The public screen as contextual field: Visibility and agency in US films about homelessness.

Because many Americans' encounters with homelessness are limited to what they see in entertainment and news media, this study examines how those representations have changed over time through an analysis of 35 years of films about homelessness. Analyzing the ways that homelessness appears in film advances our understanding of the role of the public screen in contemporary political life. We argue here that rhetoricians would benefit from considering the public screen a contextual field and expanding what this field includes. Additionally, we identify two key dimensions of the likely contextual fields audiences may draw on in subsequent public deliberation about homelessness—visibility and agency—and offer an approach to the rhetorical analysis of film that can illuminate such fields for a wide array of social and political issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]