Racialized geographies of home: Property,unhoming and other possible futures

I Introduction

Erasures and disavowals of home surround us: homeless encampments cleared and squatting criminalised, evictions filed and renters left vulnerable, ‘irregular’ migrants detained and border controls outsourced and offshored, Indigenous ownership, access and relationships to land repeatedly denied. These and many other claims the law deems invalid mark people, places and communities as legitimate targets for dispossession and violence. What follows – state-sanctioned racial banishment (Roy, 2019), expulsions (Sassen, 2014) and displaceability (Yiftachel, 2020) – underpins racial capitalism.

Racial capitalism is the ‘process by which the key dynamics of capitalism—accumulation/dispossession, credit/debt, production/surplus, capitalism/worker, developed/underdeveloped, contract/coercion, and others—become articulated through race’ (Jenkins and Leroy, 2021: 3). Racial capitalism instates hierarchies of difference that cast racialized subjects as surplus and disposable: the ‘Indigenous “non being”’ (Blatman-Thomas and Porter, 2019: 5), Black populations as ‘those “without”’ or the ‘less-than-human-as-waste category’ (McKittrick, 2011: 953) and so on. Racial hierarchies of difference are spatialised by framing places these illegitimate spatial actors use and inhabit as disorderly, lifeless and unviable. Indigenous landscapes are rendered as vacant and unused (Bhandar, 2018; Moreton-Robinson, 2015), Black spatiality as ‘ungeographic’ and ‘emptied out of life’ (McKittrick, 2006: x; 2013: 7), migrant encampments as ‘uninhabitable, wild and barbaric space’ (Singh, 2020) and so forth. With expropriation of these ‘wastelands’ legitimised, enclosure and exploitation proceeds. And, in the thick of these expulsions, amid the ruins of these homes, in and through this violence, other subjects assemble new homes (Kotef, 2020: 1).

This article interrogates the racial logics of home and homemaking. It engages with and (re)theorises the uncomfortable relationalities that characterise how we dwell together in this world: the paradox of homemaking as both life-giving and death-dealing. It does this by reading myriad thefts and threats to emplacement under capitalism as struggles with property and it charts conceptual terrain to connect and dissect these struggles within – and for – the critical geographies of home. This approach recognises property as a handmaiden of racial capitalism, instrumental in producing racial hierarchies of difference (Bhandar, 2018; Moreton-Robinson, 2015). I understand property as a ‘relational meshwork’ substantively organised through territorialised expressions of law (Blomley, 2020) operating in service of capital. In this transactional landscape, in ‘property space’, property does things: it organises us in hierarchical relations with each other over our access and use of valuable resources such as land, adjudicates how we interact and on what terms and communicates powerful messages to us about what property means (ibid). Wherever we dwell – however we practise home – property entangles us in relations with others, even those who are stateless or houseless albeit those actors have fewer entitlements; property interconnects us all in interdependencies of relative vulnerability and privilege (ibid). ¹ But while home clearly cannot escape property’s clutches, property keeps a low profile in the vast geographic corpus on home. This article seeks to lift property’s profile by reconceptualizing home as practised, unavoidably, in propertied landscapes. It seeks to centre homemaking’s contradictions by foregrounding what propertied space does to homemaking under racial capitalism and by excavating the work home does for – and (might do) to disrupt – liberal property regimes. ² It recognizes these muted home/property dynamics deserve greater bandwidth, including given increasingly complex, diverse and precarious (sub) legal relations that entangle home.

This article argues that the violence of home(making) cannot be fully understood without a racial theory of capitalism and it develops conceptual resources for attending to the racialized geographies of home. My approach honours recognised attributes, thematics and understandings of home in geography, rather than seeking radical departures. But I aim to reinvigorate the critical geographies of home by advancing a rapprochement with theories of racial capitalism. This requires, in the first instance, an understanding of property space under racial capitalism and conceptual tools for grappling how subjects navigate propertied landscapes. I begin this endeavour within the scholarship on racial capitalism and underscore the expropriation of indigenous lands and unhomemaking practices of settler-colonialism as a critical and primary context for understanding how home, property and racial capitalism interrelate. I emphasise original dispossession – the ‘primary axis of racialized violence’ (Dorries et al., 2019: 3) – as a prerequisite for racialized forms of home(making). From there, I conceptualise the racialized way law’s territorialised expressions encode property space as a matrix of ‘walls’ and ‘mindwalls’ that reticulate propertied landscapes under capitalism. As subjects come up against these walls – these material and visceral territorialities assembled and asserted through myriad legal and territorial resources – their interests are differentially supported or ‘held up’ in property space (Keenan, 2015).

Carrying this forward, I reconceptualise home as practised within these propertied landscapes across four further sections to make headway towards developing a revised property-sensitive framework for home. Section III specifies home as dominion and home as belonging as key modalities of home. Home as dominion encompasses notions of autonomy, sovereignty and freedom that saturate the literature on home (Saunders, 1989; Kearns et al., 2000) and insists on the ways property space deploys territory to assert, protect and amplify home as private and exclusive. Home as belonging heeds belonging’s importance to home (Antonsich, 2010; Mee and Wright, 2009; Probyn, 1996; Yuval-Davis, 2011): the familiar sense of being ‘at home’ but also how a politics of belonging arbitrates appropriate and legitimate social relations of home. I conceptualise how these modalities, which appear to push us in different directions, mutually reinforce each other under racial capitalism, colluding to legitimise and naturalise (slow) violence against racialized subjects, their homespaces and their homemaking. Racialized value statements governing what home should be and who belongs provide blueprints for the ‘walls’ that home as dominion asserts and defends. Meanwhile, those assertions of territoriality in relation to people and places at the margins perform essential classificatory, communication and policing work in the service of those prevailing racialized rubrics of belonging that home as belonging delineates.

In the troubling synergies between these modalities of home, Section IV foregrounds the racialised calculus of property that infuses home(making) under capitalism. Unhoming names the deliberate undertow of propertied space that exhausts, suffocates and depletes racialized subjects as they make their homes, that ‘disorients’ racialized subjects caught in its currents. Unhoming is not a practice and nor does it replace or replicate homeunmaking, as the process through which the materialities and imaginaries of home are damaged or destroyed (Baxter and Brickell, 2014; Brickell, 2014). Rather, unhoming names the hazardous ‘disorientation’ of property space that legally-sanctions processes of home-unmaking for racialized subjects. ³ Unhoming is not random in its reach or violence: it names the uneasy attritional nature of home(making) under racial capitalism, the confronting ways property ‘holds up’ only some subjects as they practise home, while it ‘pulls under’ racialized others who become caught in unhoming’s undertow. For racialised subjects, unhoming is unrelentingand pervasive: encoded into material infrastructures, obscured through legal abstractions and digital technologies and it is ever-mutating as ‘walls’ are reconstructed and retooled in the service of capital. Unhoming, I argue, is a structural feature of racial capitalism. Section V brings into sharp relief the now evident contradictions at the heart of home(making) under racial capitalism. It acknowledges the sobering interrelatedness between my home and another’s homeunmaking, between homing and unhoming, the way home(making) displaces and (re)emplaces, of home as possession and dispossession – even as the intellectual and ethical impasse of these uncomfortable relationalities sits beyond its scope. ⁴

