A review of For a Liberatory Politics of Home in Antipode, by Samantha Thompson

I am grateful to Samantha Thompson for her insightful review of my book For a Liberatory Politics of Home (Duke, 2023) out now in Antipode.

In closing her review, Samantha writes:

“For a Liberatory Politics of Home illuminates the necessity of intimate and collective thinking when writing about housing in order to reckon with the violence of housing systems and imagining, and fighting for, radical and just housing futures. The book itself embodies this approach: throughout each chapter, Lancione engages intentionally and deeply with those he is thinking with, enacting collectivity in citational practice. For a Liberatory Politics of Home offers gentle guidance and care as we wrestle with questions that are difficult and can cause us to wonder if the housing futures that we dream of are indeed possible. I suspect that for me and many others, this monograph will become a consistent bookshelf companion that we return to time and time again.”

You can read the full piece here: https://antipodeonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Book-review_Thompson-on-Lancione.pdf

Aru, Governa, Grazioli and Mezzadra review For a Liberatory Politics of Home (in Italian)

I am thankful to my dear friend and colleague Silvia Aru for organising a forum on my For a Liberatory Politics of Home (Duke, 2023) on the Rivista Geografica Italiana.

The forum, published last December, includes essays on my book by Silvia, Margherita Grazioli, Francesca Governa and Sandro Mezzadra. It is freely available in Italian, here: https://journals.francoangeli.it/index.php/rgioa/article/view/18974/3101

The forum developed from a public seminar we held at the Beyond Inhabitation Lab in May 2024, where all reviewers were present and engaged in debate around the book.

Thanks also to the Rivista for allowing the publication of these essays and my response.

Time for me to leave the RHJ, viva the RHJ!

After many years, I have resigned from my editorial role in the Radical Housing Journal. The decision, as I explain below, it is entirely personal and has nothing to do with the RHJ – a project I am still very much in love with, and one I know will continue to thrive in the future.

This does not come as an easy decision to me. I still remember where I was (the living room of my house in Cardiff) when I started playing with the idea of doing a ‘Radical Housing Journal’. It was 2016. I just returned from the Cardiff Anarchist book fair, where I discussed the project with one of the UK editors of PM Press. A few days after that chat, I called Meli (Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia) and shared the idea of the RHJ with her. I still remember Meli’s enthusiasm. Then, she organised a first meeting with Mara (Ferreri) at LSE. We then did further founding meetings with Erin (McElroy) and Mel (Melissa Lamarca)… we worked hard to produce documents and procedures throughout 2017. I remember we spent months and months working out the basics – with dozens of dreadful Excel tables! – before other wonderful people joined. Then, we launched the Journal’s project in Leeds in September 2017 and Minneapolis in 2018. After that, the first call for papers (when we had hundreds of submissions) led to our first issue in September 2019. From that moment, we published 12 full-featured issues, with articles peer-reviewed by academic and housing organisers, interviews and conversations with organisers, reviews and positioning essays situated across a number of geographies, all completely open-access.

The RHJ changed housing studies. We gave space to forms of knowledge completely absent from the mainstream academic housing publishing. The big publishers realised this. It is noticeable how journals such as Housing Studies or the IJHP started to publish certain kinds of interventions after we opened up that space. And yet, the RHJ project remains distinctive. Because it was never just about publishing academic papers. The conversations section is a testament to that. But also some of the political decisions we took (also about our own collective) and collective interventions – such as the editorials, which are widely read and circulated. This was all possible because many gave up so much energy and time, including all of those populating the RHJ board to date.

Now – after the bad accident I had a few months ago and the pain and immobility that followed – I realised that I need to focus my energy more carefully. Albeit it is hard to leave, it makes no sense to be part of the collective if I can’t prioritise it. And I know that I will not be able to prioritise it. My interests are shifting, and there are other collective projects in which I am starting to be invested, which require my attention. Professorial duties and mentoring responsibilities – which have occupied so much of my time in the last few years – won’t diminish, and I also believe one shouldn’t stay forever on editorial boards. And so I need to be honest with myself and my comrades in the RHJ collective. Leaving is the right thing to do for me now.

I know the RHJ is a fundamental project for global housing justice scholarship, and it is here to stay. If you are a reader of the journal, please help the collective spread its content and message. If you still don’t know the journal, please visit its website and dig in. In any case, support this important project: it is a rare, effective template for meaningful scholarship, engagement and research.

In solidarity,

Michele

Mara Ferreri, a core Lab member, wins ERC Consolidator Grant

We are excited to share the news that our Mara Ferreri has been awarded a prestigious ERC Consolidator grant of nearly 2 million for her proposal: “Enacting Decommodified Housing in Southern Europe: crises, family relations, and the future of collective property”.

The project is transnational, transdisciplinary and multilingual. It acknowledges new demands and imaginaries emerging from housing movements and professionals in Southern Europe that challenge dominant speculative housing dynamics. An experienced research team will be created to generate situated knowledge from Southern Europe to urgent urban debates on housing decommodification as a transformative pathway for greater urban and housing justice.

