ABOUT

In the UK and beyond, housing policies born out of austerity and financialisation are intersecting with muscular approaches to managing migration, producing new forms of ill-health and housing insecurity.

Migrant, refugee and asylum-seeker communities are caught up in this nexus, facing hostile policies that jeopardise their rights and health. However, the people most affected by these policies rarely get a chance to inform policy change.

The HoMH Lab (pronounced like “home”) is a platform that seeks to amplify these seldom-heard voices.

Initiated by anthropologists Dr Nikita Simpson and Dr Charlotte Sanders, it recognises that complex policy terrains require complex intellectual and practical responses that are community-led and supported by interdisciplinary perspectives.

The origins of HoMH Lab

The seeds for HoMH Lab were planted in two ethnographic activist-research projects.

In Birmingham, a group of Somali mothers sought to build evidence of the poor housing conditions that they were living in. Nikita worked alongside founding partners psychologist Dr Suad Duale, and health geographer Dr Liz Storer, to document the ways in which the UK government’s ‘hostile environment’ approach was bleeding into housing allocation to produce new health and mental health issues.

In Portsmouth and London, Charlotte’s ethnographic research with asylum seekers living in Home Office “contingency” hotels rendered visible a range of mental and physical health concerns. It demonstrated the acute need for those in asylum accommodation to have a means to hold public bodies and private companies to account.

Putting research and impact work into dialogue across these projects produced something more than the sum of its parts.

It enabled us as researchers to disentangle the webs of policy that shape the housing experiences of migrant and marginalised communities, and illuminated pathways toward effecting change.

HOW TO USE THIS SITE

The projects amplified by HoMH Lab are firmly oriented towards social transformation.

This site compiles research from the projects that formed the foundation for building HoMH Lab, and also brings together resources from collaborative research with other partners, including The University of Portsmouth and the University of Sydney Policy Lab.

The research amplified here pays attention to how colonial histories and present racial capitalism shape current housing conditions, and recognises the intersectionality, materiality and historical contexts of inequality.

The resources compiled here are designed for activists, teachers, researchers, and policy makers to use in their efforts to tackles issues that affect the communities that they serve or are part of.

If you make use of these resources in your own practice, are interested in collaborating, or have insights you’d like to share from your own experience, please get in touch via cs110[at]soas.ac.uk and ns53[at]soas.ac.uk.