This enclosure of home and its violence and trauma is an incomplete story; racialized subjects are irreducible to their (attempted) socio-symbolic or spatial erasure, eviction or dispossession. Section VI acknowledges that even expulsions of people and their lifeworlds do not fully extinguish possibilities of home. And, moreover, racialized subjects do more than survive their unhoming: they establish deep bonds to the places and communities where they live. Attending to these politics of refusal – the way racialized subjects resist and subvert their unhoming – attunes the analytics of home to how subjects contend with, dismantle and, crucially, rebuild propertied landscapes through home(making), through other respatialisations and other solidarities. Recognising that property contains contradictory possibilities (Blomley, 2004), I point to the promise residing in and sought through home(making) to wage alternative propertied futures. Here, the framework centres the possibilities for countercurrents that turn the tide of ‘possessory politics’ (Porter, 2014) that subtends and reproduces racial capitalism – abolition, decolonization, anti-capitalism and so forth. By giving greater conceptual priority for those rehomings, this framework invites us to explore resistance through home and as homemaking that can rescript hostile propertied landscapes and offer correctives to racial capitalism’s unhomings. Put together, this revised schema offers opportunities to develop a more expansive understanding of racialized violence through home and for the critical geographies of home, including to advance ‘an other geography’ of the marginalised, erased, oppressed (Oswin, 2020) through home. Throughout, my focus is on home under hegemonic liberal regimes of property in ‘western’ liberal capitalist democracies and on home at the dwelling or nation scale as important though by no means the only, arenas for engaging with home under racial capitalism.

II Propertied Landscapes of Racial Capitalism

Theories of racial capitalism describe how the exploitation of racialized human and spatial difference lubricates capitalist accumulation, past and present (Robinson, 1983; Hall, 2021). Racialized subjects are appraised, differentiated and sorted as a precondition of accumulation by dispossession, formatting entire populations into socio-economic hierarchies of value (Bhandar, 2018). This racism that capitalism depends on is ‘a practice of abstraction, a death-dealing displacement of difference into hierarchies that organise relations within and between the planet’s sovereign political territories’ (Gilmore, 2002: 16). Race naturalises inequalities in power, rights and resources that flow from such dispossession (Jenkins and Leroy, 2021). Race, understood as ‘mutable and mercurial’ (Robinson, 1983), is an historically contingent mode of social organisation based upon categories of presumed ‘impassable difference’ (Bhattacharyya, 2018: 2). Cedric Robinson (1983) recognised how the advent of capitalism amplified ‘precapitalist forms of social difference into racial difference’, how capitalism ‘calcified those differences into race’ (Jenkins and Leroy, 2021: 5–6). Theories of racial capitalism recognise vectors of valuation typically excised from Marxist scholarship which defines legal forms by economic processes of production/exchange alone (see Bhandar, 2018: 11). The production/social reproduction nexus is not ignored: Robinson’s formulation of racial capitalism recognised the hidden and devalued work women do, usually in private homespaces, and which makes other waged labour possible, as critical to dividing and differentially allocating value to people (Bhattacharyya, 2018: 50–51). ⁵ Theories of racial capitalism adjust for the failings of Marxist-inspired theorisations to connect capitalism and race and subsequent misreading of racialisation and its dispossession as fallout rather than means.

Our prevailing model of property obscures how property scaffolds racial capitalism by producing and maintaining these racial hierarchies. A ubiquitous vision of property reifies territoriality, with territorial control deemed ‘desperately necessary to the separative self to keep the threatening others at bay’ (Nedelsky, 1990: 183). Think here of propertied imaginaries of the home as castle, for instance, or Sir William Blackstone’s (1786 cited in Singer, 2000: 3) famed pronouncement about ‘that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other’. This vision of property rests on the ‘conceit of proper and propertied human subjectivity’ (Roy, 2017: A6). It encapsulates and inculcates the possessive individual ideology at the heart of liberalism, wherein possessing becomes a precondition of the liberal subject’s freedom – through having and excluding one carves out a private domain for autonomy and freedom, for being (Macpherson, 1962; Butler and Athanasious, 2013). ⁶ This model of property assumes an autonomous owner based on liberal fantasies of the ‘separative self’ (i.e. our detachment from others) and a ‘logic of severance’ (i.e. our separation from each other) (Blomley, 2010: 216).

What is at stake here is not only what critical legal scholars recognise as a Eurocentrism and cultural bias to prevailing property models that deny other epistemologies of property. Rather by concealing the ‘castle’ as a zone of ‘power and conditional relationality’ with those outside (Blomley, 2020: 40), our prevailing model of property obfuscates property’s hand in violent world-making predicated on biopolitical sorting. It denies property’s hand in ongoing processes of Indigenous dispossession (Bhandar, 2018; Bonds, 2019; Blatman-Thomas and Porter, 2019; Byrd et al., 2018), the carceral ‘fix’ across immigration (Bhattacharyya, 2018: 125–149; El-Enany, 2020), urban policing and criminal justice (Alexander, 2011; Bonds 2019; Gilmore 2007; Mitchell 1997), the abstracted violences of rent-extraction in urban/housing disinvestment, renewal and financialization (Bledsoe and Wright, 2019; Dantzler, 2021; Fields and Raymond, 2021; McElroy, 2020; Speer, 2017; Wyly et al., 2012) and myriad other (slow) violences. And our prevailing model of property obscures property’s roots in the historical violence of the colonial conquest that expropriated indigenous lands and dispossessed indigenous people (Coulthard, 2014; Wolfe, 2006). It obscured property’s hand in the exploitation of devalued labour and which, where slavery institutionalised property in people, led to the treatment of Black people ‘as objects of property’ (Safransky, 2017: 1086) – to the transformation of whiteness from ‘colour to race to status to property’, as Cheryl Harris (1993: 1714) theorised.

Recognising property’s hand in racial capitalism, Bonds (2019: 575) describes property as a ‘race-making institution’ wherein ‘the loss or acquisition of property produces a set of racialized relationships and conditions’. McElroy (2020: 14) calls property ‘a technology of racial dispossession’ and Safransky (2022) writes of racialized political grammars of property that condition how we interpret and produce some social worlds and erase others. Bhandar (2018: 12) conceptualises a reciprocal relationship between property and race in terms of ‘racial regimes of ownership’ involving networks of political, economic and juridical practices that ‘condense’ into domination over social groups. Read with property, moreover, racial capitalism’s regimes of exploitation, expropriation and expulsion (Bhattacharyya, 2018: 37) are understood to ‘touch at the core of one’s possession, namely the ownership of a recognised, sovereign self’ (Blatman-Thomas, 2019: 1397; 1404). Roy (2017: 9) describes this as ‘foundational dispossession—the subject whose claims to personhood are tenuous and whose claims to property are thus always a lived experience of loss’.

