Abstract
The housing crisis represents a liminal experience: a loss of the taken-for-granted and the suspension of ontological security has put individuals in a situation of potentiality in which both conceptions of home and of personal identity are open to transformation. Empirically assessing this liminal transition allows us to understand the refiguration processes of both home and subjectivities. This has both conceptual and political implications: with ongoing individualization of responsibility in virtually all spheres of social life, it is no longer possible to assume that the private sphere of home is an arena in which individuals are free and secured from societal forces, pressures, and compulsions. Instead, we might find ourselves in a transient liminal period in which the very meaning and psycho-social foundation of home are being transformed. To understand these processes is not only an epistemological but also a political endeavor, for only by understanding the psycho-social implications of the housing crisis can we acknowledge its embeddedness in and relation to processes of societal individualization, as well as the potential to open up pathways to the emergence of a liminal communitas.
Highlights
The housing crisis as a widespread and global phenomenon has been on the public agenda
This finding can be interpreted as an indication of a more general process of individualization of responsibility that does not stop at the threshold of the private sphere, such as the home, but extends beyond the public/private divide and becomes internalized, practiced, and a part of a process of governmental subjectivation
The spatial imaginary of home turns into a site of personal improvement and achievement
Summary
The housing crisis as a widespread and global phenomenon has been on the public agenda. It forces individuals to reflect on the nature of and their relationship to what exactly it is that they call home; it — at least temporarily — puts an end to an unselfconscious feeling of rootedness and simultaneously opens up a space of contingency and potentiality Such a situation can be conceptualized as an experience of liminality. Looking beneath the structural level of housing policies, distribution, and accessibility, the remainder of this paper is concerned with the different psychosocial transformations that this experience entails It investigates people’s reflections on what exactly it is that they call home, and thereby offers an entry point for reflection on and analysis of the interconnections between home, identity, habitus, and practice. In the context of this paper and this special issue on individualization of responsibility, I shall focus on the different modes in which people make sense of this situation of insecurity, attribute responsibility for it, and narrate their biographies and identities in regard to it
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