be exploratory, not definitive.

There are many ways to shape your analysis, depending on your descriptive essay. Some of you included very specific interactions that you may choose to focus on and decipher. Others may choose to address particular behaviors of people you observed. For ex. many of you noted the prevalence of tourists posing and picture-taking. You might ponder the significance of this behavior. Does this alter the experience of seeing? Who is the intended audience for these images? How and why do these photos circulate?

Review some of the assigned readings to generate ideas about themes and patterns. Your goal is to generate 2 pages of analysis (so that your descriptive + analytical essay is a total of 4 pages).

The once-bustling Main Street in downtown Memphis is left desolate under shelter-in-place
orders during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Intersecting with the city’s most
popular blues destination, Beale Street, the vacant streets are a sharp contrast to the normal
rhythms of the area. Main Street is also a commonplace for the public congregation of tourists
and locals, including members of the homeless community. The LUX was one of several hotels
on the street.

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Visual Anthropology Review, Vol. 36, Issue 2, pp. 379–400, ISSN 1058-7187, online 1548-7458. © 2020 American Anthropological
Association. DOI: 10.1111/var.12216.

Living at the LUX:
Homelessness and Improvisational Waiting
under COVID-19

LINDSEY RAISA FELDMAN & MICHAEL
VICENTE PÉREZ

ABSTRACT
This photo-essay engages with the central theme of wait-
ing under COVID-19 among a group of homeless women at
the LUX hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. The images and text
capture the structural shelter-in-place conditions and how
the women worked within those regulations to construct
a new relationship to time and the self. The images in this
essay reflect what we call improvisational waiting, a con-
cept that emphasizes the creative ways women at the LUX
turned experiences of waiting into novel rhythms of life that
held the promise of a better future.

KEYWORDS
waiting, agency, homelessness, shelter, COVID-19

mailto:

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Introduction

COVID-19 has brought more to the world than illness and
death. Moving swiftly across borders by human carriers,
SARS-CoV-2, the airborne virus that causes COVID-19, has
simultaneously induced new forms of isolation while exacer-
bating existing social and economic inequalities. But as indi-
viduals around the world struggle differently against the threat
of infection, one experience unites us all: the act of waiting.
Watching the news, we wait for case numbers to drop. Hoping
for conditions that will allow safe return to work, we wait for
the economy to improve. Infected, we wait for symptoms to
diminish. Wherever the virus and disease are found, we wait
under the shadow of uncertainty.

Although waiting has taken a particular form under the
COVID-19 global pandemic, with many government officials
heeding the advice of medical experts and ordering people
to “shelter in place,” waiting is diverse in both meaning and
experience. Here, we explore one unique set of experiences of
waiting during the global pandemic. We present images of a
group of homeless women in Memphis, Tennessee, who used
waiting in temporary shelter to improvise new daily rhythms
that, in some cases, prepared them for the possibility of a more
hopeful future. We show both the structures of life under shel-
ter-in-place conditions and how it allowed for improvised so-
cial and bodily practices that turned waiting into projects of
transformation and well-being (Jackson 2005). Through this
visual and textual exploration, we contribute to the scholarship
on waiting that highlights the unique forms of agency that can
occur within restrictive structures (Brun 2015; El-Shaarawi
2015; Hage 2009; Janeja and Bandak 2018; Jeffrey 2010; Kwon
2015). This visual essay aims to add new perspectives on the
creative approaches people can take to conditions of waiting
not of their own making.

Understanding the LUX

In the early days of the pandemic, city leaders had to act
quickly and without precedent to address the directive for all
Memphians to shelter in place. At the same time, overnight
shelters closed throughout the city due to fear of viral spread
as COVID-19 cases grew. This highlighted the persistent,
structural issue of housing insecurity in Memphis as a large
swath of individuals who needed immediate help to move
into appropriate shelter was suddenly visible. The LUX hotel
was one example of this ad hoc approach to public health
and safety. It was one of several hotels that partnered with

LINDSEY RAISA
FELDMAN
Lindsey Raisa Feldman
is assistant professor
of Anthropology at the
University of Memphis. Her
research examines incarcera-
tion, identity, and masculinity.
She is currently working on a
portrait photography project
with incarcerated men in
Memphis.