Property space realises this racecraft – this spatialisation of hierarchical difference – not through some fixed quality of physical space alone, but by assembling diverse legal and territorial resources. Property space is not wholly malleable and open; only some property relations, that empower only some interests, are stabilised or ‘held up’ (Keenan, 2015). Property engineers this ‘holding up’ through the workings of law and territory (Blomley, 2020). Law delineates relational hierarchies by circumscribing access and use of valuable things, such as land: ‘“Law” draws lines, constructs insides and outsides, assigns legal meanings to lines, and attaches legal consequences to crossing them’ (Delaney, 2015: 99). Formal Law, with its institutionalised expressions and official acts, is imbricated with a culture of legality including normative ideas, ideologies and frameworks, such as convictions that ownership bestows full control over one’s ‘castle’ (Singer, 2000; Ewick and Silbey, 1998). Enforcement, but also narratives, metaphors and messaging that naturalise law’s violence, help legitimise property law and practice (Ramakrishnan, 2013; Safransky, 2022).

Territory meanwhile provides a strategic resource for defining, inscribing and stabilising property’s hierarchical relations (Blomley, 2016b). ⁷ Territory classifies by area what is ‘ours’ or ‘off limits’, communicates these classifications, and enforces them (Blomley, 2016b; Sacks, 1985: 28–34). Territory is a product of property too (Blomley, 2016b): territoriality depends on (and reflects) how subjects engage with and revise formal property entitlements. Legal scholars Cooper (2007) and Keenan (2015) recognised that a sense of ownership – as expressed in possessive references, for instance to ‘my’ street or ‘my’ home – encompasses multiple sentiments and amounts to more than an expression of personal feelings. They subsequently conceptualise property as ‘relations of belonging’ to capture how property concerns inherent human needs and values, such as identity and community. Racialized subjects emerge through their interactions with these legal and territorial working of propertied landscapes: the ‘bad’ neighbour emerges only through the act of building and maintaining their ‘fence’ and the refugee is distinguished from the asylum seeker only through the enactment of immigration laws, not before or after (Blomley, 2013; Bhandar, 2018).

This race-making is something of a failsafe bet, as ‘something it has itself brought into being’ (Chakravartty and Da Silva, 2012: 371). The US colonial project illustrates. Property laws and rationalities of the emergent settler-colonial society converged with unfolding racial schemas that designated only some people as belonging and only some ways of living worthy of legal protection. In terms of law, indigenous dispossession involved the transposition of English common law, such as the right to exclude, and new legal technologies, such as land title registration (Harris, 2004). White discourse regaled a fiction of savagery, lawlessness and dual twinning of whiteness with civilisation (Harris, 2002, 2004) and white land cultivation with ideologies of improvement (Bhandar, 2018). In terms of territory, Indian reserves satisfied the white colonial geographic imagination by relocating ‘elsewhere’ indigenous peoples (Harris, 2002). Alongside chattel slavery and to a lesser degree the exploitation of devalued labour, these workings of law and territory rendered deviant indigenous land uses and ontologies of land and legitimised wholesale expropriation of indigenous lands and ‘eliminatory logics’ of settler colonialism (Coulthard, 2014; Wolfe, 2006).

In this and many other instances since, alternative property practices, epistemologies and ontologies have been repeatedly destabilised or denied. On occasion, non-hegemonic property arrangements, such as alternative epistemologies of land tenure, are ‘held up’ signally what Keenan (2015) calls the ‘subversive’ potential of property. After all, prevailing grammars of property never fully erase indigenous, immigrant, Black and other subaltern claims; the land is ‘distinctly “unquiet”’, burdened with others’ claims and boundary transgressions (Blomley, 2008: 325). Resistance and counter-projects – ‘counter-grammars of reckoning and redress’ – enfold alternative political imaginaries of property that challenge the ‘notions of sovereignty, personhood, race and value’ that undergird liberal regimes of property (Safransky, 2022: 5). Although the possibilities for subversive property are not unbounded (Blomley, 2016c), not least given property’s preoccupation with organising hierarchical statuses in the service of capital, such possibilities preview resistance to propertied landscapes that this propertied reading of home(making) must foreground.

Drawing upon these understandings, I conceptualise the way law’s territorialised expressions encode propertied space (and thereby mediate subjects’ access and use of valuable socio-spatial resources, such as land and housing) as a matrix of ‘walls’ and ‘mindwalls’ designed, constructed and maintained through assemblages of legal and territorial resources. Wall references material territorialities assembled through myriad legal technologies – legislation, policies, contracts (and associated fees and fines) that govern immigration, social welfare, housing, public space and so forth. Some material territorialities are readily legible, announced through heavily securitised borders, barriers, checkpoints and ‘keep out’ signs. But many others are far less visible, including territorialities enacted through digital (algorithmic) filtering processes, for instance.

To acknowledge property’s hard-to-grasp ‘visceral’ territorialities, I use mindwall, borrowing the term from the German mauer im kopf where it references a ‘wall in the head, a mindwall’ and describes how, though the Berlin Wall had fallen, it was still perceived, stirring the brain much like a phantom limb (Hayes, 2020: 97). Mindwall captures both the experiential dimensions of less visible or indeed hidden territorialities as well as the way property assembles walls in our minds – cognitive boundaries assembled through ideas, models and narratives – that operate as powerful devices of division, more insidious arguably than actual securitised borders and barriers. I conceptualise mindwalls as a propertied rendering of Ahmed’s (2014) concept of ‘atmospheric walls’, which describe how visible and invisible gatekeeping techniques make some spaces less available to some than to others. Whiteness (race), for instance, can be experienced as a visceral wall that ‘stops Black bodies inhabiting space by extending through objects and others’, or ‘something that does not receive you’ (Ahmed, 2006: 110–11). Racialized subjects encounter mindwalls as awkward silences, hostile gazes, pressures to assimilate or ‘fit in’ and so forth. Don’t be fooled by a wall’s subtleties, Ahmed (2014: np, 2006: 111) cautions: mindwalls can mean subjects ‘inhabit the same room [or dwelling, or nation] but be in a different world’. Mindwalls can make it unbearable for those who come up against them to stay put, with discomfort a sophisticated strategy of power.

Under racial capitalism, as subjects navigate propertied landscapes, they encounter a racialized matrix of walls and mindwalls which differentially circumscribes their interests (e.g. access, use and mobilities). To repeatedly collide with these walls and mindwalls as one traverses propertied landscapes means one is not ‘held up’ (Keenan, 2015); rather, one’s positioning is ‘angled’, one’s body ‘orientated’, and property space ‘disorients’ (Ahmed 2006: 111). Crucially, as a ‘wall’ alienates or dispossesses a racialized subject, that same wall will defend and enable another subject’s interests.

