Cold Case or Hot Topic? On the Rediscovery of "Social Murder" in Housing Studies

Gurney, C. M. (2021) Cold Case or Hot Topic? On the Rediscovery of "Social Murder" in Housing Studies. Housing Studies Association 30th Anniversary Conference: Preparing for the Future and Learning from the Past, Sheffield, UK, 14-15 April 2021. (Unpublished)

Abstract

This paper considers the rediscovery of Engels’ “social murder” in the lexicon of contemporary housing research. Recent work by both Hodkinson (2019) and Tombs (2020) have invoked Engels’ charge that the state, through regulatory or policy failure, caused the deaths of 72 people at Grenfell Tower. There is further evidence elsewhere in the desire for praxis in the emergence of the Radical Housing journal, in accounts of un-homing and slow violence in work on gentrification displacement (Atkinson 2015, Eliiot et al 2020) in work on domicide, eviction and the violence of austerity (Paton and Cooper 2017), and on social harm, symbolic violence and housing (Gurney 2020, 2021, Soatia and Gurney 2020) for the suggestion of either a turn to structure or a turn to violence to be made. This paper asks whether the reappearance of social murder is evidence of a “turn” – a response to the social harms caused by the turbo-charged capitalism of neo-liberalism and financialization, a paradigm shift in response to the failure of post-structural or post-social perspectives to solve a post-pandemic housing question or simply a coincidence. The paper concludes with some remarks on the utility of Engels’ work for the housing imagination.

• Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item
• Status: Unpublished
• Refereed: No
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Gurney, Dr Craig
• Authors: Gurney, C. M.
• College/School: College of Social Sciences > School of Social and Political Sciences > Urban Studies