A video camera captures an interview with a man named Spirit, who relaxes in an outdoor plaza on a sunny afternoon. Of his nearby service dogs, Kyya and Miniaga, he says, “They mean everything to me, and I mean everything to them.”

In another video, three sweater-clad dogs scamper around a Los Angeles park, while their companion, Judie, tells their backstory. And in still another clip, Myra races her spaniel mix, Prince, down a neighborhood street.

The images have an every-person quality — a collection of random pet owners, explaining why they love their dogs. And that’s part of the point of the series: The people featured are homeless, and a focus on their relationships “humanizes” a population that is often neglected or shunned, according to 91±¬ÁÏ geography professor .

Lawson and her colleague, Wesleyan University postdoctoral researcher , studied these videos from the multimedia project , created by the New York-based nonprofit of the same name, and wrote about its essential themes for the journal Gender, Place and Culture. Their , published online June 14, is a call to action, not only for services for homeless people and animals, but also for new understandings of them.

Encountering homeless people, especially those with pets, generates a mix of emotional responses, Gillespie and Lawson said. On one of end of the spectrum are those who question whether a homeless person should be allowed to care for an animal, or who show sympathy for the pet, but not the person. On the other end are those who are moved by the pairing of two forsaken lives and want to help but don’t know how ­— other than, perhaps, by giving money.

“How do we get from an emotional response to a transformative one?” said Gillespie, who received her doctorate in geography at the 91±¬ÁÏ.

In their paper, Gillespie and Lawson examined a selection of videos from the My Dog is My Home exhibit, which featured participants in Los Angeles, as well as photos of homeless people and their pets in Austin, Texas, taken by the project. The researchers focused on the relationships between humans and animals, what those relationships demonstrated and what solutions might address the needs of both.

Determining precise counts of homeless people ­— and their pets ­— is difficult because of varying state methodologies and definitions of what constitutes homelessness. The National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty estimates up to 3.5 million people experience homelessness annually; of that, roughly 3 to 5 percent have pets, according to a Nevada-based nonprofit, Pets of the Homeless. But that percentage varies by community; in some areas, it is estimated that nearly one-quarter of the homeless population cares for animals.

The video interviews reveal people who have suffered, or continue to suffer, from mental illness, inadequate health care or violence. But each person brightens when sharing the story of their dogs — in particular how their pets have made them feel loved and safe. They stress the importance of remaining with their dogs, even when it means forgoing housing that doesn’t allow animals, or food for themselves so that their pet can eat instead.

“In these stories, the humans care for dogs, but the dogs also care for the humans,” Lawson said. “There is a mutualistic relationship, in which the humanity of homeless people is expressed, rather than them being viewed as disposable.”

And these relationships — and needs — are visible in any major city, she added. Whether on display in an exhibit like My Dog is My Home or living day to day on the streets of Seattle, homeless people and animals deserve attention, and respect.

“There is a villainization of poor people, and the lack of services available is connected to how people are prioritized,” Lawson said. “We need to start to think critically about how we understand ‘the other’; seeing homeless people as flawed and inadequate allows us to see ourselves as stable and good. You have to first understand that privilege relies on disposability and distance. Then you can take action.”

There are immediate steps that cities can take, Gillespie pointed out: More homeless shelters, tent cities and federally subsidized housing could accept pets. Then there are bigger issues to tackle, such as access to mental health care or affordable housing, and the surplus of animals bred to maintain a pet industry.

Exposure to the issues faced by homeless people and their animals is a start, the researchers said. A future study could focus, for example, on what prompts passers-by to change their thinking and actions in meaningful ways.

“How do middle-class people become radicalized around issues of poverty and homelessness?” Lawson said. “Homeless people understand their own lives as multifaceted and full of love, but how does society come to understand that?”

The research is informed, in part, by Lawson’s and fellow 91±¬ÁÏ geography professor Sarah Elwood’s relational poverty research that was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

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For more information, contact Gillespie at kathryn.a.gillespie@gmail.com or Lawson at lawson@uw.edu or 206-221-6075.