MICHAEL VICENTE
PÉREZ
Michael Vicente Pérez
is assistant professor
of Anthropology at the
University of Memphis. His
research has examined
long-term displacement
and statelessness among
Palestinians in Jordan. Dr.
Pérez is currently working on
questions of authority and
community among Muslims
in Chile.

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a local nonprofit and city government to provide temporary
residences for the homeless population.1 With the transfor-
mation of hotels into shelters, houseless individuals and fami-
lies throughout the city made their way into this unfamiliar
context of sheltering in place. An upscale boutique hotel that
just weeks before was bustling with tourist traffic, the LUX
offered one of its f loors to a subset of this larger population:
a group of about twenty-five currently homeless women in
need of temporary residence.

We came to the LUX on the invitation of a nonprofit after
this newly configured hotel/shelter had been in operation for
three weeks. Because this nonprofit had never before run an
overnight shelter, they wanted local anthropologists to help
understand the backgrounds of new residents and asked us
to interview the women. Accepting the agency’s request, we
obtained IRB approval within two weeks. While the IRB pro-
cess was swift—thanks to the university’s rapid response and
relatively straightforward research partner approval process—
conducting interviews and engaging in participant observation
within the confines of a hotel under shelter-in-place conditions
presented challenges to our fieldwork practice and praxis. For
example, we wore face masks during all research encounters
and, to the best of our abilities, remained socially distant from
the women. Although the masks and distance helped protect
us all from potential exposure to the virus, they also reinforced
the sense of risk we brought to the research context and placed
a physical limit on a fieldwork cornerstone: building rapport.
During our month at the hotel, we relied on our ability to over-
come the impact that masks and distance had on the embodied
intimacy of the ethnographic encounter.

Another challenge concerned the role and reception of
the camera in this fieldwork context. The LUX was a brack-
eted space both for the women and for us as researchers.
Establishing our presence in the few areas of the LUX available
for communal interactions required careful attention to the
line between fitting in the space and becoming an imposition.
We presented the camera as a tool for capturing daily life in the
shelter, while also providing several options for consenting to
participate in the project that allowed the women to choose the
extent to which they were photographed. These included con-
senting to either interviews only with no photographs, taking
photographs with no faces, or taking identifiable images. We
continually checked in with our participants as interviews pro-
gressed about these consent categories. We also showed them
their images during the interview period by placing the camera
with the images displayed on a nearby surface, and the women
then reviewed it. In this way, we offered a chance to share their

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assessment of our ethnographic eye. This allowed for a sense
of rapport building between ethnographer and research par-
ticipant, and it also created a sort of co-constitutive process of
image making in the field. Whether establishing rapport with
masks or working with cameras in a limited space, fieldwork
under shelter-in-place conditions was an inherently improvisa-
tory act. It required the f lexibility and adaptability that exist in
nearly all anthropological research but under novel conditions.

Through this improvisational research, life at the hotel
revealed much more than stories of past hardships. For some
of the women whom we met, staying at the LUX was conceptu-
alized as just another stop on a longer journey. But for several
others, staying at the LUX was an unexpectedly emergent and,
in some instances, transformative experience. As we recorded
these experiences, we began to understand how new forms of
self and future-making were taking place within this unprec-
edented context of the LUX-as-shelter and of shelter itself. It
was from this situation that we began to question what waiting
really meant—or could come to mean—in improvisational and
rare circumstances such as these.

Sheltering at the LUX followed many of the same shel-
ter-in-place procedures implemented throughout the nation
and world: remain indoors as much as possible, wear a mask
outside, and maintain a safe social distance in public. For the
women living in the hotel, these basic practices were codified
through a variety of rules for living at the LUX that were all
designed to minimize the risks of viral spread.

