Erin Gaede (2025)

Erin Gaede is a Ph.D. student in the Sociology department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on rural poverty, housing insecurity, and the social dimensions of housing policy. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews, Erin’s dissertation investigates how housing insecurity unfolds in rural communities–contexts often overlooked in housing and poverty research. Her work challenges the dominant binary framework that categorizes individuals as either housed or unhoused, a model reinforced by government funding mechanisms that rely on point-in-time (PIT) counts. Erin argues that such static measures fail to capture the dynamic and relational nature of housing insecurity, especially in rural areas where formal shelters are scarce and housing precarity is often hidden. Her preliminary findings suggest that housing insecurity is likely a dynamic and complex process, one in which people move through four different stages, albeit sometimes in nonlinear or overlapping ways. Support from the National Institute of Social Sciences Dissertation Grant enables Erin to return to her field sites in rural Wisconsin to test and refine this framework through additional observations and in-depth interviews.

Erin earned a BA (magna cum laude) in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from the University of Washington, her MA in Africana Studies from New York University, and her MS in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Prior to beginning her doctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Erin worked in homeless shelters in Miami, Florida, as well as in San Francisco and Santa Cruz, California, where she gained critical insights into the intersecting policy and service-level mechanisms that shape operational responses to and definitions of housing insecurity.