Call for Papers: Housing: Part of the storm or the shelter?

This is a call for papers for an academic workshop on the Political Economy and Economic Sociology of Housing, which will take place on the 21st-22nd of March 2013 at the Department for Business and Politics at Copenhagen Business School.
 
The focus of the workshop will be on contributions towards the understanding of the politics of housing in comparative and/or cultural politics perspectives that address the context of current socio-economic issues in Europe and globally. As such the title of the workshop asks if the politics and regulation of housing, private homeownership and indebtedness are part of the solution to current socio-economic tensions, or rather, are part of the problem? With this workshop, we are hoping to attract a broad sample of disciplinary traditions and approaches to various national or regional cases of housing within the fields of political economy and economic sociology.
 
Among the issues we hope to discuss are questions concerning the financialisation of everyday life through housing, the cultural politics of private indebtedness, and broader discussions concerning legitimacy in the housing finance sectors. Further, these issues feed into concerns relevant to Colin Crouch’ argument about privatized Keynesianism as a catalyst for economic growth prior to the financial crash in 2008. Might housing policies be used to revive the national economies, and if so, how, and how are they framed? Increased homeownership has also been seen as a contributing factor to the acceptance of welfare state retrenchment in the UK and elsewhere. Finally then, we might ask what role public and private authority might play in negotiating housing policies nationally and internationally in a context of austerity and lacking economic growth.
 
As a part of the two day workshop we therefore invite paper submissions that might contribute to an academic exchange of perspectives on housing. The workshop format will include paper presentations from nine or ten international housing scholars in total, of which only three remain to be found by this call for papers.
 
Please submit an abstract for a new paper or a work-in-progress paper that represents current housing research to ik.dbp@cbs.dk no later than the 25th of February. Final exchange of papers will take place one week in advance of the workshop. We are able to cover the travel expenses for two or three paper givers.
 
Do not hesitate to make contact if questions arise.
 
Kind regards,
Dr. Prof. Leonard Seabrooke
PhD Fellow Ben Jacoby
PhD Fellow Iver Kjar