Time: 9:30-12
Place: online – Zoom
in English
Chair: Martin Grander, Malmö University
Guy Baeten, Carina Listerborn & Emil Pull, Malmö University
Housing Displacement: Conceptual and Methodological Issues – Presentation of a book
Abstract
The book seeks to highlight how housing injustice finds its prime expression in the act of displacement. Following the work of Marcuse, amongst others, we argue that housing displacement needs to take a much more central place in our understanding of urban injustices. We need to reveal how housing displacement processes mutate into new forms and are more diverse than have been acknowledged thus far in the literature. We need to think beyond the existent gentrification literature to understand the reasons and consequences of housing displacement. Through giving primacy to studying displacement we can, first, put more focus on gentrification’s unjust nature. Second, we can highlight unjust housing policies in cities and neighbourhoods that are simply not undergoing gentrification. Third, the dominance of Anglo-American experiences of housing displacement leaves our conceptual apparatus unequipped to capture, contextualise and compare the contemporary varieties and complexities of housing displacement.
This book examines reasons, processes and consequences of housing displacement in different geographical contexts. This book offers interdisciplinary perspectives on housing displacement to academics and researchers in the fields of urban studies, housing, citizenship and migration studies interested in housing policies and governance practices at the urban scale.
Read more about the book on Routledge’s website.
Tove Samzelius, Malmö University
A Vicious Circle of Silent Exclusion: Family homelessness and poverty in Sweden from a single mother perspective
Abstract
Within the confines of the receding Swedish welfare state, family homelessness and poverty is on the rise among one parent families, in particular those headed by a single migrant mother. This development follows a trend that is noticeable across advanced welfare states, where female-headed households are facing an increased risk of being locked into vicious circles of low paid work, inadequate income protection schemes and poor housing options. The dissertation analyses welfare policy and political-institutional arrangements through the lens of everyday experiences and struggles conveyed by marginalized single mothers. Drawing on critical social theory and inspiration from feminist ethnographic methods, the study uses an approach to the development of new poverty knowledge, which is found at the nexus between lived experience, activism, empirical research and social theory. The findings suggest that current welfare and housing policies that are shaped by a normative framework aligned with the interests of financialized capitalism, are incompatible with Sweden’s ambition as a forerunner of women’s and children’s rights.
You can find the dissertation here.