Home: socio-legal interventions

Cowan, Dave ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9750-8262 2024. Home: socio-legal interventions. Jacobs, Keith, Flanagan, Kathleen, De Vries, Jacqueline and MacDonald, Emma, eds. Research Handbook on Housing, the Home and Society, Edward Elgar, pp. 109-121. (10.4337/9781800375970.00015)

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Abstract

In this chapter, it is argued that socio-legal studies offers something different to the study of housing and home from those important studies from other disciplines. While we may share much in terms of our methods and ways of seeing housing and home, socio-legal studies has offered insights about the impact of regulation on housing and home; ideas about property itself, specifically (re-)considering the exclusion thesis; and, ideas about what contexts might matter in the construction of home in (and out of) law. The aim of this chapter is to draw out from these three examples an appreciation of why understandings of legality – interpreted broadly – matter. Rather than reflecting the debates about housing and home, socio-legal studies refracts those debates, demonstrating broader considerations in how housing and home are constructed, and opening up new possibilities of change. Taking an example (and, starting with the example) of the mundane – a thing such as a battery smoke detector, which one can buy cheaply – we can see how concerns about health and safety in the home have gained a regulatory fixity and are now part of the make-up of housing and home because they are risk prevention devices; yet, they are unseen and unobserved (until the battery runs down and it makes an annoying beeping sound, which offers a further self-governing opportunity); regulations, oddly, require them in privately rented accommodation in England, but, perhaps oddly, not in other forms of accommodation, although they are routinely provided in social housing (without regulation) and newbuild properties (which require them to be built in to the electric circuitry). One might say that the smoke detector is itself an actant in producing a version of the social, in discriminating between types of accommodation which are risky, but also re-producing ideas about tenure, albeit non-simplistically and problematically.

Item Type:	Book Section
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Law
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HM Sociology K Law > K Law (General)
Publisher:	Edward Elgar
ISBN:	9781800375963
Last Modified:	18 Feb 2025 15:12
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/165507

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