To remain in residence, the women would stay in their
assigned section of the hotel. Visitations of any kind were pro-
hibited, though women were able to socialize among them-
selves following safety measures of physical distancing and
mask wearing. The women had their temperature checked
three times a day. Cigarette breaks were permitted at the hotel
entrance with supervision. Beyond the hotel, the women could
shop at three local stores and visit the nearby park. All of these
excursions were supervised by nonprofit staff.

During the month of our research, we observed and par-
ticipated in the lived environment of the LUX as a transformed
shelter. We joined several women in their daily routines, like
meal delivery and temperature checks, walking to the local
stores, and spending time brief ly outside. Importantly, how-
ever, we spent a significant amount of time simply waiting
with them in the few spaces they inhabited. These experiences
provide the basis of the text in our essay. The images we pres-
ent are the visible acts of waiting in shelter that address the
experience of temporary shelter beyond its straightforward
restrictiveness.

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Although our time at the LUX generated important in-
sights into the practice of waiting among some of the women,
we must also note that other women at the LUX waited differ-
ently. For some, individual rooms became their primary do-
mains and isolation their preferred mode of residence. Due to
this and the limited time the LUX operated, ten weeks in total
before being disbanded as the City of Memphis reopened to
tourists, we did not connect with all residents. As such, our
essay offers one vantage into life at the LUX and underscores
the challenges of ethnographic research under rapidly chang-
ing and contingent circumstances.

Theories of Waiting

The theme of this photo-essay is what we call improvisational
waiting. By joining the concepts of improvisation and waiting,
we want to emphasize the creative energies that can emerge
under constraining conditions. Like jazz players immersed in
a musical composition, we consider both the structures of shel-
ter and the dynamic ways that women at the LUX reworked
its form and significance for their lives. Waiting here is a form
of improvisation connected to projectivity, that is, the active
production of a present that anticipates the possibility of new
futures (Brun 2015, 24). As the women repurposed the struc-
tures of waiting to their own desires, they did so in ways that
were inextricably linked to imagined future possibilities. In
this way, we break with much of the social scientific literature
on waiting among the homeless.

Shelter in this body of work is often depicted as a bu-
reaucratic structure of immense regulation (DeVerteuil 2003),
in which the homeless exist as passive subjects (Deward and
Moe 2010). Waiting for housing, treatment, or social services,
homeless populations are recognized through their subjection
to disciplinary power (Cooper 2015). Focused on the institu-
tional conditions that compel people to wait—or what some
call the politics of waiting (Janeja and Bandak 2018, 3)—such
approaches fail to see how people respond to its imposition in
unexpected ways.

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During our fieldwork, we often joined the women on outings to the three local stores they
were permitted to visit. More than an opportunity to leave the hotel, trips to the store
were a reinsertion into the normative life of consumerism. With their own funds, some of
the women could now enter stores as customers and buy things they once lacked while
living on the streets.

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Understood through its limits, the LUX hotel may seem
like a space of total confinement. The women had rules, and
compliance was mandatory. Yet, the LUX was more than its
regulations. Within the structure of shelter-in-place existence,
there was a temporal space of improvisation in the waiting of
things to come. This is what we observed during our time at the
LUX. In the gaps of regulatory time and practice, we encoun-
tered what some scholars have described as agency in waiting
(Brun 2015; Hage 2009; Janeja and Bandak 2018). Although
structurally imposed, waiting in these instances also can cre-
ate opportunities for individuals to act within limits toward
new outcomes. These actions do not challenge the regulations
that govern daily life. Instead, they use them as parameters for
new rhythms that shift the experience of waiting into an active
set of practices that anticipate a novel, better future.

Improvisational Waiting

While always operating within the limits of shelter, life at
the LUX was often profoundly improvisational. Prior to the
pandemic, the nonprofit behind the LUX initiative had never
functioned as a shelter. As such, there were no set rules beyond
maintaining the safety of its team and the women it served.
This allowed staff and guests to proceed creatively, impro-
vising within the basic structure of reducing the viral risk of
COVID-19. Beyond temperature checks, restricted mobility,
and limited contact, daily rhythms emerged that brought the
nonprofit staff and residents into relations of care and col-
laboration toward futures that were, in some cases, previously
unimagined.

