How Can Scholarship Contribute to Housing Justice? Three Roles for Researchers

This article discusses three ways that research, within and outside academia, can contribute to housing activism. First, we discuss the role that documentation, using non-traditional methods such as film, art, and social media, can play in expanding the visibility of struggles and in politicizing people in the process. Second, we consider how a “politics of resourcefulness” can support activism, by channelling material support from universities and other institutions, asking research questions of interest and relevance to activists, and by investigating the barriers to, and opportunities for, sustained participation in activism. Third we analyse how recent and historic scholarship has re-imagined what housing means by locating it in a wider political sphere, of (anti)racism, participatory justice, and self-determination. We argue that such works, whilst not necessarily directly engaged in on-the-ground struggles, create a conceptual “guide for action”, that stretch the question of housing (in)justice beyond (re)distribution to questions of (anti)racism, (anti)colonialism and participatory justice.