Structures of feeling in the affective economies  of private renting in the Majority World
Creators: name: Soaita, Adriana Mihaela
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023
Subjects: Structures of feeling
housing
renting
Majority World
Raymond William
Ethics of care
Greed
Exploitation
Cruel optimism

description: Abstract

The interest in the private renting sector as a mechanism generator of new inequalities is dominated by accounts of the Minority World. In these economically developed countries of sustained regulatory, market, welfare and tenant-activism institutions, much of the focus has fallen on proposing ways of increasing the sector’s efficiency and addressing tenants’ precarity. But what about the Majority World? 

 Advancing a Critical Interpretative Synthesis of the academic literature on renting in the Majority World and drawing on the method of ‘experimental comparison’, I aim to read the affective economies of private renting through Raymond William’s (1977) concept of ‘structures of feeling’ that is a ‘sense of a shared affective quality through which the present is rendered sensible and apprehended’. Through an inductive/deductive interpretation, I propose understanding the affective economies of private renting through three dominant structures of feeling: (a) greed and alienation, emerging through capitalist relations as exposed by Karl Marx (1867), and more recently Madden and Marcuse (2016); (b) ethics of care, emerging through the social infrastructure of diverse economies, as exposed by Karl Polanyi (1957), and more recently Gibson-Graham (2008); and (c) cruel optimism, emerging through the attrition of the conditions of possibility of the ‘good life’, as exposed by Lauren Berlant (2011). I apply this framework of interpretation to the very different historical presents of Eastern Europe, Western Africa (Ghana and Nigeria) and the Indian subcontinent. Rooted in broader theories of affect (Anderson 2014), it is hoped that the theoretical reading proposed shows that the lived experience of private renting is not only shaped by economic and political structures but also by structures of feeling through which the other two are both reproduced and questioned, potentially leading to the emergence of new everyday practices and institutional arrangements.
description: Dr Adriana Mihaela Soaita is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Bucharest, Romania, and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow, United Kingdom. She received her PhD degree from King’s College London in 2011 and worked in the British and Dutch academia until she returned in 2022 to Romania, her native country. Adriana’s research has focused on some of the ways in which housing and home are permeated by, and shape our ideas of politics and power, space and place, emotions and embodiment. Her prestigious 2022-24 EU Horizon-funded project investigates the experiences of private tenants and landlords in Romania, which she examines through the theoretical lenses of affect. She has published more than 25 articles in renowned academic journals, including Geoforum; Environment and Planning A; Habitat International; Housing Studies; Housing Theory and Society; International Journal of Urban and Regional Research; Journal of Youth Studies; Urban Studies.