CFP Housing Studies Special Issue: ‘Thinking Relationally about Housing and Home’

Details HERE

We invite you to submit your paper to this special issue of Housing Studies.

Background to the special issue:

In 2008, in Housing Studies, Gabriel and Jacobs reviewed developments in ‘post-social’ theory in housing studies. Their paper noted the dearth of current literature and aimed to provoke further research and debate. A review of housing research since that date shows little advancement in this field. This is despite a flourishing of relational thinking in allied disciplines, most notably in urban studies where growing volumes of urban research have attended to the networks, relations (Jacobs and Malpas 2013) and assemblages (McFarlane 2011) that constitute urban spaces.

This work has produced significant advances in understanding, exploring: the dynamic nature of policy development and transfer (Baker and McGuirk 2016; McCann 2011), processes of urban assembly and city-making (McFarlane 2011), as well as the more-than-human relationships shaping cities (Franklin 2017). These efforts have mobilised a range of different relational frameworks, drawing on a diversity of theorists ranging from Bourdieu to Latour to Deleuze and Guattari to Wacquant.

There is little consensus amongst housing researchers about the utility of relational and post-social theories, how they should shape the research process, and indeed if these theories can productively move us beyond current housing methodologies. For instance, and at odds with an expanding corpus of urban and ‘more-than-human’ research, Cowan et al (2009, p298) reflected on the limited utility of actor network theories to housing research. They argued that these theories offer “not necessarily a theoretical challenge but an empirical nudge”. Yet, as Cook et al (2016, p2) argue relational approaches to housing/home allow researchers to challenge traditional conceptual boundaries that often fail to recognise that housing/home is always a ‘coproduction of diverse elements’. From this perspective, relational and post-social theories offer rich opportunities to raise ‘new normative, conceptual and empirical questions’ regarding housing/home.

Details of the special issue:

The special edition aims to prompt a deeper engagement between housing studies and relational thinking. We are seeking papers that engage with the theoretical, methodological and political questions posed to housing studies by relational thinking. The special issue will critically examine the value and utility of relational theories within housing studies, and give consideration to how they expand knowledge of housing across scales, from the spaces of policy and governance, to housing markets, development processes and everyday practices of inhabitance.

We encourage papers addressing this issue from different perspectives, including:

• Papers that are strongly informed by relational theories, which explore ideas of agency and emergence in a housing context;
• Papers that are critical of these theories; and
• Papers that adapt relational methodologies as a tool to open up new avenues of enquiry.

The special edition does not aim to be theoretically prescriptive. Instead we are seeking a survey of relational thinking in housing studies. The aim is to attract and select a body of papers that will enable a provocative survey of the state of research.

To be considered, papers must consider how relational thinking can be mobilised to expand knowledge in the field of housing studies, but within these confines papers can cover diverse topics including, but not limited to:

• The housing policy process and the constitution of housing across scales;
• How housing markets and policies are constituted and negotiated through assemblages of information, technologies, power and the activity of market and state actors;
• How housing is lived in everyday practice within and beyond the home including within the house, neighbourhood and urban region;
• How the micro- and macro-politics of housing are negotiated and constituted in the everyday; and
• How information and decision-making flows between housing developers, designers and inhabitants shape housing form.

Why you should submit:

Ranked in the Top 20 journals in Urban Studies with a 2016 Impact Factor of 1.513 (© 2017 Clarivate, 2016 Journal Citation Reports®), Housing Studies is a leading journal in its field.

As such, authors can be assured that their research will be widely read and cited, and stand to benefit from having their work published in a major forum for theoretical and analytical developments in the housing field.

How to submit

Interested authors should email a title and abstract of under 500 words to Hazel Easthope before 31 December 2017 at hazel.easthope@unsw.edu.au.