Feminist Politics In a Housing Crisis: Rethinking Housing Insecurity and Homelessness

Feminist knowledge, activism, and practice continue to be a driving force in demonstrating how gender shapes experiences of housing precarity and homelessness. Feminist work has shown that a home is not only a material resource but also a site where power, violence, labour, care and belonging are organised and contested. Domestic and family violence, systemic economic inequality, and the feminisation of poverty are all factors that contribute to housing vulnerability for women and gender-diverse people. Just as housing and homelessness are not static fields of enquiry, feminism, too, continues to evolve in response to social change and diverse global contexts. Intersectional approaches that recognise and embed Indigenous, Black, queer, disability, and other critical scholarship not only highlight the complexity of housing and homelessness, they also generate new ways of politicising this space. This is evident across academic scholarship and in practice contexts such as domestic and family violence refuges/shelters and specialist women’s and LGBTQ+ homelessness and housing services. This session welcomes papers that explore how feminist approaches are being applied to housing precarity and homelessness in research, policy and practice. Contributions may address, but are not limited to:

• Gendered and intersectional experiences of housing precarity and homelessness
• The politics of feminist care
• Policy, practice and advocacy initiatives informed by feminist and intersectional perspectives
• Diverse feminist frameworks for understanding homelessness and ‘home’
• Gender-based violence, coercive control and safety
• Methodological and ethical challenges of conducting feminist research