To insist on the way hegemonic property arrangements subtend and structure distinct propertied landscapes under racial capitalism, I draw on Keenan (2015: 84–86) and Ahmed’s (2006) concept of orientation as ‘a question not only about how we “find our way” in propertied landscapes, but moreover how we come to “feel at home”’. Subjects perceive and experience this orientation unevenly. In a white world, for instance, the property space may ‘hold up’ a white worker’s ‘smooth’ orientation in their workplace, while a black worker may come up against walls and property space ‘disorientates’ (Ahmed, 2006, 2014). Orientation ‘depends on the bodily inhabitance of that space’ (Ahmed, 2006: 6) since even where no ‘walls’ are visible, racialized subjects may sense visceral walls that cast them as unworthy or unwelcome, reifying their position of vulnerability. We might think of the orientation of property space as something of a ‘normative landscape’ that transmits through space and place certain ideas about what is right and appropriate (Cresswell, 1996: 8–9), holding up a ‘smooth’ orientation for those who conform and disorientating those subjects who do not. A propertied reading understands the experience of (dis)orientation as contingent on one’s positioning in property relations of relative privilege or vulnerability. Disorientation denotes how propertied landscapes in certain places and times are encoded through territorialised expressions of law that disorient or fail to ‘hold up’ racialized subjects entangled in vulnerable property relations.

Taking forward this conceptualisation of propertied landscapes, our next task is to conceptualise home as practised amid its territorialised expressions of law. How do propertied landscapes, reticulated by walls and mindwalls, shape home(making)? And, conversely, how might home(making) (dis)assemble and (de)legitimise these walls?

III Revisiting Home in Propertied Space

Home is omnipresent yet hard to pin down (Mallett, 2004). Home is a relational process that binds the material and the affective; it is neither place nor feeling alone but rather the relationship between these (Blunt and Dowling, 2006). Home is made through social and emotional meanings we attach to homespaces (Massey, 1992), perhaps a dwelling but also diverse sites and scales across and beyond (Blunt and Sheringham, 2019). Those meanings include notions of distinction, self-expression and identity; notions of agency, control and autonomy; and notions of belonging, attachment and fixity (Mallett, 2004; Kearns et al., 2000). Home can have other symbolic meanings too as a site of exclusion, fear, alienation and danger.

Approaching home as practised has multiple rich antecedents from early conceptualisations of home-making (Blunt and Dowling, 2006) to recent framings of home as ‘fabric-ation’ (Jacobs and Smith, 2008): 516), as performed’ (Roelofsen, 2018) and as assembled (Soaita and McKee, 2019). To practise home is to bind social relations, identities and materialities, to anchor a sense of belonging and make and perform subjectivities (Blunt and Dowling, 2006). Home is emergent and provisional, perhaps emotionally and physically taxing, even fraught to sustain and forever susceptible to change; with home one is ‘always getting there’ (Ahmed, 1999: 331). Home is momentarily or irreparably unmade as (im)material dimensions of home are divested, damaged or destroyed, whether intentionally or accidentally. And home is contradictory too: home can be recovered and renewed through its unmaking (Baxter and Brickell, 2014; Brickell et al., 2017; Nowicki, 2014), such that home fuses comfort and hostility, constancy and insecurity, and homeliness and unhomeliness (Blunt and Dowling, 2006; Mee, 2007).

Scholarship on home largely overlooks property. Delaney (2015: 97–98) acknowledges something of this oversight of property in calls to engage with how ‘“home” is legally constituted, how different kinds of homes are legally differentiated, and the experiential consequences of this’. Extant conceptual schemas of home do connote elements of property, such as control, but scholarship concerned with the legal fabrication of home mostly leans on housing tenure, its focus trained to the home-as-dwelling. Besides, this home/tenure research nexus remains underdeveloped, homeownership focused (cf. Easthope, 2014; Soaita and McKee, 2019) and yet to fully engage with tenure complexity debates that challenge the adequacy of traditional tenure categories as ‘fault lines’ for specifying complex and diverse legal relations underpinning housing access and use (Hulse, 2008; Murie, 2019: np; Wegmann et al., 2017). Conversely, where geographers and socio-legal scholars have used a property analytic to explore alternative living arrangements (e.g. Sullivan, 2018) and tenures (e.g. Cowan et al., 2018), home is rarely a focus and never reconceptualised to accommodate property (e.g. Cowan and Hardy, 2020). Geographers also use informality as a productive heuristic for engaging with places, people and practices of inhabitation framed as illegitimate (Roy 2005; Yiftachel, 2015; Gurran et al., 2021). But informality does not centre property’s hand is spatialising racial hierarchies. And neither tenure nor informality stretch well to home conceived at geographic scales beyond the dwelling.

A notable exception is Kotef’s (2020: 2) The Colonising Self. Kotef theorises home with property first, via Arendt, to establish home as a site for political action, which reprioritises domestic intimacies, houses and homes that find themselves otherwise relegated within western political theory. Kotef also theorises home with property via John Locke, which prioritises the (propertied) household as the basic property-making unit, over and above the individual modern liberalism foregrounds. The Lockean expansionary tendencies of these propertied households provide theoretical grounds for Kotef to read settler colonialism through the concept of home and homemaking in Palestine/Israel, amid ongoing occupation. For Kotef, home is considered in two main dimensions: territorial, as a technology of territory or mode of emplacement, and in terms of subject formation (settler colonial subjecthood), rendering home as a place that constitutes the self. The concept of home, Kotef (2020) argues, is embedded with the ‘systems of injury that founded the systems of property’.

The impetus for this framework hinges on similar concerns with home, and especially Kotef’s (2020: 6) unease with the ‘intimacies of public wrongs’. I depart most obviously from Kotef, who theorisation centres on how colonisers make their homes amid and through settler colonial violence, by reading home with property as a handmaiden of racial capitalism and home as practised. ⁸ From that starting point, I theorise home more expansively in and beyond settler colonialism, give far greater weighting to belonging to capture the relationality of property, and treat belonging relatively more expansively (beyond political belonging). Where Kotef suggests violence resides within settler colonial homemaking (and shapes individual and collective settler colonial identities), I position unhoming as a structural feature of racial capitalism, conceptualise home’s inherent contradictions, and make space for unhoming’s resistances. In the first instance, however, I conceptualise home via the territorialities and relationalities through which property is mediated. Throughout illustrative (rather than exhaustive) examples are drawn from literature within and beyond the critical geographies of home literature.

