On Tuesday 12 March 2024 1600-1800, Michele Lancione, Professor of Economic and Political Geography at the Polytechnic University of Turin, introduced his new book In For a Liberatory Politics of Home.
This was followed with a response by Professor Vanesa Castán Broto at the Urban Institute.
Michele Lancione questions accepted understandings of home and homelessness to offer a radical proposition: homelessness cannot be solved without dismantling current understandings of home. Conventionally, home is framed as a place of security and belonging, while its loss defines what it means to be homeless. On the basis of this binary, a whole industry of policy interventions, knowledge production, and organizing fails to provide solutions to homelessness but perpetuates violent and precarious forms of inhabitation. Drawing on his research and activism around housing in Europe, Lancione attends to the interlocking crises of home and homelessness by recentering the political charge of precarious dwelling. It is there, if often in unannounced ways, that a profound struggle for a differential kind of homing signals multiple possibilities to transcend the violences of home/homelessness. In advancing a new approach to work with the politics of inhabitation, Lancione provides a critique of current practices and offers a transformative vision for a renewed, liberatory politics of home.
You can get a 30% discount using code "HOME24", which can be used to order through the website.