Please find below call for papers for a one-day housing colloquium to be held at Birkbeck, University of London
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/bisr/news/housing
Birkbeck Institute for Social Research
Beyond the Housing Crisis: Capitalism, Activism and Film
Friday 18th November 9.30am – 5pm Room 101, 30 Russell Sq., Birkbeck, London
Registration tba
The colloquium will examine the social, cultural and political nature of the current housing crisis as it is being lived out within the homes, streets and estates of the UK. This crisis provides a perfect illustration of the inherently contradictory nature of housing within capitalist relations of production, contradictions which have been dramatically illustrated by the US sub-prime mortgage market meltdown and its UK and Irish equivalents; in each country, housing finance has been centrally implicated in the wider turmoil. In the UK, the social after-shocks of such crises are currently being felt by the unwitting victims of the Coalition Government’s radical policy changes in relation to Housing Benefit and social housing as part of its ‘Big Society’ vision.
The colloquium aims to highlight how the growing problems of housing unaffordability and insecurity is being lived out with, for example, five million people on council housing waiting lists in England. The colloquium also aims to highlight the manifold ways that the housing crisis is being contested by groups and individuals. These various often ‘small acts’ of resistance take a multitude of forms, including in lived alternative cultures (e.g. squatting) as well as through cultural representations. In the recent past, film has played a major role in shaping the public and political discourses around housing, most famously via the seminal TV drama Cathy Come Home (BBC, 1966). The colloquium will include an evening screening of this work as well as the film Chocolate City (Ellie Walton and Sam Wild, 2007) about public housing and gentrification in Washington DC.
Speakers
• Duncan Bowie<http://www.westminster.ac.uk/schools/architecture/staff/staff-in-housing/bowie,-duncan> (Senior Lecturer in Spatial Planning, School of Architecture and the Built Environment, University of Westminster) is the author of Politics, Planning and Homes in a World City (Routledge, 2010) and he convenes the Highbury Group on Housing and the Credit Crunch.
• Sarah Glynn<http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/homes/sglynn/> (independent researcher) is the editor of Where the Other Half lives: Lower-income Housing in a Neoliberal World (Pluto Press, 2009).
• Graham Turner<http://www.gfceconomics.com/> (GFC Economics) is the author of The Credit Crunch: Housing Bubbles, Globalisation and the Worldwide Economic Crisis (Pluto Press, 2008) and most recently No Way to Run an Economy: Why the System Failed and How to Put It Right (Pluto Press, 2009). He is the founder of GFC Economics, an independent economic consultancy established in 1999.
Call for Paper Presentations and Film Screenings
We invite two kind of submissions for the colloquium:
1. Paper Presentations – if you wish to present a paper, please send a 300 word abstract to Paul Watt - [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> - by 7th October 2011. Each presentation will last for 15-20 minutes. Some paper presenters might wish to include short film extracts as part of their presentation.
2. Film Screenings – if you wish to screen a short film, please send a 200-300 word summary to Paul Watt - [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> - by 7th October 2011. The maximum length of each film will be 20 minutes – there is no minimum length.
There will be a cost for the event which will cover lunch and evening screening: Standard - £30 Students, unwaged and Birkbeck staff – £15
Registration and payment tba
Organising Committee:
• Dr. Paul Watt
Department of Geography, Environment and Development Studies
Birkbeck, University of London
• Dr. Isabelle Fremeaux
Department of Media and Cultural Studies
Birkbeck, University of London
• Glyn Robbins
Department of Social Policy and Education,
Birkbeck, University of London
• Dr. Stuart Hodkinson
Department of Geography
University of Leeds
Dr Paul Watt
Senior Lecturer in Urban Studies
Department of Geography, Environment & Development Studies
Birkbeck, University of London
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HX
Work: 020 3073 8371
Mob: 07788 415096
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/geog/about/index_html/watt
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