IV Unhoming

Unhoming names the distinctive disorientation of property space under racial capitalism whereby material and visceral territorialities of prevailing politics of belonging destabilise the homemaking of racialised subjects. It references interlocking legally-sanctioned walls and mindwalls that disorientate racialised subjects as they (re)make their home. Unhoming may register as abrupt moments of home-unmaking such as an eviction event, but it has other less erratic tempos too, as a slow violence (Nixon,2011). And unhoming always has an extended temporality in the persistent torment and ‘spectral presence’ of historical thefts and erasures still denied. Unhoming often figures as an ongoing existential threat to practising home: a persistent disciplining, the ghostly assertions of belonging by absent or invisible others, the uneasy sense of being unwelcome or out-of-place, of being an outsider or even invisible, and the haunting of possible attritional violence to come. Unhoming stages and quickens ‘group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death’ (Gilmore, 2002: 261). Unhoming denies and depletes one’s capacities to settle – it assimilates, endangers, and deadens racialized subjects as it renders their homes unsafe, insecure, or precarious.

Unhoming requires attending to how territorialised politics of belonging delegitimise and disavow the homes, homespaces and homemaking of racialized subjects as nonnormative, undesirable or dysfunctional. As an important recent example, the Grenfell Tower fire illustrates how housing and immigration policy encoded state-sanctioned racial hierarchies that shattered Grenfell’s residents and their homes. In this preventable tragedy in West London in 2017, 72 people lost their lives, many more were injured, and hundreds lost their homes as catastrophic fires engulfed a 24-storey social housing block. Grenfell’s victims, who were mostly people of colour, Muslim and Arab, European migrants and refugees, were racialised as non-white and rendered disposable in ill-suited unsafe housing – a high-rise with flammable cladding, no sprinkler system or alarm, no evacuation plan and a single fire stair in London’s wealthiest borough – as their calls for their homes to be made safe were systematically ignored or silenced. This tragedy marked the deep failures of neoliberal urbanism, a story of outsourcing, deregulation and negligence (Hodkinson, 2020). But it was a tragedy rooted in the legacy and persistent violence of empire which ensured many of Grenfell’s victims lived through and then fled the enduring consequences of European colonisation only to face, on arrival in Britain, the ‘hostile environment’ expressly forged by Theresa May’s immigration acts (Danewid, 2020; El-Enany, 2017, 2019; Keenan, 2019). Grenfell brutally tells of a widespread slow violence of racialized displacements and discrimination wrought through London’s housing system (e.g. Lees and Hubbard, 2021). Parallel forms of state-enacted or -sanctioned coercion and violence that deny certain people home are commonplace: underfunding public housing, criminalising homelessness, policing public space, detaining asylum seekers and so on. These leave racialised subjects unhomed across all spheres of human life (work, housing, healthcare, policing, etc.).

Lending products and debt practices assemble other walls, with their unhoming work exposed by recent subprime lending and foreclosure crises. Indeed debt represents an enduring method of dispossession and indenture of racialized subjects – a method which has long been instrumental to leveraging racial difference to produce value, including through urban land, housing and infrastructure (Chakravartty and Da Silva, 2012; Jenkins, 2021; Park, 2018). ¹³ Unlike redlining and other exclusionary debt practices, Taylor’s (2019) account of insidious predatory inclusion of Black people in homeownership markets captures, for instance, how debt practices encode racialised blueprints, as race was conflated with risk to naturalise racialized geographies of predatory lending for white profit in midcentury America. Vested interests subordinated Black communities through racialized and gendered narratives that painted Black homespaces as dysfunctional and Black families, and especially women, as having ‘deficient capabilities’ (176) and being ‘incapable of achieving the status of home’ (11). These portrayals legitimised underwriting criteria for determining who ought to be included and enabled contrived insights into the speculative elements of ‘good housing’ (i.e. based on distance from Black families and neighbourhoods) to be actualised in rising housing values. In this racially-tiered housing market, each tier reinforced the other such that desirable, safe white suburbanisation was ‘dialectically connected’ to (37) and ‘unintelligible without’ (11) crisis-prone Black homes – we return to this interplay between unhoming/homing below. Debt relations also illustrate subjects’ uneven vulnerabilities to unhoming, as cis-heteropatriarchy ensures, for instance, such that it is women who are more likely to be over-indebted and reliant on higher-interest credit.

Staying with debt relations invites us to think about unhoming’s temporal dimensions too. Debt practices framed within longer temporalisations of empire and race underscore the enduring co-constitution of the architecture of empire and the apparatuses of (contemporary) social subjugation (Byrd et al., 2018: 1). Under settler colonialism, for instance, unhoming must attend to the colonial relation and how contemporary unhomings unavoidably interlock with Indigenous unhomings past and enduring. Lenape scholar Joanne Barker (2018: 20–22) provides helpful prompts in critiques of how the Occupy Wall Street movement, anticapitalist politics and associated scholarship normalises Indigenous erasures through discursive and ideological notions of ‘occupation’ and reclamations of the commons and ‘public land’ that implicitly deny indigenous stolen lands. As Barker underscores, Wall Street was contingent on indigenous dispossession right down to the street itself as a wall constructed, among other things, to bar Lenape people from their lands in lower Manhattan, providing the grounds for always-already racialized processes of financialization. With dispossession ‘not anecdotal but formative’ to US empire, Barker challenges: ‘might it be necessary to treat [dispossession] as a component of the economic disparity not only of Indigenous people but also others so indentured within/to the state?’ (34). Unhoming names how racialised subjects – those othered, including low-income households, people of colour, women, queer and trans individuals, for instance – find their home(making) disproportionately destabilised as diverse walls defend and protect the patriarchy, settler colonialism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, cis-normativity, ableism and other forms of oppression. ¹⁴

Digital and legal technologies help enact and obscure unhoming’s racialized domination and violence by distancing its perpetrators and neutralising and naturalising its classificatory work. Legal code and legal abstraction assembles and conceals state-sanctioned walls (Pistor, 2019; e.g. criminal justice: Alexander, 2011; and through policy: see Lea, 2020). Writing on Australian settler colonialism, Moreton-Robinson (2015: 79–92) challenges the apparent race neutrality of a high court decision by showing how the court’s denial of a Yorta Yorta native title claim turned on creating juridical and legal impediments which helped consolidate the court’s legal and political resistance to native title concessions. This decision affirmed the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous land. Britain’s ongoing imperial project provides another example, with El-Enany (2020) identifying how immigration laws helps enact the racialized ‘(b)ordering’ of national identity. This regime of exclusive belonging, authorised through abstracted legal filtering across artificial categories – aliens, migrants, asylum seekers, refugees and so forth – excludes racialized subjects of British imperialism from the spoils of the empire within Britain, even as their lands and bodies remain ongoing sites of colonial extraction and expulsion, as Grenfell corroborates. Turning to the US, Alexander (2011; also Gilmore, 2007) specifies how a ‘colourblind’ legal system systematically discriminates against African Americans, thereby enabling mass incarceration to operate as the New Jim Crow. This racial caste system, wrought by biased sentencing, political disenfranchisement, legal employment discrimination, probation and parole fees and fines and so on, trap racialized subjects in unhoming’s relentless undertow. Read alongside critical carceral studies (Gilmore, 2007), these latter practices of violence and carcerality embedded within myriad institutions and ‘softer systems’ including housing (Bonds, 2019), reinforce unhoming’s centrality to racial capitalism.

