Carolina Talavera

Drawing on 18 months of research, my dissertation examines the production of bodily and social precarity through a municipal system of temporary accommodation (TA) for homeless people in an East London borough. Departing from the anthropology of homelessness, which has focused on rough sleepers at the intersections of mental health and addiction, I use TA to redefine the issue, describing a complex and mostly hidden spectrum of housing insecurity. Studying the experience and management of temporary accommodation in London generated insights into how encounters with material and immaterial infrastructures accumulate in spaces and bodies, compounding embodied and social injuries. Focusing on the comparatively mundane and minute, like a missing bath rail or a slowly spreading patch of mold, my research de-centers the more ‘extreme’ forms of injury that typically narrate suffering. Instead, it makes visible the kinds of harm that accumulate in the stagnating spaces of social abandonment and illustrates how they aggregate in bodies that are left to endure these exposures. To do this, I pay particular attention to the affective sensorium of decaying material and immaterial infrastructures to theorize how precarity becomes embodied. By centering these ethnographic encounters, ‘waiting’ (i.e. waiting your turn) can be understood as the condition of possibility for the accumulation of these injurious exposures, but also for their disavowal, bracketing them as only temporary. Through this approach, my research focuses on the stagnation of a housing ‘crisis’ and how material insecurity in Britain should be understood as endemic—the pervading condition of everyday life. I argue that demands to wait for material security can be understood as a mechanism of contemporary governance under austerity. Secondly, that the condition of waiting itself is experienced as an injury, an unintelligible non-event under contemporary liberal governance.