Setting the Scene Capitalism is amazingly good at devouring the things that would seek to challenge it, then packaging that same thing up and selling it back to people through its own market tendrils. It is somewhat of a superpower. You may recognise this process from things like:   Self-care is radical; rest to resist. Buy this premium Radical Rest  subscription app to provide you with daily self-care prompts for a more radically rested you!   Reject the cult of beauty; embrace your natural self. Buy our Natural Self concealer to banish those bags and let the real you shine ..read more

Have you ever been part of a social movement or community initiative that started off with great momentum but eventually lost its way? You’re not alone. I have definitely been there. It’s frustrating and disheartening. One of the critical factors behind the success of any social movement is strategy. Strategy is a word I struggle with because I think it gets used in the same way as ‘god’ or ‘of an excellent standard’. We say these words without clearly defining what we do and do not mean, what we include and what we exclude. I can also get the ick from the word strategy because of how corpora ..read more

What do tiny houses do I started out researching and writing this thesis about tiny house living five years ago. When I began, I think I was more concerned with finding out if tiny houses were a good intervention or not. It was a much more yes/no question. After five years I am much more interested in how women are using tiny houses to change their lives, not if they are managing to do so. Conforming and resisting Women have shared with me stories about about their lives which highlight tensions between conforming and resisting. Conforming to capitalist modes of relating and resisting them. C ..read more

Tiny Houses as Resistance: A Multi-Institutional Politics Perspective Photo by David Gonzales from PexelsMulti-Institutional Politics: Academicese for ‘doing lots of stuff at the same time’. I have become pretty taken with the concept of Multi-Institutional Politics as a way to understand what tiny houses and the people who live in them are doing. As an academic and an activist, my primary interest lies in what people are doing and how I can help them do some of that stuff. It’s action focussed. MIP is useful for looking at what people are doing. A multi-institutional approach suggests that ra ..read more

Tiny homes are weirdly both liberating and crushing It’s a really tricky one. Luckily, I love tricky stuff and have made an entire career out of pointing at stuff and saying ‘Gah! That’s tricky isn’t it?’. The TLDR seems to be broadly the same TLDR as so many other social situations: the whiter, richer, hetero-er (?), cis-er, educated-er you are, generally the easier all this is for you to navigate. Here’s what I see: On the one hand, tiny houses can offer a seriously affordable way to live. Like unbelievably cheaper than conventional houses or flats. One of my participants built their entire ..read more

It looks to me like things are a bit bad and scary at the minute. How might regenerative finance change that? In a world increasingly facing the consequences of climate change and massive social inequality, it seems like it would be a good idea to have some better financial systems that can actually address these challenges. Enter regenerative finance. It’s a way of using money that is actually very old, but does seem counter-cultural now under our existing hyper consumerist corporate capitalist arrangement. As far as I can understand, regenerative finance aims to harness the power of fi ..read more

Here is the TLDR: Dieting probably makes you feel guilty. Dieting with food, dieting with possessions. Both processes are about self-denial, self-control, and self-discipline. Both processes require you to have a predefined idea in your head about what the ‘right’ way to look or to live is. Both require you to look at yourself, your life, your home and see things that you don’t like. You also need to believe that you will be able to feel good if you diet enough, or in the right way, or for the right amount of time, or by replacing the things you usually eat/do/buy with different, other stuff ..read more

Tiny houses have always existed From a historical perspective, the idea of tiny houses as a solution to financial and social problems is not new. Survival in the face of severe constraint is especially not new to women. At the end of this blog there is a bit about screaming from rooftops, feel free to skip to that bit if you want. Throughout history, women have been economically marginalized and excluded from property ownership and decision-making, which has made them vulnerable to economic insecurity and dependence on others. The idea of living in small, affordable homes has been a popular s ..read more

A converted van can be a heterotopia My PhD thesis looks at women who design and build their own tiny houses. When I first started this project, I knew I was interested in what effect living in a tiny house would have on their experience of work, money, and time. I was also interested in if living in a tiny house affected women’s relationships, particularly with men. As time went on and I began collecting data – speaking with 35 women from 11 different countries – I started to see tiny houses as a type of ‘other space’. Tiny houses are a type of ‘other’ space Women told me stories of personal ..read more