Digital technologies and financial and numerical abstraction construct and assert other walls, including as the guise of objectivity facilitates hidden-in-plain-sight violence in the service of capital. Staying in the US, Benjamin (2019) identifies the New Jim Code, describing how computational veneer, involving more discrete and seemingly colourblind digital tecnologies encode discriminatory practices and enact racial hierarchies. Proliferating landlord tech and carceral tech offer pertinent examples. As ‘racist robots’ bias Whiteness, illusions of objectivity obscure increasingly invasive domination (also Eubanks, 2018; O’Neil, 2016; for discussion: McKittrick, 2021: 103–121). These techniques span from engineered inequity to the more insidious benevolence of techno solutionism. These (automated) digital technologies, software and algorithms do not stratify on skin colour or individual histories even, but rather on ‘statistical associations to risk factors…the legacy of racial discrimination’, rendering an often automated ‘digital epidermilization’ (Brown, 2010 in Fields and Raymond, 2021). Walls assembled and asserted through digital technologies spatialise racialized social hierarchies in financialised housing markets, for instance, from the subprime loans extended to Black and Latinx households (Dymzki, 2009; Wyly et al., 2009) to the faceless extractive violences wrought by institutional landlords (Fields and Raymond, 2021).

Unhoming names a form of state-sanctioned or state-enacted violence wrought through and registered in the everyday lives of racialized subjects. For those racial capitalism entangles in vulnerable property relations, unhoming describes how propertied space may operate – even in places normatively understood as homely – as a ‘death trap’ (Chakravartty and Da Silva, 2012: 367) or necropolitical regime that ‘makes die’ and ‘lets die’ (Hong 2015: 13). Grenfell’s residents, for instance, endured their unhoming as a ‘slow death’, a relentless fear and threat of deportation and inability to escape racial state violence (El-Enany, 2019: 55–58; Keenan, 2019). For Grenfell’s survivors, unhoming’s dragnet endures in the torment of lives lost, homes destroyed and the ongoing denial of the colonial or racial dimensions of this tragedy and failure to address the role of racialisation and racial discrimination (El-Enany, 2019). Grenfell also underscores how unhoming is enacted and experienced through diverse material infrastructures, objects and artefacts. The design, governance and maintenance of the Grenfell tower generated discomfort for its residents who were unable to escape its territorial stigma and, ultimately, fatal danger generated through its negligent property management.

Unhoming does not name a singular experience. Moreton-Robinson (2015: 17–18) details how Indigenous people in Australia are rendered ‘homeless and out of place’ as ‘the hybrid of settlement…continues the legal fiction of terra nullius [nobody’s land] by positioning us as trespassers’. Indigenous people perceive this unhoming in their ‘everyday intersubjective relations between Indigenous and white subjects’ (94) and in amorphous sites, such as ‘the Australian beach’, where Indigenous unceded ancestral territories and relationalities to land are continually erased through everyday white performativities of possession, for instance (xxi). Conversely, unhoming might be experienced through unwanted (im)mobilities. Darling (2011) describes a British domopolitics of asylum wherein visions of ‘threatening’ migrants legitimise the subjection of those awaiting immigration decisions to techniques and sites of discomfort, where eviction, movement or inspection threatens subjects’ every moment. Over the Channel, in the refugee camps of Calais, Van Isacker (2019: 617) and Mould (2018) detail a ‘hyperactive campaign’ of domicide and state technologies of ‘destabilisation’ involving evicting, destroying place-making efforts and impeding social service provisioning, that ultimately aims to ‘break human bodies and spirits’ such that migrants abandon all unregulated movement, recognising their ‘dead end’. At that site, unhoming produced a fragile cycle of home(un)making that entrenched migrants’ impermanence and invisibility. ¹⁵

Thinking about unhoming as legally-sanctioned spatial and temporal precarity is productive. Precarity is not just a useful heuristic for describing the condition, subject position and experience of subjects unmoored by unhoming’s undertow. Precarity, as a relationship descriptor, operates within a relational ontology. ¹⁶ This makes precarity well-suited to characterising the way property relations tie us to each other. Recognising this, Blomley (2020) describes precarity as the lifeblood of our prevailing model of property – not only its lived reality but also its organising principle whereby one’s power to shape relations comes at the cost of another’s immunity to such changes. Recognising how property ties us to each other surfaces the uncomfortable interdependencies that necessarily exist between homes and ‘non homes’, between legitimate or illegitimate homemaking, and between dutiful or deviant homemakers. It gives analytic centrality to the way my homemaking relies on – potentially thrives on (Kotef, 2020) – another’s homeunmaking.

V Uncomfortable Relationalities

The violent dragnet of unhoming is knowable to all. But the impasse of property rights-based thinking, comforting delusions of the separative self, observance of the ‘central fiction of the fence – the lie of binary thinking’ all help justify our dereliction of responsibility or care for racialized others (Porter, 2014; Nedelsky, 1990: 183; Blomley, 2020; Hayes, 2020: 332). Our dominant vision of property buoys an ethic of intersubjective severalty (Blomley, 2010: 216) that not only authorises, legitimises and naturalises violence but does so by fostering apathy, hostility and even disgust (Bhattacharyya, 2018: 37). What eventuates as the prevailing property regime conditions us to its logics of severance is that the ‘relationship of abandonment and severalty’ inherent to private property ‘becomes a part of us’ (Safransky, 2017: 1087). What eventuates is a manufactured ‘social separateness’ (Melamed, 2015: 79); a denial of the inherent interdependencies of lives lived in propertied landscapes. This denial validates our perception of the threat others pose, and in turn naturalises violence towards ‘others’ as a response. It is a denial that helps explain ‘how people become divided from each other’ (Bhattacharyya, 2018: x) and how we become embolden to disavow and abandon each other. Home’s etymological associations with domo portend these confronting impulses: domo means to domesticate, tame and subdue and domopolitics describes ‘a will to domesticate the forces which threaten the sanctity of home’ (Walters, 2004: 241).

In forcing home as dominion and as belonging into the analytic frame, this framework does not shy away from this ‘difficult interrelatedness’ (McKittrick, 2011: 960) between my home(making) and your home(making), the way walls endanger your home(making) as it protects mine. Examples abound of these uncomfortable relationalities. Consider British citizenship politics and bordering regimes, for instance. El-Enany (2020: 6) diagnoses how Britain’s very ‘coherence’ as a nation-state under its ongoing imperial regime hinges on the interplay between the islands of Britain as territorialised sites of ‘order privilege and entitlement’ and its former colonies as territories of ‘insecurity, poverty, illness and violence’. Relatedly, Tyler (2020: 119–158) describes how British immigration’s performative demarcation of a population to govern and a population to regulate and reject legitimises the targeting and criminalisation of non-citizens. Exclusionary belonging and aspirations of dominion legitimise each other and they naturalise violence. Racialized immigration rhetoric and practice feeds the domopolitical desire for a safe and homely nation such that ‘British citizens demand it’ (ibid). Perpetuating a ‘politics of discomfort’ for non-citizens thus becomes part and parcel of enabling citizens to feel ‘at home’; it justifies, in the case of asylum seekers, for instance, ‘positions, techniques and places of discomfort, spaces in which feelings of belonging are to be undermined, negated or challenged’ (Darling, 2011: 269).