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Temperature checks were mandatory at the LUX and taken three times a day. This
is one of a series of regulatory acts taken up by nonprofit staff and could be viewed
as a production of disciplinary power—for women to gain access to a safe living
environment, they must be subject to continual bodily monitoring. We agree with
this to a certain extent, but as discussed in detail in the following, this is not the
only framework with which to view the LUX.

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One nonprofit staff member exemplified the act of im-
provisational waiting. Along with millions of other Americans
at the outset of COVID-19, she was laid off from her job in
marketing. Looking for work, she found a job listing for the
nonprofit and, although she had not worked in social services
before, decided it was the time to try something new. As a
dancer and yoga instructor, she asked the women within the
first few days at the LUX if there was interest in offering in-
formal classes to break up the monotony of daily life under the
shelter-in-place orders. In this way, she matched her passions
with homeless women’s desire for new bodily experiences and
created opportunities to stretch and dance in a city park where
just weeks before some of the women used to sleep. This was
not part of any case management plan. It was, rather, an impro-
vised response that exceeded the structure of shelter in place
and allowed for profoundly new embodied practices of pres-
ence and care in the liminal space of waiting.

There were other ways the women improvised while wait-
ing at the LUX. Using objects provided by a network of donors
in the city, they transformed noncurated hotel areas into spaces
of interaction and activity. The women were only allowed ac-
cess to one f loor of the hotel. All common areas like the lobby
and eating areas were off limits. Operating under these restric-
tions, the women intentionally crafted a communal space on
small tables in front of the elevator doors. Here, the women
ate together, played cards, and shared photographs of their
children on smartphones. There was a donated Memphis ver-
sion of Monopoly, which small groups of women would pull
out of its box and pore over, recounting memories of visiting
Graceland or living on the streets near Beale. There was also a
set of UNO cards in this makeshift common room, and at all
hours of the day, the women would sit in each other’s company
forging temporary relations of pleasure and intimacy.

Games were more than simple ways of passing time. A form of routine interaction, they offered
occasions for conversation and solidarity. For some of the women, these activities were novel
experiences of pleasure. Unavailable in the past, when the struggles of either houselessness
or unsafe living arrangements made life too precarious for these kinds of entertainment,
conditions of shelter turned games like UNO into a reclaimed experience of recreation and
leisure. Games also facilitated opportunities for intimacy as the women shared ideas about
their favorite foods and the kind of lives they anticipated once the pandemic ended.

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In a city park next to the LUX, a nonprofit staff member leads a hotel guest in a one-on-
one yoga session. Yoga was an example of what we call improvisational waiting, or the
act of unplanned, agential forms of meaning-making for both guests and staff at the LUX.
This park is where several of the homeless women once slept prior to COVID-19.

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Beyond the common area, shelter at the LUX turned hotel
rooms into private spaces of residence. Women at the LUX
waited on king-sized beds with WIFI-enabled f lat-screen tele-
visions. Day after day, these lavish accommodations provided
comfortable conditions for waiting and the unexpected antici-
pation of new ways of living. Describing the first time she saw
her room at the LUX, for example, one woman explained: I said
this is not for real. I thought I was dreaming, I said I know this
ain’t right. From the unimaginable setting of her new room, she
began to settle into new ideas of a better life ahead. Clean from
drugs for the first time in years, the experience of a temporary
life in shelter opened a new vision on the future: I’m through. I
ain’t never going to do it no more…this is the way I was supposed
to live, and this is the way I’m going to be living. As this quote
indicates, the physical space (the place and time of this mo-
ment) of this improvised waiting matters. The stark difference
between the LUX and life on the streets offers much more than
a captivating mental image. It provides us with a way to con-
ceptualize the relationship between material conditions and
the agential dynamic of imagination. For some women, the
safety and comforts of their accommodations provoked new
imaginable futures. They offered tangible evidence of a differ-
ent form of life and the possibility of achieving it through the
new practices repeated and honed while in shelter.

