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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