To foreground this interrelatedness, this framework insists on centring in and through home(making) the inextricable link between the possessive logics of patriarchal white sovereignty and the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty. It understands home(making) as contingent on original dispossession under settler colonialism. It understands unhoming as the very bedrock of the settler colonial home. In Australia, home(making) is practised in propertied landscapes that are always and everywhere Country (Porter, 2018). If white Australians feel they belong, if they feel ‘at home’, it is because white dominion has been naturalised through liberal ideals of private land ownership as commodifiable, useable, exploitable – naturalised through white possessive logics – and endorsed through its territorial and legal processes that define and circumscribe Indigenous sovereignty in particular ways (Moreton-Robinson, 2015: 18). It is only through the violence of rendering Indigenous people ‘ontologically homelessness’ and out-of-place that a space was and continues to be carved out for settler colonial relations of belonging (xix). White belonging involves a wilful denial of original thefts – a blindness, ignorance or disassociation perhaps. Or perhaps something even more insidious – after all, violence and its historical vestiges are often plain-to-see. Kotef’s (2020) theorisation of the coloniser in Palestine/Israel suggests as much, arguing colonisers adopt affectual techniques of attachment including through that violence – attachments to war, other forms of destruction, to landscapes partly destroyed, for instance – that enable them to construct individual and national homes (and ultimately identities) on the ruins of others’ homes. These unsettling dynamics, while essential, do not tell the whole story of home. For this, unhoming’s resistances must be given due place in this revised schema for home.

VI Assembling Other Possible Futures

Racialized subjects refuse their unhoming. Their resistance is more than a reaction to colonial and capitalist violence, to pervasive propertied imaginaries, to normalised understandings of urban space. Their resistance does more than disassemble walls. It does more than defend demands for inclusion or territorial repossession for those excluded. Through a diverse repertoire of urban protest and activism with varied agendas and tactics, racialized subjects establish solidarities and stake claims to contested territories. These ways of practising home are propositional. They invite other modalities of property; they compose a ‘different language of property’ (Porter, 2014: 17) that speaks of possibilities outside the matrix of walls that protect individual possession and liberal propertied subjectivities. They venture a respatialization (McKittrick, 2006): a remaking of urban space that builds another kind of home. Their territorialised propertied claims imagine and articulate alternative relations of emplacement, thickening relations of belonging and ‘(re)constituting collectives’ in socially and politically valuable ways (Melamed, 2015: 80; McKittrick, 2021; e.g. Justice and O’Brien, 2021). This homemaking recovers possibilities for (re)emplacement, for performing alternative lifeworlds that assert a different politics beyond the permissible rationalities of racial capitalism, including different ontologies and epistemologies of property: whether framed as abolitionist, anti/post-capitalist, decolonial, an alternative ethics of care or responsibility or something else. This resistance contains possibilities for practising home anew in contested propertied landscapes, for countercurrents that animate another kind of homing. This framework asks us to excavate in and through homemaking home's work in these kinds of reorientations and reconfigurations of propertied space.

Black feminist scholarship has long recognised home’s radical political potency for resistance, insurgence, empowerment and liberation (Brickell, 2012; Hook, 2014). Racialized subjects replenish and remake themselves in homeplaces and through non-capitalocentric practices of social reproduction (in which women are central) despite – and beyond – exploitative (labour) relations and the ravages of capital, for ‘love, care, community, survival’ (Bhattacharyya, 2018: 44, 55–57), for other kinds of belonging (also see ‘dwelling as difference’ Lancione, 2020: 275).

Resistance to unhoming reimagines propertied landscapes; it might reconfigure propertied landscapes. Blatman-Thomas (2019: 1410) work provides ideas for conceptualising how racialized subjects practise these kinds of homemaking. Writing on Australian settler colonialism, Blatman-Thomas (2019) conceptualises how Indigenous people practise ‘reciprocal repossession’. This is not legal repossession and indeed challenges the liberal ownership model by invoking property as land; Indigenous people’s reciprocal repossessions, rather, are complex ‘hybrid performances’ (1406) which ‘hold up’ Indigenous people in propertied landscapes. What are the possibilities for this form of repossession to carve out spaces for home to be reimagined and practised in ways that counter unhoming’s undertow, in ways that push aside the walls racialized subjects come up against? These possibilities are traced in the ways Indigenous people interact with contested social and built environments where they practise home. An indigenous homeowner, for instance, dismisses capitalist investor subjectivities, narrating her home-purchase in terms of the trees and landscape on her plot of land, as food to eat (subsistence) and as culture (‘bush tucker’), and therefore as means to practise home through ‘social and familial ties that are fundamental to expressions of home and Country’ (1404). As Blatman-Thomas (2019: 1410) argues, these practices of reciprocal repossession may materially rework property (relations) to the extent that repossession manifests as ‘the “dislocation” of “whiteness as property”’, such that through homemaking ‘blackness retains “value” as well’.

Reimagining and reconfiguring propertied landscapes is a shared endeavour for another kind of homing and, under settler colonialism, this resistance necessarily intersects with the decolonising project. Ramírez (2020: 693) underscores these overlooked inter-connectivities between isolated resistances and the possibilities to subvert colonial property regimes that flow from recognising their connection. Ramírez does this by bringing into conversation two Black and indigenous movements in Oakland, California, organising not four blocks from each other, yet in isolation. A first movement links the houselessness crisis to real estate speculation. Activists Moms 4 Housing, a group of precariously housed Black mothers, who position their occupation of a foreclosed house owned by a corporate investor as more than a struggle for housing and land or protest against perpetual dispossessions in their historically Black, devalued neighbourhood. Theirs is a struggle about belonging, over their bonds to place. A second movement involves the return of lands to indigenous stewardship. The woman-led Sogorea Te’ Land Trust’s decolonising vision goes beyond the ‘spatial constructs of private property and the temporal frame of settler colonialism’ (688): they seek ‘a new relationship or idea of land’ (687). Stewardship is about building ‘something in relation with one another’ that could offer, amid the local housing crisis, ‘futures for all peoples living in respectful coexistence’ (688). The cofounders recognised complex layered geographies of Oakland and inhabitants’ interrelatedness: ‘Whatever the issue is, we are related because you are on our territory. We share this land now.’ (688). These spatially-proximate but for now disconnected movements reinforce how shared attempts to enact another kind of homing will require ‘slow, intentional relationship building, learning how to be accountable accomplices and the mutual recognition of each others’ thefts’ (Ramírez, 2020: 689). Meanwhile, these and other (re)affirmations of Indigeneity reconfigure the order of property, whether in Oakland or Cairns, illustrating possibilities for reorientations within colonial property regimes and its cadastral map.

