This research aims to provide fundamental knowledge regarding how everyday experiences of housing insecurity may foment populist political commitments. Despite the growing influence of populist movements globally, the phenomenon has garnered little attention in anthropology; the few anthropological accounts that do discuss populism in depth rarely do so through long-term socially embedded ethnography. More common are accounts that rely upon methodologies developed in political science, and rely upon analysis of populist leaders’ discourse. By eschewing anthropology’s hallmark methodology of ethnography, analysts fail to gather data on the lifeworlds of populists, and fail to grasp the broader processes of populist subjectivation and experience.
Through ‘Living Populism: Polarisation and Quotidian Experience’ (LPPQE) I will move past the discursive reduction of populism to examine how populist commitments are made through everyday experience – in particular though looking to how tenants’ experiences of navigating housing conflicts in Madrid, Spain, lead to populist understandings of the political landscape.
This research will have both academic and societal impacts. A more ethnographically grounded approach than has so far been taken by many theorists of populism, which explores the domestic lives of populist supporters will, I suggest, offer far deeper and more nuanced insights regarding the phenomenon. By adopting this methodology, I will help set the standard for how anthropologists study populism in the future. Even beyond the emerging anthropology of populism, anthropologists and other social scientists will increasingly have to account for populist politics due to the continuing political importance of the phenomenon. The results of this project will enrich anthropological research writ large. Much as neoliberalism has become a pervasive topic explored in a wide range of anthropological subfields, populism too will become an issue that many anthropologists will need to deal with, regardless of the theme that they are investigating.