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Luxury rooms at the boutique hotel became sites of newfound pleasures and comfort,
with one hotel guest relaxing on her bed, laughing while watching cartoons. At the LUX,
hotel rooms provided new experiences for a group of women unaccustomed to the
comforts of consumer luxuries. For some, the very opportunity to dwell within spaces of
comfort populated by flat-screen televisions and king-sized beds offered a compelling
new experience of life. It opened the imagination to the possibility of living beyond the
precariousness of the street or unsafe home environments.

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This was especially true for certain women who had
arrived at the LUX under acutely traumatic circumstances.
Fleeing intimate partner violence, Carol spent the first few
days at the LUX adjusting to a room of her own. As she shared:

Basically, I’ve been through a whole life like, suffer with
like depression, since my mom passed, and through my mar-
riage and not having my kids right now and able, you know,
financial situations with my husband like living the way I used
to live. And basically, like coming down and have to walk away
and leave everything. So I’ve been having a lot going on in my
life even before the quarantine, it’s like God was just preparing
me for the worst, you know.

Within the first week of living at the LUX, she began pre-
paring for other things. She expressed a newfound resolve in
picking up a lifelong passion that she described she had left
behind in the face of decades of domestic abuse. In her hotel
room, she began once again to sing gospel songs that she wrote
long ago, vocalizing a resilient, more hopeful self. At the LUX,
Carol and others imagined possible futures in the wake of
complicated pasts and presents. As she explained: Oh, I’m ex-
cited because it’s been a long time coming. …I’m looking forward
to the future, like I got a son, he’s doing good. My daughter, she’s
doing good, and I feel like the best is yet to come for me.

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A woman rolls back her shoulders, looks straight ahead, and clears her throat, in
preparation to sing one of her original gospel songs for the ethnographers. For decades,
intimate partner violence and addiction kept her from the music that gave her an
important sense of self. At the LUX, she rediscovered the power of her voice through
song.

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While guests waited under shelter-in-place orders, some
improvised new forms of sociability. There were many con-
versations held between the women about who stayed in their
rooms, who reveled in the improvised communal spaces, and
who among these groups changed their approach to socializing
over the course of their weeks together. Some women initially
never left their room and over time decided to sit by the eleva-
tors. Some other women, immediately upon entering the LUX,
attempted to forge new friendships with other guests. And oth-
ers, who already knew each other, decided to strengthen their
bonds. Two women whom we interviewed expressed that they
deepened their connection under the circumstances at the
LUX. Once friends on the streets, they now called themselves
sisters, planning a unified future post-LUX. Sitting side by side
in their interview, they explained that they would seek adjoin-
ing apartments once the LUX experience ended. One ethnog-
rapher asked whether that meant they would be roommates,
and the women laughed. They had come to appreciate private
space at the LUX, but also could not imagine a life without one
another as sisters, and so they would seek separate housing side
by side.

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Prior to the LUX, these two women were friends on the streets of Memphis. Navigating
the vulnerabilities of life as women without permanent shelter, they depended on
each other for material and emotional support. Now in a stable context with their own
rooms, their bond has deepened. Once friends in need, today they are self-declared
sisters committed to a common future. Reading the latest CDC guidelines for COVID-19,
their concerns are focused on how to maintain their familial connection in a new living
context.

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As is the case in many shelters, several women at the LUX
experienced waiting as a time of transition. Clean for the first
time in decades, Rhonda understood a day’s wait as, simply
and profoundly, a day’s success. Surrounded by new clothes,
bags, shoes, and a bible, she saw shelter as a break from the past.
After losing her husband, mother, and father, she decided to
“no longer lose herself.” And so she chose the LUX as a place to
wait in sobriety. Getting clean might be considered a truly im-
provisational act, requiring patience and acceptance with each
new stanza of craving. As she developed these new rhythms
each day at the LUX, she described a sense of increased com-
fort with the notion of hope and the potential for a future of
continuity, rather than one marked by loss.

