The Post-Social Turn: Challenges for Housing Research

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.     

Housing and Social and Material Vulnerabilities

Issues around the materiality of housing and inequality are increasingly important today. Yet, housing researchers have not settled on conceptual tools to account for and study the role of both social and material characteristics of people and their housing. Outlining a new research agenda, I use the idea of social and material vulnerabilities to stress the need to always account for how material and social characteristics relate in myriad ways that render some people and certain material environments more vulnerable than others. I suggest typologies and comparisons as useful tools researchers might use to investigate relationships – that can be malleable yet are often institutionalized – between social and material vulnerabilities, and caution against some assumptions that may skew our understandings of housing. I argue that attending to the social and material vulnerabilities of housing reveals ways in which the materiality of other built environments might also be important.