Centering Renters: Theorizing Tenants’ Housing Experiences

Tenant organizing has long been at the core of social movements concerned with housing. Negative tenant-landlord experiences—in particular, around rent increases, housing condition, access rights, and evictions—drive local social movements. Without doubt, tenant organizing is essential to the achievement of housing justice, particularly in the context of an accelerating global housing crisis. The pressing need to address contemporary crises, though, may mean that many dimensions of tenants housing experience remain undertheorized.

This session invites papers that consider what else, in addition to or beyond tenant organizing, might be learned by centering renters’ experiences. How do housing experiences shape non-housing dimensions of tenants’ lives? How are wider community involvements, neighbouring practices, and engagements in civil society shaped by tenants’ housing experiences? Centering experiential dimensions of rental housing in this way can provide a modest correction to the relative absence of micro and meso-level theorizing in housing studies. Papers treating the unique epistemological position of tenants as a resource for theorizing and conceptual development are especially welcome.