The Post-Social Turn: Challenges for Housing Research

Abstract

In an editorial entitled 'Living Room' for the journal Urban Geography (Vol. 25, 2004) Susan Smith made reference to the 'tired state of housing studies'. Smith argued that the 'post-social turn' in sociology and cultural geography has largely gone unnoticed by housing researchers and because of this, the radical implications of its epistemology have yet to be explicitly addressed. This post-social turn, elsewhere referred to as Science and Technology Studies, Actor Network theory, feminist technoscience and post-humanism, calls on researchers to decentre the human as the nucleus of social life and in turn recognize the significance of non-human actors (e.g. animals, technology and material artefacts) within social analysis. While in recent years housing scholars have begun to embrace post-structuralist accounts of social life, including discursive and constructionist theories, there has only been limited engagement with post-social assumptions and concepts. In view of this gap, this paper reviews recent developments in post-social theory with a specific focus on the implications of this approach for housing studies.

Following the Actors: mobilising an actor-network theory methodology in geography

“…Urban and housing studies have, in recent years, identified ANT as a potentially fertile conceptual framework (see Cowan et al 2009;Doak & Karadimitriou 2007;Gabriel & Jacobs 2008). Lovell (2005) goes as far as to position housing markets as a 'socio-technical system, whereby the social and the technical are interlinked' (p. 815).…”

“…Thus, Smith (2003) suggests that ANT allows for a richer poststructuralist interpretation of networks, facilitated through a variety of qualitative methods, allowing a greater understanding of the actual organisation of cities. ANT has been mobilised within human geography as an epistemological framework for almost two decades (Murdoch 1995(Murdoch , 1997aWhatmore 1997;Haraway 1991); however, until recently, few studies have recognised its specific methodological backbone (see Cowan et al 2009;Bear & Eden 2008;Gabriel & Jacobs 2008;Doak & Karadimitriou 2007;Inkpen et al 2007;Jons 2006). Indeed, it has been argued by many authors that the key to ANT's development is that it is more a method for studying the world rather than a theory that yields some level of inference and hypothesis development (Latour 1994(Latour , 2005Dicken et al 2001;Murdoch 1997a).…”

“…We are required to trace the associations and connections among 'things that are not themselves social' (Latour 2005, p. 5). The study of actornetworks is, therefore, the study of associations between different materials and relations through which orders and hierarchies are made (and unmade) and through which society is held together and made durable (Gabriel & Jacobs 2008;Latham 2002;Latour 1986). It is these associations that any ANT methodology must recognise and follow.…”

“…As researchers we are therefore required to recognise how we mobilise and hold together disparate actors for our own purposes. ANT is inherently semiotic and focuses on order and meaning through the pursuit of agendas )*all entities achieve their significance through their relations with others (Gabriel & Jacobs 2008;Law 2000a). Enrolling is the process by which actors constitute others in their own agency.…”

Trouble at the Top: The Construction of a Tenant Identity in the Governance of Social Housing Organizations

“…Her work provides a new research framework through which the discourse of housing governance can be understood as a productive force and in which the constitution and destabilising of identities among tenant directors can be analysed without recourse either to voluntarism or determinism. Butler's work has considerable application to any analysis of power (Chambers & Carver 2008), and has as a result been applied beyond the world of gender studies (see Gregson & Rose 2000, Davies 2006, and noted as an insightful analytical tool for housing research (Gabriel & Jacobs 2008). …”