Earlier this year I was invited to give one of the keynotes at the Housing Studies Association conference in Sheffield, UK. My talk was sponsored by the International Journal of Housing Policy, which has now published an extended version of my speech at the HSA.
The paper, entitled Radical housing: on the politics of dwelling as difference, is the first of the Journal’s new series of ‘Housing Futures’ essay, where leading scholars will be invited to address the contemporary housing debate from different angles. In my contribution I attack mainstream notions of what is considered to be ‘radical’ when it comes to ‘housing’, and I introduce a more nuanced (decolonial and feminist) take with the notion of ‘dwelling as difference’.
This paper expands on my previous works on housing precarity, homelessness and housing resistance, but it also opens up a new phase in my research interests. It also goes hand in hand with the work that I am doing with a number of comrades in the Radical Housing Journal.
The paper can be downloaded from the publisher’s website here, or on Research Gate or Academia.edu. Below you can find the abstract.
Radical housing: on the politics of dwelling as difference
Urbanites worldwide fight for their right to housing and the city in ways that encompass what Westernized and masculine takes on ‘radical politics’ make of them. This intervention proposes a decolonial, grounded and feminist approach to investigate how resistance to housing precarity emerges from uncanny places, uninhabitable ‘homes’ and marginal propositions. This is a form of ‘dwelling as difference’ that is able to challenge our compromised ‘habitus’ of home at its root, from the ground of its everyday unfolding. The article argues that only looking within those cracks, and aligning to their politics, new radical housing futures can be built with urbanites worldwide.
