On the Social Relations of Contract Research Production: Power, Positionality and Epistemology in Housing and Urban Research

Abstract

The growing interest in reflexive social science has been matched by a voluminous literature on the epistemological consequences of positionality in social research. Inter-subjectivist approaches to positionality emphasise how social interactions within the field produce 'interpretative moments' and thereby consciously affect the process of knowledge production. Objectivist approaches to positionality emphasise the 'background thinking' that social researchers carry into the field, unexamined, as occupants of social positions that are class, gender etc. based. It follows that this (class, gendered) background thinking unconsciously influences the process of knowledge production. However, since this literature has had little impact on the field of housing and urban research, its relevance to these fields remains to be established and vice versa. In this paper, I discuss both of these approaches and find them helpful but limited in their relevance to housing and urban research. Since housing and urban research tends to be undertaken on behalf of 'policy funders', I argue that constant exposure to the 'disciplinary gaze' of those funders means that the positionality of housing and urban researchers is also moulded during the course of the academic career. This means that the positionality of housing and urban researchers is not simply established within the field nor carried into the field. Rather, the positionality of housing and urban researchers develops over time of constant exposure to the 'disciplinary gaze' of research funders and manifests itself in what Foucault refers to as 'docility', i.e. research practices intuitively and uncritically oriented to satisfying the needs and demands of research funders. I draw on my own research career experiences to demonstrate this argument and, in doing so, show how my docility manifested itself during recent 'policy funded' research into the housing and urban problems of visual impaired children.

Feminist Epistemologies and the Social Relations of Housing Provision

“…The rarity distinguishes housing studies from other, more established disciplines such as rural sociology and geography. In part, this gap may be explained by the differences in the proportion of a pragmatic rather than a conceptual orientation of the different disciplines (see, for example, Allen 2005, Kemeny 1988, Madsen & Adriansen 2004, Mäki & Oinas 2004. But the explanation is not a satisfactory one and deserves to be rectified.…”

Political Science as the Missing Link in Housing Studies

“…It can also be a way to access empirical material, and final reports may sometimes use social theory meaningfully (cf. Allen 2005a, andKemeny in Allen 2005b).…”

“…This orientation is sometimes claimed to be an effect of the dominance of contract funding (Allen 2005a), but often institutional funding of housing research is also biased towards socio-technical rationality, policy development and program evaluation (cf. Marston 2008).…”

Synthesizing Feminist and Critical Realist Approaches to Housing Studies

“…My aim in this paper is to contribute to a literature that has been growing since that call, exemplified by, inter alia, the paper by Somerville and Bengtsson (2002) and its critiques in the same issue of Housing, Theory and Society, and work such as by Allen (2005), Clapham (2009, Clapham, Clark, and Gibb (2012), Lawson (2006Lawson ( , 2012 and Jacobs, Manzi, and Kemeny (2004). Specifically, I propose an approach to housing studies that combines critical realism and standpoint feminism.…”