The Precarious Home: Socio-legal Perspectives on the Home in Insecure Times

A workshop at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law, Onati, Spain organised by Caroline Hunter, Helen Carr and Brendan Edgeworth. The workshop provides an opportunity for scholars from across the globe to respond to the dramatic reversal of the promise of home, and to place this phenomenon in its historic and political context. We will reflect upon the new, unevenly spread, ‘norm’ of insecurity, the increasing intensity of occupation, the strategies that people deploy to manage, reduce and resist their insecurity, the consequences of insecurity, the winners and the losers, and the role that law and the state might play in either undermining or reinforcing the growing precariousness of home. More specifically, the workshop will examine, from multiple perspectives, law’s critical role in these broader socio-political developments. In the process, law appears as more complex and contradictory than traditional legal scholarship might suggest. It is as implicated in the increasing conditionality of occupation, the exclusions from provision, and the rationing of resources as it is in the protections it offers.