The Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield, UK, hosted a hybrid event to launch my new book ‘For a Liberatory Politics of Home‘ published by Duke University Press
The event took place on Tuesday, March 12, 2024. I introduced the book, followed by Professor Vanesa Castán Broto’s response at the Urban Institute. The recording of the seminar is available at the UI page, below and on our YouTube channel at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m8pUyxzM6I&t=31s
In the book, I question accepted understandings of home and homelessness to offer a radical proposition: homelessness cannot be solved without dismantling current understandings of home. Conventionally, home is framed as a place of security and belonging, while its loss defines what it means to be homeless. On the basis of this binary, a whole industry of policy interventions, knowledge production, and organizing fails to provide solutions to homelessness but perpetuates violent and precarious forms of inhabitation. Drawing on his research and activism around housing in Europe, the book attends to the interlocking crises of home and homelessness by recentering the political charge of precarious dwelling. It is there, if often in unannounced ways, that a profound struggle for a differential kind of homing signals multiple possibilities to transcend the violences of home/homelessness. In advancing a new approach to work with the politics of inhabitation, the book provides a critique of current practices and offers a transformative vision for a renewed, liberatory politics of home.
I thank the Urban Institute for making the registration of this book launch available to me and the Lab.