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Participatory research methodologies have expanded the opportunities for critical, emancipatory and democratic health and social work research. However, their practical application in research with vulnerable participants has historically been challenging due to ethical, practical and theoretical concerns. Individuals who are homeless are typically seen as 'hard-to-reach', transient, 'hidden' and even chaotic participant populations. Unsurprisingly, examples of the use of innovative participatory research techniques with those groups have been relatively scarce. This paper aimed to address this gap by discussing the application of one such technique – the mobile phone diary in research with multiply disadvantaged homeless adults. Diary methods are situated within the qualitative research on health, illness and social marginality, and the enhanced capabilities of the mobile phone diary are highlighted. The author illustrates the application of the mobile phone diary in his participatory research on the everyday life narratives of adults with serious mental illness (SMI) who were homeless. The process of designing the mobile phone diary is detailed. Following this, participant testimonies of their use of the mobile phone diary are presented. They demonstrate the participatory and inclusive nature, as well as the cathartic and empowering potential, of this technique. The methodological contributions and challenges and the theoretical generativity of the mobile phone diary method are discussed. The mobile phone diary is a feasible approach for eliciting evocative, contextualised and nuanced accounts of the lived experience of homelessness, social isolation, coping and recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the diaries of Michael P. Riabouchinsky (Mikhail Pavlovich Riabushinskii), held by the New York Public Library, and their value as a resource for the study of the Russian emigration. The diaries and other papers were/donated to NYPL in the course of the 1950s through 1960, after the author's death, but have thus far remained outside the purview of most scholars despite their significance as a primary source. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an extract from a private diary kept by an intelligent and scholarly young carpenter living in New England and New York from September 1820 to May 1827. Carpenters having frequently discussed upon the impropriety of working so many hours during the longest days in summer, for a day's work and on the necessity and expediency of limiting the number of hours for a day's work, thereby reducing it to a regular system whereby every mechanick might be enabled to work the exact specified time for his employer and yet have some leisure time to regulate and make such arrangements in his affairs as are indispensably necessary. The first step taken to effect this was notice given in the public papers that a meeting of the journeymen carpenters would be held at Concert Hall, on April 12, 1825 and solicited punctual attendance. This notice was given about ten days previous to the proposed meeting. Five or six days before the meeting about sixty or seventy of the above named met to consult what measures to adopt at the general meeting and make such arrangements for the same as might be thought proper.