August 2024
International Geographical Congress. Dublin.

The housing journeys of criminalized women and gender-diverse people reveal some of the deepest forms of economic, social, and spatial marginalization. For many, their home is a site of personal, systemic, and intergenerational trauma. The lack of access to safe, affordable, appropriate housing is a significant contributing factor to women and gender-diverse people getting caught in the “revolving door” of homelessness and incarceration. This paper reflects on our experiences of co-designing aseries of housing journeys workshops with community co-researchers to share stories of housing insecurity, gender, and criminalization. The recognition of the right to adequate housing by the Government of Canada in the National Housing Strategy Act is a critical moment for reframing housing as more than an asset or service to be provided. It asserts housing as fundamental to our individual and collective wellbeing. And yet, the confirmation of a legal right to housing and the evidence-based policy directions being offered have limited transformative value when rooted in the legal, political, and social systems that perpetuate social and spatial injustice. Our workshops combine community engagement methods using storytelling, counter-mapping, and speculative design that were selected for the ways they make space for exploring complex socio-political contexts, interpersonal relationships, emotions, and experiences. The co-creation, collection, and analysis of these housing journeys will inform collective speculative designs of community-led and care-based housing to better meet the needs of criminalized women and gender-diverse people, and that offer transformative housing justice practices to disrupt cycles and systems of criminalization and homelessness.

May 2024
Critical Perspectives / Criminology & Social Justice. Winnipeg MB.

The recognition of the right to adequate housing by the Government of Canada in the National Housing Strategy Act (NHSA) is a critical moment for reframing housing as more than an asset or service to be provided. Informed by the civil society housing justice movement that fought for it, the right to housing in Canada asserts housing as fundamental to our individual and collective wellbeing. The NHSA, however, does not recognize people with experiences of criminalization as among those groups in greatest housing need, nor does it recognize the intersectionality of their experiences with identified priority groups. This is despite the evidence that recognizes homelessness as a pathway into and an experience shaped by criminalization, incarceration, and release. Ultimately, the confirmation of a legal right to housing and the policy directions being offered have limited transformative value when rooted in the legal, political, and social systems that perpetuate social and spatial injustice. This paper is a provocation to move beyond the limited rights-based frameworks of housing justice by thinking of housing through transformative justice and abolitionist praxes. It frames the present housing crisis, with its deep-reaching roots in settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and cis-heteropatriarchy, as more than injustice but also as a space of extensive individual, interpersonal, collective, and intergenerational harm. Using preliminary research from a larger project on the housing journeys of criminalized women and gender-diverse people, this paper explores how home is, how it fails to be, and how it can better be a place of harm reduction, mutual aid, healing, and freedom.

October 2023
Philosophy of the City. Brooklyn NY

In 2019, the Government of Canada recognized the right to adequate housing under the National Housing Strategy Act (NHSA). The conceptual framework of the right to housing, the funding opportunities through federal investments, and the new accountability mechanisms under the NHSA have generated new opportunities for community-led and non-profit organizations. Housing has become a key strategic issue around which to mobilize both funding and advocacy agendas in support across a diverse array of social services and supports. The housing journeys of criminalized women and gender-diverse people reveal some of the deepest forms of economic, social, and spatial marginalization. Through lived experience and empirical evidence, we know there is a correlation between the varying ways that housing insecurity is experienced by women and gender-diverse people and the pathways to their involvement with the criminal justice system. Both feminist and abolition frameworks reveal critical intersections between the prison industrial complex, the non-profit industrial complex, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and the housing sector. In my work with a national non-profit organization who provide housing and housing-related supports to criminalized women and gender diverse people, I proposed the following question inspired by Dolores Hayden: “what would a rights-based strategy to intersectional feminist and abolitionist housing be like?” The question holds space for critical engagements with feminist planning and abolition geography as part of the work of finding solutions to the housing crisis and working towards spatial justice and a world without prisons. This paper elaborates on these theoretical frameworks and arguments in setting up the design of participatory counter-mapping and speculative co-creation workshops with administrators, staff, and people with lived experience to imagine more-than-adequate housing that better respond to the needs of criminalized women and gender-diverse people, and that fundamentally work towards dismantling the systems that create pathways to both homelessness and incarceration.