In thinking about this interconnectivity, we can be mindful of the multiscalarity of attendant relations of alternative urban belonging (e.g. their global-local nature). The possibilities that reside in these connections is evidence, for instance, in diverse Indigenous legal activisms sought through Law (Keenan, 2015: 97–127), in Law’s decolonial resistances (e.g. Law’s inconsistencies) and contra law, as a racialized technology (Johnson, 2016; Moreton-Robinson, 2015), where a shared common law tradition has strengthened trans-local solidarities between the settler societies of Australia, New Zealand and Canada (e.g. Johnson, 2016: 7).

VII Conclusion

This article brings race and the racialisation of people and places into dialogue with home to excavate the logics of race and associated racecraft in producing geographies of home. It intervenes in the critical geographies of home by opening up the conceptual terrain of home to property – a persistent ‘elephant in the room’ in geographic inquiry (Blomley, 2016a: 252) – as an instrumental technology of racial capitalism. By developing a revised property-sensitive conceptual framework for home, it seeks to encourage more systematic engagement with home/property/race dynamics, with broad applicability across diverse geographic sites, scales and spheres of human life. For scholars of home and scholars of racial capitalism, it plots conceptual terrain within the critical geographies of home for tackling shared concerns with the violence that unfolds from spatialised racial hierarchies of difference. For abolition geographers, it insists on homemaking as resistance and organising, and on homespaces as key abolitionist spaces, seeking due conceptual primacy for homespaces as places of freedom (see Gilmore, 2017). For (legal) geographers, it provides conceptual tools for thinking about the legal fabrication of home, tools that may also interest legal scholars who are concerned with establishing home more securely within law (e.g. Fox O'Mahony, 2006; Nield, 2013), albeit recognising law’s limits (Pistor, 2019; Moreton-Robinson, 2015). For housing scholars, a focus on property relations offers an alternative set of theoretical commitments to traditional tenure classifications, in recognition that those classifications increasingly misrepresent the complexities of property relations in situ. ¹⁷ Foremost, this article invites dialogue on and through the synergistic and antagonistic interplays between home and racialisation, including to move us towards brighter possible futures.

A key contribution of this framework is to excavate the work home does in the service of prevailing liberal regimes of property under racial capitalism. It historicises home by insisting on the racialized colonial genealogies of home and homemaking in settler colonial societies: it underscores the racialized geographies of home as contingent on the foundational dispossessions of indigenous lands. In this way, it positions all subjects’ unhomings as inextricably bound up in sedimented and persistent colonial relations. ¹⁸ This recontextualises the temporalities and geographies of home: it insists on the limits of contracted temporal frames and calls for attentiveness to colonial logics and asks for careful scrutiny of claims suggesting contemporary homemaking is somehow disconnected from original thefts. It invites us to contemplate home’s transnational geographies and transtemporal dimensions as layered property relations interlinking across place and time avowedly local or singular unhomings, as examples such as Grenfell illustrated.

Offering a more hopeful reprieve, this framework centres the work home does to disrupt hegemonic liberal regimes of property. It carves out analytic space for registering via home and as homemaking diverse often disconnected political acts and critiques of dominant epistemologies and ontologies of property. It reads homemaking as acts of repossession in a precarious world: as claims that assert an alternative calculus of property attuned to property’s social and redistributive functions, as ‘oppositional geographies’ (McKittrick, 2006), as counter practices of insurgency and emplacement, whether intimate or collective, local or global-local, fleeting or enduring. By centring resistance, this framework promotes methodologies invested in ‘unspelling’ (Hayes, 2020: 385) and recoding land. It calls for the critical geographies of home to centre another kind of homing.

By giving conceptual weight to these countercurrents, this framework also encourages an ‘urban praxis of remaining’ (Masuda et al., 2020; Roy and Rolnik, 2020). It recognises that racialized subjects’ perspectives are necessary resources in transformative politics, to derail the rights-based playbook of prevailing property regimes that brackets the dispossessed beyond the political (Bhandar, 2018). This is not about romanticising or colonising anew the real constraints propertied landscapes exercise on homemaking subjects, the way property space disorients racialized subjects. Resistance is not without risks, for instance of being co-opted (Melamed, 2015: 84), nor without limits given subjects’ uneven access to the means for politicisation. But to heed unhoming’s resistance acknowledges several truths: that fixating singularly on unhoming’s trauma risks reproducing its violence (see McKittrick, 2011) and that the dispossessed exert ‘a stubborn will to live, create, and ultimately to influence’ (Masuda et al., 2020: 243). It recognises this stubborn will – a will marshalled through homemaking – as possibilities for alternative ontologies of property and alternative epistemologies of land tenure and collective subjectivity, whether reciprocal, non-predatory, mutual, collective, cooperative, state or public property forms or something else. This framework encourages us to place these at the centre of our thinking about home – for these alternative patternings of relationships between people and place can jolt us from ‘property as we know it’ (Bhandar, 2018), they can challenge us to ‘consider how things can be otherwise’ (Safransky, 2017: 1087), they can inform emancipatory ‘propertied futures’ (McElroy, 2020: 112; Ramírez, 2020: 689).

As a provisional heuristic, this framework warrants empirical testing and refinement. There is broad scope to engage with other social institutions (e.g. beyond housing and immigration) and other established hierarchical systems (e.g. sexuality and ableism). In that vein, gender deserves attention more on par with its centrality to home, including to recognise by whom the home is expected to be made and in whose interests. Other refinements might consider conceptual overlap with informality, for example, since informality represents an ongoing, definitional questioning of the limits and conditions of the formal, an ongoing challenge to the legitimacy of territoriality. How might scholarship nuancing the informality/formality binary advance understandings of homemaking as negotiated in propertied landscapes? Informality research offers ‘grey spaces’ to conceptualise how marginalised subjects live suspended between legality and hopes of integration (whitening) and illegality and threats of eviction and impermanence (blackening) (Yiftachel, 2015). This framework sees homemaking as similarly multifaceted, even schizophrenic: melding both propertied defiance and resistance with acts of compliance and obedience, as racialised subjects mediate what is expected or authorised with how such walls unhome them.

In researching home, ethical questions abound given home’s inherent intimacies. We can be mindful of the limits of inclusionist methodologies to ‘resolve the problem of erasure’ (Barker, 2018: 34; Blatman-Thomas and Porter, 2019; Dorries et al., 2019; Porter and Yiftachel, 2019; Simpson, 2014) and recognise that even methodologies of the ‘remaining’ are constrained by the ‘limits of radical representation and even self-representation’ (Roy and Rolnik, 2020: 19). And we can adopt a relational reflexivity as researchers and consider ways our skills and institutional positions might be put to work – despite and beyond the neoliberal university – forging spaces for allyship and solidarity and working as ‘accomplices to these struggles’ (Ramírez, 2020: 689).