PhD Dissertation Defense

Tuesday, August 20, 2024

Rationing Housing: How Technologies, Providers, and Definitions of Need Sort and Stratify by Health

 

Tessa M. Nápoles

When there is not enough housing for all who need it, housing agencies must triage and prioritize who receives assistance, and who is left out. In this dissertation, I explore how people in the social and healthcare safety net are sorted and stratified by technologies, service providers, and definition of need. Drawing from observations of and interviews with service providers and their clients experiencing housing insecurity and homelessness, I focus on the increasing incorporation of illness into definitions of housing need and vulnerability and how biomedical logics have emerged as central to systems that prioritize people experiencing housing insecurity, homelessness, and poverty. By investigating the processes involved in the adjudication of who should be prioritized for housing within housing rationing systems, I provide a clearer evidence base for housing and healthcare safety net institutions and policymakers to understand how social institutions both reproduce and mitigate housing inequality. Such evidence suggests how we might strengthen our ability to implement fair and equitable processes along which housing assistance is rationed and allocated in the context of housing scarcity. This research contributes to scholarly understandings of the social construction of deservingness, boundary and classification work, and technological rationalization and quantification.

When: Tuesday, August 20, 2024

Time: 10:00 am

Where (in person): Valley Tower, 12th floor, View Room (#1204)