Call for Papers
RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2006
"House prices; home truths"
30 August - 1st September 2006
Royal Geographical Society with IBG, London
A session sponsored by the Social and Cultural Geography Research Group
Conveners: Susan Smith, Nicole Cook and Beverley Searle (Durham University)
The market for housing – the buying and selling of property, especially
owned homes, which are themselves entangled with the sale and purchase of a
host of financial products and services – increasingly underpins the
economies of the more developed world. This market for and around owner
occupied housing is also drawn into neo-liberal politics, as the wealth
rolled into rising prices turns owned homes into the foundation for social
wellbeing: a cornerstone of asset-based welfare; the hallmark of inclusion
in an ownership society. This session is about the changing social
geography and complex cultural economy of the growing market for homes. It
considers the way those markets are lived, experienced, animated, and
perhaps transformed, in the beliefs, behaviours, capabilities, motivations
and aspirations of households and other market subjects.
Papers are invited to engage with some of these themes: with the changing
role of housing wealth in consumption; the enhanced investment dimensions
of home ownership; and the geographies of inclusion and exclusion enacted
in the sale and management of mortgages. Contributors might explore the way
housing debt impacts on the meaning and materiality of home, the importance
of housing assets for social wellbeing, the uneasy renegotiation of the
financial and other values invested in property, and a variety of other
uneven social ramifications of the changing economy of housing.
Please send your abstract to Susan Smith by 25 Jan 2006
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