Walshe, Zoe. 2024. Navigating Precarity: A Qualitative Study of Child and Family Accounts of Housing Precarity in Austerity London, UK (2019-2023). Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]

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Abstract or Description

This research explores child and family accounts of housing precarity in austerity London, UK between 2019 and 2023. The hyper-financialisation of housing has created extreme inequality. London faces multiple, overlapping ‘housing crises’ of affordability, overcrowding, homelessness, temporary accommodation, disrepair in social housing, building safety and more. In short, decent, affordable, secure housing is out of reach for many Londoners. The situation has only got worse since the implementation of the UK government’s austerity regime in 2010, with the household benefit cap and ‘two-child limit’ driving up child poverty. Stark housing inequalities were further intensified by the UK government response to the Covid-19 pandemic from 2020 onwards.

The thesis approaches precarity as a structure of feeling (Williams, 1977; Berlant, 2011). Using London as a city case study, the project responds to the contradictions and tensions within austerity policy narratives of child and family homelessness. I argue these narratives are both historically repetitive and newly punitive. I identify the figure of austerity’s child, the latest iteration of the poor, homeless child, who - like its Victorian predecessor – is smothered by both vulnerability and stigma. Rather than reproducing this dominant, sticky child-figure again in academic text, the thesis aims to amplify minor, but significant alternatives, tracing counter-figurations of the child in family accounts of housing precarity.

To achieve this aim, the thesis develops a creative and crafty ‘patchwork methodology’, informed by the theoretical frameworks of figuration (Castañeda, 2002), found childhoods (Burman, 2019), and live methods (Back and Puwar, 2012). The research stitches together qualitative data fragments sourced from relevant legal struggles, crowdsourced archives, community-activist campaigns, participatory arts projects, and children’s letters. In the thesis, these multimodal materials are crafted into seven ‘data patches’ and analysed using figuration, narrative, and rhythm analytical strategies. Attention is given to the form and content of these personal accounts of housing precarity and how they work as interventions in the public sphere.

The analysis demonstrates how these family accounts are animated by emerging counter-figurations of the child, including the numeric child, the unruly child, the child part-participant, and the child constituent. These depart from the deterministic and damage narratives of (child) poverty circulating in the public sphere, offering a glimpse of the worlds being made between children and adults in contemporary housing struggles. The thesis reports on how these lively, personal-public accounts make claims to the right to housing, home and the city, and in doing so enact more expansive forms of residential citizenship. Far from being excluded, this patchwork of precarity makes visible the ways in which children are already present and participating as residents, as citizens, alongside their families in their struggles for housing justice.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.25602/GOLD.00037489
Keywords:	child, family, housing, austerity, precarity, London, child as method, found childhoods, live methods
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Sociology
Date:	31 July 2024
Item ID:	37489
Date Deposited:	21 Aug 2024 11:20
Last Modified:	21 Aug 2024 11:23
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/37489

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