Intersectionality and housing struggles: RHJ Call for Abstracts RC21 – Athens 2022
Call for Abstracts for the RC21 Conference – Ordinary Cities in Exceptional Times – Athens 2022 – deadline 31st January 2022, please see the official webpage for further details and the submission form.
PANEL 17. Intersectionality and housing struggles: Liberating housing at the intersection of race, gender, class and other forms of structural inequalities
Description: Housing is a matter of economic, cultural, ecological and material intersections, therefore being a critical juncture of conflicting forms of power. These intersections have been shown by the feminist critique of the patriarchal foundations of ‘home’ (Blunt and Dowling, 2006), which intersects the foundational work of Marxist scholarship on the extractive groundings of housing (Rolnik, 2019), and more recently by scholarship looking at the racialised logic of proprietorship structuring housing (Gibbon, 2018; Roy, 2017; Kotef, 2020). Grassroots organising has often conceived the struggle for just housing as a gateway for a broader form of intersectional liberation. ‘Radical housing’, in this sense, can be understood as that praxis grounded in a liberatory understanding of the ‘use value’ of housing, that is, in the conceptual and active practice of fighting for a differential form of ‘being at home in the world’ against racism, capitalism, patriarchy, ecological extractivism, and more (Lancione 2020).
In this paper session, we welcome:
I. Theoretical contributions grounded in concrete direct-actions;
II. Historical reconstructions of intersectional urban housing struggles;
III. Empirically based reflections on long-term engagement with specific contexts of action;
IV. Conversations amongst scholars and activists based on a politics of reciprocity and solidarity;
V. Video material
We are interested in how this approach is implicated in housing struggles in ‘ordinary cities’ during ‘exceptional times’ around the world. We are particularly interested in hearing from scholars writing outside the canons of Western academia, and we are ready to offer concrete support to those for whom English is not their native language. This session is organised by the Radical Housing Journal. It is our intention to produce a special issue out of this panel. For this reason, we ask authors to commit to the production of draft papers to be submitted to the journal in advance of the conference.