Struggles over housing are one of the most pressing social, economic and political issues of our time. Yet questions over access to, plus the redistribution and maintenance of secure housing have only recently begun to be considered anthropologically. Drawing on E.P. Thompson's concept of moral economy, this special issue addresses these questions and considers how contemporary moral economies of housing play out. Citizens try to make their demands for adequate and safe housing heard, but such aspirations are often undermined by, political rhetoric, state officials, loan terms and the law. People claim allegiances to particular moral communities, thus (re)constituting themselves as deserving of secure tenure and proper homes, often in the face of stigma, laws or policies that construct them as the very reverse. By placing fine-grained ethnographic analysis in conversation with the political economy of housing, we redefine housing as an essentially contested domain where competing understandings of citizenship are constructed, fought over and acted out.

The Danish concept of faellesskab (community) is explored in this article. Faellesskab covers different kinds of belonging and notions of proper togetherness in Danish society, ranging from neighborhood relations at the local level to membership in society at the national level. In investigating the ideals and practices of faellesskab in housing cooperatives, the article shows how people establish connections between these different scales of sociality. It argues that the way people live together in housing cooperatives, in a close atmosphere of egalitarian togetherness, is a cultural ideal in modern Denmark. The more recent commercialization of cooperative property has, however, caused concern. While some believe that faellesskab can still be practiced in the small enclaves of autonomous cooperatives, others fear that this ideal is threatened by economic inequalities.

The authors of this article are engaged in anthropological research on the links between the growing interest in privacy and data security as a technical field and how notions of trust, security and accountability are practised in and beyond technical fields of cryptography, specifically a field called multi‐party computation (MPC). They pursue the relationship between trust in different forms of cryptography – academic and activist – and notions of trust as they are articulated in relation to data security and the protection of citizens’ data. There is a tension between the concerns raised in public debates about data security and the promises of emerging cryptographic protocols. In political speeches and public debates, citizens’ trust that governments and tech companies will protect their data is framed as important and essential. In the environments of emerging cryptographic technologies, such as blockchains, bitcoin and MPC, a promise to provide ‘trustless trust’ and abandon the need for trusted intermediaries, authorities and institutions is articulated.

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The article tells the story of Danish cooperative housing's radical transformation from a collective housing good and commons to a financialized asset during the 2000s when neoliberal housing reforms were introduced and the mortgage finance market was deregulated. Processes of financialization of collectively owned housing have to be understood not only in relation to the dynamics of the surrounding housing market and political-economic changes but also to the communities and social relations that they presuppose and feed off, often in contradictory ways, as people are motivated by both solidarity and private interests. Housing cooperatives have existed as a form of collective housing throughout the 20th century, balanced, on the one hand, between the reproduction of kin, family and local communities and the common good and, on the other, between the market and the reproduction of the base for both families, local communities and the larger public sharing the housing commons. During the 2000s, processes of financialization brought the market and the cooperatives' base so close together, primarily through new mortgaging opportunities, that families and communities have lost their savings and the base has been undermined, both in a material and an immaterial sense.

What is the strength of anthropological fieldwork when we want to understand human technologies? In this article we argue that anthropological fieldwork can be understood as a process of gaining insight into different contextualisations in practiced places that will open up new understandings of technologies in use, e.g., technologies as multistable ontologies. The argument builds on an empirical study of robots at a Danish rehabilitation centre. Ethnographic methods combined with anthropological learning processes open up new way for exploring how robots enter into professional practices and change values, social relations and materialities. Though substantial funding has been invested in developing health service robots, few studies have been undertaken that explore human-robot interactions as they play out in everyday practice. We argue that the complex learning processes involve not only so-called end-users but also staff, management, doings and discourse in a complex amalgamation of materials and values.

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