This is what Mara had to say:

This achievement would not have been possible without the unwavering support of Michele Lancione, of all the great researchers and affiliated scholars at the Beyond Inhabitation Lab, of my colleagues in the editorial collective of the Radical Housing Journal, and at DIST in Turin, as well as all those near and far who have spared time and energy to give me feedback and advice over the last year and a half.

Mara is currently a senior researcher within our co-director Michele Lancione’s ERC “Inhabiting Radical Housing” and is due to commence her new project in the summer of 2025, running until 2030. According to Michele:

Mara is one of the leading housing scholars of her generation, and this important award is just another testament to the value of her scholarship, dedication and approach. In the last three years, core team scholars of the Lab have been awarded two Marie-Curies, one Urban Studies Foundation Fellowship, a FARE project from the Italian Ministry of Universities and now this ERC. We are proud of what we have done and extremely happy for Mara: a terrific achievement for a project that will have long-lasting impacts to our understanding of housing decommodification.

Below, you can read the abstract of Mara’s project.

Enacting Decommodified Housing in Southern Europe: crises, family relations, and the future of collective property

Faced with increased housing inequalities worldwide, calls are emerging for housing models that are resident-led and non-speculative. ‘Decommodified’ housing – such as co-operative rental and limited equity ownership – is seen as a pathway for a more caring and just urban future, in contrast to global crises of housing affordability in ‘homeowning cities’. Such housing models aim to transform economic, social, and political relations by challenging the role of housing in wealth inequalities, and by outlining paradigm changes in shared living and housing governance.

To date, international scholarship on decommodified models has focused on countries with strong housing welfare mechanisms, neglecting practices in ‘familistic’ housing regimes, such as Southern Europe. The EnactDECOM project will challenge the myth and academic paradigm of the cultural and economic inevitability of individual homeownership by learning from neglected innovations in housing enacted by historical and new (<10 years) decommodification movements in the region. It will break new ground conceptually, empirically, and methodologically in urban and housing scholarship by filling substantial research gaps on past and present housing decommodification in six key Southern European countries.

By pioneering a new interdisciplinary framework, the EnactDECOM project will examine how decommodified housing practices enact transformative responses to intersecting crises and established relations to property. It will generate novel knowledge on 1) neglected histories of decommodification at risk of disappearance; 2) place-specific responses to social, economic, and political crises; 3) changing family property relations, and 4) local and transnational cultural visions of collective property. The project will test the potential for decommodification in contexts marked by deepening wealth inequalities, familism and limited housing welfare, to advance global debates on enacting urban and housing equity.

New paper in EPD with Simone

With my brother AbdouMaliq we recently published a paper in EPD: Society & Space, titled: “Dispossessed exposures. Housing and regimes of the visible

You can download it here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/02637758241274636

Abstract

Literatures and organising show us how, in contemporary racial financial capitalism, housing is formed through dispossessive histories and geographies. Here, we query how these enter into play in the visual regimes through which housing is seen and experienced. For if the visual realm is as much a construct as any other housing matter, finding a grammar to tap into its workings might become handy when its violent outcomes come to the fore. What is reproduced in the visual regimes of housing? What is offered and taken anyway? What might never be seen, and by whom? The article offers a tentative analytical approach to questioning what we call dispossessed exposures: the (en)visioning of homely futures that are deprived, already in the social construct of seeing with the house, the possibility of radical care for and of habitation. These ideas are unpacked through reflection on two films: Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables and Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouihl’s Gagarine. We offer these reasonings as a contribution to ongoing conversations in the renewed field of housing justice scholarship.

Lab’s urban school keynotes in Turin: Gilmore, Osbourne, Thieme (reg open to all)

The Beyond Inhabitation Lab & Urban Transitions Hub’s Urban School is happening in Turin on 23-26th September. We are welcoming 15 selected international postdocs who will engage in collective study with Lab and Hub’s members and with our fantastic keynote instructors. 

Keynote lectures are going to be open to all:

  • Tatiana Thieme (23th September, 6pm CEST)
  • Ruth Wilson Gilmore (24th September, 6pm CEST)
  • Alana Osbourne (25th September, 6pm CEST)

Registration for online and in-person attendance for the keynotes is available on the posters below and more details are available at this page: https://beyondinhabitation.org/urbanschool/

Please help us to disseminate further, thank you!

Keynotes’ lectures in Turin

The keynotes are free and open to attend for anyone, both online and in person. Registration is required and links are available in the posters below.

Tatiana Thieme, 23th Sept 2024

Ruth Gilmore, 24th Sept 2024

Alana Osbourne, 25th Sept 2024

CFP – ISA/RC21 in Rabat, 6-11th July 2025 – Deadline Oct 15th

With AbdouMaliq Simone we are organising a panel at the forthcoming ISA Sociology-RC21 conference in Rabat, Morocco.