From the comforts of her room, surrounded by new clothes, purses, shoes, and other material
needs, Rhonda anticipated a new future. She was ready for the change and used the objects in
her life as tools for a new way of living. With them, she improvised a better version of herself free
from a past of drugs and the absence of shelter. I change clothes three times a day now. Heck
yeah, one for every meal. Yeah, I’m ready. Ready. … I’m going to be right.

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Conclusion

At times during our research at the LUX, the communal table
by the elevator, placed in front of the large portrait window
overlooking downtown Memphis, would be empty. In those
moments, certain guests who preferred solitude would emerge
from their rooms to take advantage of the silence and the view.
In this case, sitting still was a critical, improvised practice of
self-making in waiting. Some of the women at the LUX had—
just days or weeks before—experienced long stretches of rest-
less and vulnerable mobility. The quiet space of the elevator
lobby provided room for reacquainting themselves with an
alternative lived space while also introducing them to a new
bodily experience of respite from life punctuated by struggle.
The act of stillness while sheltering in place, in this moment,
was not stif ling, but freeing. It was a space of meditative ref lec-
tion, of calm.

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A woman sits in silence after eating a donated lunch at the large window next to the
elevators overlooking downtown Memphis. Once a true interstitial waiting space for
pre-COVID-19 hotel guests, the small area next to the elevator doors was made into the
primary communal living space for the women sheltered in place at the LUX.

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Promise. Transition. Hope. These were critical dimen-
sions of waiting that we encountered among some of the
women living at the LUX in shelter. These forms of waiting,
borne out of structural constraints, constituted the improvised
efforts of women committed to reconstituting their lives under
unprecedented circumstances.

These were not the only possibilities for women at the
LUX. Some came and went. Stif led by the regulations, they
sought refuge in what they knew of the world before COVID-
19. But others stayed. In waiting, they improvised lives within
limits and created novel forms of sociability, rituals, and be-
comings (Biehl and Locke 2010).

Waiting for the end of temporary shelter, they were also
waiting on their new futures (Hage 2009). Agentially and im-
provisationally, they chose to work with and on their circum-
stances in preparation for imaginable futures. For them, LUX
became one stop on a longer journey of the self and world.

Note

1. The names of the hotel, the nonprofit agency in charge of the LUX shelter,
and all participants have been changed or omitted to protect the privacy
of all individuals in this research.

References

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Brun, Catherine. 2015. “Active Waiting and Changing Hopes.” Social Analysis
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Cooper, Amy. 2015. “Time Seizures and the Self: Institutional Temporalities and
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DeVerteuil, Geoffrey. 2003. “Homeless Mobility, Institutional Settings, and
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El-Shaarawi, Nadia. 2015. “Living an Uncertain Future: Temporality,
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Hage, Ghassan, ed. 2009. Waiting. Carlton: Melbourne University Publishing.
Jackson, Michael. 2005. Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies, and

Events. New York: Berghahn Books.
Janeja, Manpreet K., and Andreas Bandak, eds. 2018. Ethnographies of

Waiting: Doubt, Hope and Uncertainty. London: Bloomsbury.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank the
nonprofit agency in charge
of the LUX for inviting us to
conduct this project and for
its cooperation throughout
the research period. Without
the kindness of its staff and
its confidence in our work,
this project would have never
been possible. We are also
grateful to the many women
at the LUX who offered their
time, patience, and trust
during this research. We
want to acknowledge the
support of Darien Sproesser,
who assisted with data
management and coding. This
project was partially funded
by the College of Arts and
Sciences at the University of
Memphis.

https://doi.org/10.1086/651466

https://doi.org/10.1086/651466

https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2015.590102

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-014-9405-8

https://doi.org/10.1068/a35205

Shitty First Draf ts

N

ow, practically even better news than that of short assign_
ments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good w,riters writ

e

them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and
terrific third drafts. people tend to look at successful writers,
writers who are getting their books published and maybe even
doing well financially, and think that they sit down at their
desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great
about who they are and how much talent they have and what
a great story they have to tell; that they take in a few deep
breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times
to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed
passages as fast as a court reporter. But this is just the fantasy
of the uninitiated. I know some very great writers, writers
you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of
money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly
enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant

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