Populating the Runaway and Homeless Youth Act: Governance, Vulnerability, and Positivity in US Federal Policy

This dissertation examines how the runaway and homeless youth (RHY) population is produced through U.S. federal policy as an object of governance rather than recognized as a preexisting social group. Drawing on a historical and genealogical approach, I analyze legislative hearings, statutory language, Federal Register documents, service regulations, senatorial archives, and selected media representations to trace how youth housing instability becomes intelligible as a coherent and actionable federal population. Rather than treating policy as a neutral response to an already existing social condition, I examine how federal legislation, administrative practice, and developmental expertise assemble runaway and homeless youth through practices of abstraction, designation, and intervention.

The dissertation traces three related processes. Chapter 1 details how the runaway and homeless youth population is produced as an abstraction through legislation, services, testimony, and research. Focusing on the Runaway Youth Act of 1974 and subsequent reauthorizations, it traces how heterogeneous experiences of youth housing instability are rendered legible as a distinct population by stabilizing characteristics such as vulnerability, family dysfunction, and risk. Second, I argue that vulnerability functions as a governing designation rather than an inherent condition of youth. Across policy and media, vulnerability organizes recognition through racialized and gendered forms, differentiates care from punishment, and delimits intervention while obscuring the structural conditions that produce youth homelessness. Third, I examine Positive Youth Development as a governing rationality that reframes youth homelessness as a developmental problem to be addressed through self-regulation, resilience, and future orientation, narrowing the scope of state obligation while stabilizing a self-managing subject as the normative horizon of intervention.

Taken together, these chapters argue that youth homelessness is governed through administratively legible categories that shift attention away from housing, poverty, racism, and economic precarity and toward the management of populations through vulnerability, developmental deficiency, and self-sufficiency. By tracing how the RHY population is made thinkable, recognizable, and actionable in federal policy, this dissertation reframes youth homelessness not simply as a social problem to be solved, but as a problem continually reorganized through the terms of its governance. In doing so, it contributes to social work scholarship by showing how policy categories shape the forms of care, intervention, and recognition available to young people, and by pointing toward responses grounded less in contingent designation and developmental management than in housing, material support, and structural redress.