Below you can find the call for paper. Abstract submission will close on October, 15th 2024 and it is done directly on the ISA website, at this page: https://www.isa-sociology.org/en/conferences/forum/rabat-2025/5th-isa-forum-call-for-abstracts

Geographies Beyond Inhabitation. Urban grounds, housing struggles, and the everyday political

Michele Lancione, Polytechnic University of Turin (michele.lancione@polito.it)
AbdouMaliq Simone, University of Sheffield (a.t.simone@sheffield.ac.uk)

In light of extended capacities to enclose, surveille, pre-empt, and capitalise upon the improbable, what constitute viable performances of generativity beyond production? In light of the relegation of the marginalised, impoverished, and racialised to both objects of extraction and purveyors of liminality, how is inhabitation re-imagined from those spaces where only the uninhabitable seems to be? Taken together, what does it mean to think beyond inhabitation, in a world where every inch of the possible seems to have been colonised by the extractive and expulsive makings of contemporary racial capitalism?

In this session we invite contributions exploring the unannounced propositional politics of urban habitation. We want to engage with works those focus is on specific manoeuvres through which different geographies and peoples navigate the tensions between translocal and embodied dispossessive processes, enduring valuations imposed by the colonial, the gendered/heteronormative and the racial. We are particularly interested in situated works approaching the themes of the session using ethnographic, geneaological, speculative, visual and geopoetics methods.

Our goal is to incite a conversation on thinking beyond current modes of inhabiting our contemporary global urban world by focusing on three themes:

· Inhabitation from the standpoint of every day of city life. What does it mean to be alive and to be ‘human’ in today’s urban worlds?

· Inhabitation from the gateway of housing precarity and its struggles. What does housing do at the intersections of violent forms for dispossession related to lands and to bodies, financialised multi-scalar assemblages, heteronormative forms of homing, criminalisation of houselessness and bordering practices?

· Inhabitation as an emancipatory proposition from the ground of its struggle. How can one give room to forms of liberations that are not typically conceived to be ‘political struggle’ in Western ‘radical’ canons?

Abstract submission will close on Octtober, 15th 2024 and it is done directly on the ISA website, at this page: https://www.isa-sociology.org/en/conferences/forum/rabat-2025/5th-isa-forum-call-for-abstracts

Book launch and sessions at the RGS-IBG conference, London, 28th-30th August 2024

I am going to be involved in a number of sessions at the RGS-IBG conference in London this week, including discussing books from my friends Colin and Erin, as well as presenting my own book (For a Liberatory Politics of Home). Here are the sessions:

Thursday, 29 August

11:10am – Author Meets Critics: Waste and the City: The Crisis of Sanitation and the Right to Citylife (Colin McFarlane) Venue – ICL — SALC (Sherfield Building) Room 5 (In-person only). Organised by: Michele Lancione, Claire Mercer, Matthew Gandy, Paula Meth, Colin Marx, Alexander Vasudevan, Colin McFarlane, and Tatiana Thieme

Friday, 30 August

9am – Paper: Housing, The unfulfilling relation (Michele Lancione), Venue – ICL — SALC (Sherfield Building) Room 7 (In-person only) Organised by: Jonathan Pugh and David Chandler

2:40pm – Author Meets Critics: For a Liberatory Politics of Home (Michele Lancione), Venue – ICL — Royal School of Mines Room 301c (In-person only) Organised by: Colin McFarlane, Katherine Brickell, Ben Anderson, Erin McElroy, Victoria Okoye, Saanchi Saxena, and Michele Lancione

4:50pm – Author Meets Critics: Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times (Erin McElroy), Venue – ICL — Sir Alexander Fleming Room 120 (In-person only)
Organised by: Kavita Dattani, Erin McElroy, Ryan S Powell, Gillian Rose, and Michele Lancione

In Melbourne: research workshop, book talk & seminar

I am happy to be in #Melbourne for a number of things, thanks to the wonderful Alison Young – Deputy Director of the Melbourne Centre for Cities.

On Wednesday, I will be in a full-day workshop to celebrate and discuss Alison’s latest research project on Spatial Justice & the City. Many critical housing and urban scholars will be there, and I look forward to the conversation.

On Thursday morning, I will give a seminar for ECR researchers, and in the afternoon, I will present For a Liberatory Politics of Home (Duke University Press) at the Melbourne School of Design. The talk will be online too. Details: https://msd.unimelb.edu.au/events/informal/politics-of-home-homelessness

Thanks, Alison & colleagues, for having me here.

Freedom School “Insurgent Ground: Land, Housing, Property” in Los Angeles

It was a privilege for me to participate in the Institute on Inequality and Democracy’s Freedom School “Insurgent Ground: Land, Housing, Property” in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago.

A collective of old and new friends and comrades, doing housing justice work across geographies. We spent so much time sharing generous scholarships and organising at UCLA but also at Union de Vecinos and with my good friends at the Los Angeles Poverty Department.

One of the best moments for me was sharing reflections with Elizbeth Blaney and the inspiring, wonderful Lisa ‘Tiny’ Gray-Garcia on her poverty scholarship work. Her writings and insights are really meaningful.

I also have some time to plot future things with Ananya, who has done an amazing job, together with Terra Graziani and their colleagues, to set up the School. Watch out for the open-access volume that will be produced with all the contributors!