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Two 91±¬ÁÏ geography professors are leading an effort with what might be considered a staggeringly ambitious goal — to reframe how poverty is perceived and studied around the world.

and are the co-founders of the 91±¬ÁÏ-based , a coalition of academic institutions and organizations around the United States and as far away as Europe, Asia and Africa. The network seeks to recast perceptions of poverty from something impacting others — what Lawson terms “this shiny object or person called the poor” — to a condition created by a complex web of societal relationships involving power and privilege.

It’s a sharp departure, they say, from the traditional view of poverty in the United States as resulting from people’s own decisions, rather than the effect of economic forces and structural inequality.

“There’s a tendency to blame the poor for their poverty,” Lawson said. “That’s the individualist explanation. There’s a lot of judgment.”

The network’s website allows members, who currently number close to 300, to share published works, access teaching resources, find out about upcoming events and peruse successful proposals for funded poverty work. It also highlights members’ projects, which range from research on in post-apartheid South Africa to a of poverty in remote locations of the Pacific Northwest.

Bringing academics together to talk about alternate ways of studying and approaching poverty, Lawson and Elwood say, can help advance research on a global scale and, ideally, influence policy decisions that impact people living in poverty.

The initiative has prompted insights on how cultural attitudes about poverty vary among countries. Colleagues in Argentina, Elwood said, interviewed middle-class residents about economic vulnerability and found that they largely saw the fallout from their country’s economic crisis in the early 2000s as a collective burden.

By contrast, she said, many Seattle residents who nearly lost their homes during the last recession “could see no connection” between their own vulnerability and that of homeless people living in their communities.

The network launched in 2013 with a five-year, from the National Science Foundation, the first-ever NSF grant for a research coordination network in geography.

“We are a groundbreaking project, in a sense,” Elwood said. “It’s a huge responsibility.

The first event was a conference last November that drew more than 300 attendees; future plans include a summer institute for junior scholars, a writing retreat and another large conference in 2018.

Lawson and Elwood are working to integrate the network into as many areas as possible. There’s an undergraduate salon series this spring focused on issues related to poverty, and plans for a research exchange that would connect students with faculty members doing poverty-related work.

Lawson, who directs the 91±¬ÁÏ’s honors program, is putting together an honors course with a relational poverty focus, and Elwood is teaching a mapping workshop that involves pairing students with community organizations on projects focused on inequality and social justice (read about it ). A group of undergraduates hosted a peer education seminar about poverty, and students are contributing to the network’s blog.

“Undergrads are hungry to get involved with this,” Elwood said.

The roots of the network date back several years, when Lawson was doing research in Ecuador on women and poverty. She became disillusioned by the realization that her work was reinforcing the notion of Latin America as poor and in need of rescuing, and the U.S. as the model for a solution. So Lawson refocused her efforts back home, collaborating on a five-year project with Lucy Jarosz, a 91±¬ÁÏ geography professor, about poverty in the American Northwest. Through that work, she said, she realized that policies around poverty were being set primarily by people who were middle class.

“The middle classes have the power to say what constitutes poverty because they design policy,” she said. “They are the gatekeepers and leaders of their communities. So what they say about who is poor and why becomes deeply influential.

“We realized that a lot of the ways poverty is framed, defined and understood is done by people in power, not by people who are poor. That was the birthing of this network.”

Lawson teamed up with Elwood, who has a background in community organizing around affordable housing and gentrification, and the two created the network. Its launch comes at a time when issues around inequity are dominating national and local discourse — 2016 presidential hopefuls from both parties are talking about , and in Seattle, skyrocketing rents, livable wages and increased homelessness are increasingly pressing concerns.

“We’re in a moment not just regionally, I think, but globally, of looking at how we address the question of poverty,” Elwood said.

Lawson and Elwood envision the network as an international community of geographers, historians, economists and others who can learn from one another and collectively redefine the global research agenda around poverty.

“It’s not that we want to replace a lot of great work that’s being done, but we want to expand that conversation,” Elwood said.