Radical housing (dis)encounters: reframing housing research and praxis

We came to this issue before the outbreak of Covid-19, and we release it amidst what feels like an entirely new, and yet also entirely known world-order—a place of multiple and multiplying crises that existed before the pandemic and continue, relentlessly, to render certain people, bodies and homes disposable. It is against this cruelty, but also with a renewed sense of radical hope in justice everywhere, that RHJ first came to be. The majority of contributions to Issue 2.2 emerge from a long process of designing and selecting participants for the event Radical Housing Encounters: translocal conversations on knowledge and praxis. This event was meant to take place in person, in three separate locations simultaneously, at the end of May 2020. Through it, we sought to define and re-define radical housing knowledge and practice, paying particular attention to diverse methodological, theoretical and ethical approaches deployed in both research and militant practice around the globe. While disappointed that the event could not take place as originally planned, its rationale and ethics of care are central to the making of this issue and are reflected in the texts of its contributors as well as the process of organising the issue

‘Post-2008’ as a Field of Action and Inquiry in Uneven Housing Justice Struggles

The first issue of the Radical Housing Journal focuses on practices and theories of organizing as connected to post-2008 housing struggles. As 2008 was the dawn of the subprime mortgage and financial crisis, and as the RHJ coalesced ten years later in its aftermath, we found this framing apropos. The 2008 crisis was, after all, a global event, constitutive of new routes and formations of global capital that in turn impacted cities, suburbs, and rural spaces alike in highly uneven, though often detrimental, ways. Attentive to this, we hoped to think through its globality and translocality by foregrounding “post-2008” as field of inquiry. What new modes of knowledge pertinent to the task of housing justice organizing could be gained by thinking 2008 through an array of geographies, producing new geographies of theory