Radical housing (dis)encounters: Reframing housing research and praxis

Abstract

We came to this issue before the outbreak of Covid-19, and we release it amidst what feels like an entirely new, and yet also entirely known world-order—a place of multiple and multiplying crises that existed before the pandemic and continue, relentlessly, to render certain people, bodies and homes disposable. It is against this cruelty, but also with a renewed sense of radical hope in justice everywhere, that RHJ first came to be. The majority of contributions to Issue 2.2 emerge from a long process of designing and selecting participants for the event Radical Housing Encounters: translocal conversations on knowledge and praxis. This event was meant to take place in person, in three separate locations simultaneously, at the end of May 2020. Through it, we sought to define and re-define radical housing knowledge and practice, paying particular attention to diverse methodological, theoretical and ethical approaches deployed in both research and militant practice around the globe. While disappointed that the event could not take place as originally planned, its rationale and ethics of care are central to the making of this issue and are reflected in the texts of its contributors as well as the process of organising the issue.

A structural view on housing movements: Strategic lessons from a field of contention approach

“…The first issue of Radical Housing Journal (RHJ) proposed to approach the period of social struggles against the pro-capital management of the 2008 crisis as a field of inquiry, interconnected with complex reverberations of the financial crisis as a global event, with translocal connections of the struggles as well as the critical inquiries built in its aftermath (Vilenica et al, 2019). In encountering new forms of housing deprivation linked to pandemic policies and postpandemic crisis effects, RHJ has emphasized continuities in the long-term dynamics of polarization and marginalization (Gibbons et al, 2020;Reyes et al, 2020).…”