Shared Housing As Lived Experience: Negotiating Distance, Copresence and Civic Inattention In Everyday Life Under the Same Roof

Shared housing among strangers is a recurrent pattern in (in)formal housing markets, particularly among marginalized and racialized populations. While this dwelling arrangement increasingly attracts academic attention, its lived experiences remain under-researched across its diverse configurations (from short-term “couch-surfing” and long-term flatshares to informal settlements, squats, and encampments).

This session invites oral presentations based on fine-grained analyses of need-based shared housing across diverse geo-political and cultural backgrounds. We focus on the micro-dynamics of collaboration, conflict, and mutual tolerance negotiated by dwellers with different socio-demographic backgrounds, navigating different structures of opportunity. We welcome contributions addressing - among the others - the following questions:

• What factors shape everyday boundary-making and homemaking within shared spaces, considering housing infrastructures, local contexts, and intersectional dynamics?

• What vulnerabilities and resources are entangled in shared living experiences?

• What are the specific social profiles of shared dwellers, and what implication this has on the experience of living together?

• How do ICTs structure distance or proximity between unequally positioned co-inhabitants?

By addressing these questions, this session aims to advance a sociological agenda on the mechanisms and routines produced or transgressed through unavoidable daily proximity between individuals without shared affective, cultural, or material backgrounds. Ultimately, we seek to rethink traditional notions of distance, copresence, domesticity, and civil inattention.

We welcome fieldwork-based contributions exploring emerging social boundaries, material cultures, and interaction patterns in shared housing, alongside their meso- and macro-level impacts. Submissions focusing on diverse spatial settings - both rural and urban, across the Global North and South - are highly encouraged.