Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MEDIAHOMES (Media Homes: Housing Precarity on Screen in Ireland, Portugal and the UK from the 2008 crisis to COVID-19.)
Reporting period: 2021-12-01 to 2023-11-30
The 2008 economic crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic have resulted in growing housing precarity and increased homelessness worldwide. But how do screen media highlight these issues? The MEDIAHOMES project developed a groundbreaking interdisciplinary methodology, combining humanities and the social sciences, to investigate representations of the current global housing crisis in different film productions: essays, documentaries, and other non-fiction screen media. It explored who produces them, their circulation, and the aspects of gender, racial and social class inequalities that inform their making. Using case studies from Ireland, Portugal and the United Kingdom, the project created a transnational model of media representation of the current housing crisis in a pandemic reality. Screen media representations are crucial to convey larger ideas about society and about the place of marginalised communities within it. Therefore, understanding how they work, who they centre, and who has access to their production, constitutes a fundamental tool to represent precarity in contemporary society, but also to envisage more sustainable and just housing futures.
The research found that the large majority of ‘precarious home’ narratives are directed and produced by women. Vulnerable to housing precarity, especially when multiple factors are present (i.e. economic fragility, domestic violence), women nevertheless play a crucial role in housing justice movements and media production. Despite its importance, women’s labour is often invisible, as they are still marginalised in terms of access to, and retention in, the film and media industries, as feminist scholarship demonstrated. Women making housing films also experience these limitations. The lack of wider recognition of women’s crucial contribution to the housing media corpus is also a problem of access to their work, data collection being also strongly impacted by structural inequality. This problem needs to be systematically addressed by showcasing women’s work, but also by preserving it. The project has contributed to showcasing women’s work through screenings, research presentations, and publications and sharing information on the project website.
Through a strongly interdisciplinary methodology combining methods in the humanities with studies in the social sciences, a new, transnational model to analyse screen narratives of housing precarity, their production and circulation has been devised. Across a range of documentaries, essay films, realist features and short fiction, non-fiction and “hybrid” films, the project investigated the representation of the ongoing housing crisis and traced its intersections with the developing corpus of housing precarity in the pandemic. The project theorised a “precarious home genre” to describe the recurring types of narratives (as reflected in thematic and formal aspects) across these different media forms and formats. These contribute, it was found, to an emerging “cinema of housing resistance”. This model was applied in publications and research presentations the Fellow produced during the course of the action. In detail, the work consisted of analysing the film and media case studies and categorising them according to different recurring themes, spaces and formal aspects. Within the broader focus on representation of marginalised communities, the research has identified a particular area of interest in representations of two experiences portrayed in the films: youth and motherhood, often in relation to gender and labour. Specific publications and research presentations addressed this range of aspects. The research found that the large majority of ‘precarious home’ narratives are directed and produced by women. Vulnerable to housing precarity, especially when multiple factors are present (i.e. economic fragility, domestic violence), women nevertheless play a crucial role in housing justice movements and media production. Despite its importance, women’s labour is often invisible, as they are still marginalised in terms of access and retention in the film and media industries, as feminist scholarship demonstrated. Women making housing films also experience these limitations.