Category: Academic

Three years ago, I published this monograph with Duke University Press . It took me about 10 years to write it.

Can we think of a home that does not require otherness to stand?

My little contribution to the queering of homing, and the queering of the sociologies of home(lessness). It will be translated into Italian in 2027.

For those interested in the original English version, you can find it here: https://www.dukeupress.edu/for-a-liberatory-politics-of-home

Thank you to the numerous colleagues who spent time reading and assessing this work:

“Michele Lancione has given us a tremendous gift with this pathbreaking and brilliant book. His arguments will be of immense meaning for social movements concerned with housing justice, many of which are grappling with regimes of property and the affective politics of home. The study of housing and homelessness will not be the same.” – Ananya Roy, author of Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development

“By mobilizing a new methodological, conceptual, and political grammar in which home and homelessness are not opposite but coherent expressions of a wider function of patriarchal and racialized processes of expulsions and extractions, this book offers a whole new perspective to imagine housing futures toward housing justice in which ‘housing precarity’ is not only a site for deprivation and relegation or a ‘problem to be fixed’ but can also perform a new politics of inhabitation.” – Raquel Rolnik, author of Urban Warfare: Housing under the Empire of Finance

“What Lancione offers is not just a critical reading of housing debates in the twenty-first century, but a complex argument pointing towards a methodological treatment of often taken-for-granted truisms. Here, the context is a deep unpacking and sincere questioning of home; however, scholars from a number of disciplinary approaches and topical interests will learn immensely from the thinking, dismantling, and reconstruction that Lancione provides. . . . The intellectual contributions of the book are likely to be wide ranging. . . .” – Jeffrey N. Rose, Social & Cultural Geography

“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. . . . 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.” – Samantha Thompson, Antipode

“Michele Lancione’s For a Liberatory Politics of Home is a rare and remarkable piece of scholarship. It breaks new ground and will likely make a lasting impact in Geography and Urban Studies. It does what all great books do: inspires new kinds of thinking, and does so by mobilising a deceptively straightforward argument, the kind of argument that when you read it the topic in question seems to have shifted on its axis.” – Colin McFarlane, Urban Studies

“I cannot think of another book that offers such a profound reformulation of home-lessness, and it does so with breathtaking mastery of critical theory, the political economy and biopolitics of capitalist dispossession and expulsion, and evidence from around the West of what the machinery of home and homelessness produces on the ground. . . . In his reimagination of the dispossessing and alienating character of the ‘home’ as property and security machine, Lancione exposes the class, racialised and gendered iniquities associated with becoming housed, being expelled from homes, and casting street dwellers as those who lack the traditional nucleated home.” – Ash Amin, Urban Studies

“For a Liberatory Politics of Home is a monograph which is extremely rare – to stunning effect Michele combines the conceptual, empirical, personal, practical, philosophical and political in a text that asks a huge gamut of actors… to think about, and ‘do’ home and homelessness differently. . . . The book asks much needed questions, without compromise, and not sparing discomfort. It turns homeless studies on their head by shattering the oppositional frames of home and homelessness and centering an anti-capitalist critique of housing.” – Katherine Brickell, Urban Studies

“[T]here is something hauntological about the way in which housing gets troubled throughout the book. . . . In other words, it is not ‘the housing question’ as much as ‘the question of housing’ that [Lancione] argues we need to further interrogate… What does it mean then, to move beyond inhabitation, or to radically inhabit housing? Attempting to guide readers in exploring this question, Lancione opens up space to theorise a housing future yet to come.” – Erin McElroy, Urban Studies

“Michele Lancione’s For a Liberatory Politics of Home, a brilliant, thought-provoking contribution to the fields of urban studies and critical geography. Where the book shines is in its proposal of a radical epistemology that breaks the dichotomy of home and homelessness, reads those occupying the sites of homelessness as performing their own politics of inhabitation, advocates for a structural overhaul of the way we think of housing and housing interventions, and on a broader scale, prompts us to rethink our understanding of urban inhabitation.” – Saanchi Saxena, Urban Studies

“Books like this are rare. Lancione brings together deep theoretical insight with political activism and ethnographic richness in a way that is both unsettling and generative. . . . I imagine it will be remembered as a seminal contribution in housing and urban scholarship – one that future scholars will return to when trying to think differently about the politics of space, care, and belonging.” – Lindsey McCarthy, Housing Studies

“Written with both care and humor and in an accessible way.” – Tatiana Acevedo Guerrero, City

“A scholarly marvel. . . . For a Liberatory Politics of Home . . . is an urgent contribution; one that must, and will, engage even those—yours truly included—who do not necessarily hold a scholarly specialty in the notion of ‘home’.” – Antonis Vradis, City

“Lancione offers a radical re-orientation as an aid for us in making sense of an incredibly complex, ambivalent and contradictory mode of inhabitation in the contemporary period. A brilliant achievement that others must surely build upon.” – Ryan Powell, Space and Polity

“For a Liberatory Politics of Home is a dense and intellectually expansive book that destabilises dominant understandings of home and homelessness, offering significant contributions to geography, urban studies, feminist and queer theory, and development studies.” – Paroj Banerjee, Dialogues in Human Geography

#home #geography #homelessness #race #feminism #queertheory #Italy