As a sociologist, my prior experience of archives can be best described as excavational. Reading archives and analysing them as sociological data is an established sociological research method. Whereas archiving as a sociological practice has been almost completely overlooked, despite some of the practice like ethnography are like a form of archiving. Being part of Glasgow Housing Struggles Archive project has helped my think through archiving housing struggles as a sociological practice. Derrida notes that archive derive from Arkhē – a Greek word meaning government, and what we come to know of archives are those of official records, government materials, state bureaucracy – all imbued with power. The counter-power of community archives have a long history, providing representation and grassroots knowledge which often get excluded or lost from the historical record. Community digital archives opens up opportunities for sociologists think their sociological practice in different ways, as form of live sociology, which moving beyond the dictaphone and embracing digital age (Back), and which seeks to curate a public knowledge (Puwar and Sharma, 2012) and as praxis in how it can disrupt power and knowledge in relation of housing inequality.
I’d been thinking more creatively and carefully about my sociological practice around my research on housing inequality and evictions, and how to approach researching evictions with an ethos of care. As Les Back notes ‘Moral consequences follow from the way sociologists tell society’. Evictions have become commonplace in Britian today. And the extent of this really came to light publicly this through data published by Ministry of Justice in England in Wales – which caused shockwaves – 167 court led evictions a day in 2017. This is an ‘officially recorded’ eviction figure so we know so we know this in reality if far higher. Not archival but this speaks to the power of official records telling the story of evictions. The circulation of this statistical data acted as a powerful catalyst to spur housing researchers, activists and campaigners to demands better protections for tenants. But for many people, evictions and struggles against landlords are often not seen, they are invisible and the difficultly with evictions being unseen is that they become an individual burden and shame. Practices in resisting evictions from PAH in Barcelona, make the sharing and socialising of one’s burden as a collective struggle fundamental part of their strategy to responding to eviction. The current debates around rent controls is another example of contested narrative. Successive governments, the National Residential Landlords Association, and academics alike, none of whom represent tenants, have been powerful in claiming rents must be deregulated, rent that controls are useless or even dangerous. The space for tenants’ voice and desires is negligible. Giving voice to tenants has been vitally important getting the rent controls back on the political agenda, thanks to tenant unions and housing campaigners. This is a case of history repeating, of course, as tenants fight for the return of rent control that that were so hard fought for in the first place. This denotes the interconnected of housing struggles, they are not bounded and discrete, they build from earlier struggles and generate later periods of contention. Yet housing struggles are much less documented as labour struggles.
As I thought about how to talk about the experience and resistance to evictions and housing struggles, I started thinking about how this could also be shared as a form of knowledge which empowered communities. Helping to build a community archive is generative, it disrupts that official narrative by giving voice to both housing struggles and their histories, including the violence against tenants, tenants’ desires and tenant knowledge. An archive of housing struggle brings all of this together as knowledge, as a repository, public resource, a testimony. It goes beyond the ‘attractiveness’ associated with traditional research methods, like interview, offering the capacity for co-production within and for communities.
The Workers’ Stories Project achieved this so brilliantly by providing a snapshot into the everyday lives of workers during covid-19: ‘We want to show future generations how workers experienced the COVID-19 crisis in Scotland and encourage workers to bring their story to life using any method they think captures what working life is like during this historic moment’. But more than being this vivid time capsule, there was a cultural production and community education and co-creation elements to this project, which was why it was so powerful see here. This brought to mind to what Back calls live sociology, premised upon ‘new ways of telling and showing its empirical evidence and arguments through using techniques established in sculpture, curatorial practice, theatre, music and television drama’. ack cites Bruno Latour curatorial sociological practice developed in the Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (2005) as an example. This exhibition invited participants to engage with objects in order to produce an assemblage of political views on a current issue and in doing to brought generated public assembly. I think too of Martha Rosler’s If You Lived Here which enabled amore more specifically, critical discussion of the housing crisis in new York at that time which brought together a host of different actors in the city,
Puwar and Sharma (2012: 43) have developed the idea of a curating sociology as one which seeks to ‘adapt some of the practices of the curator, and grasp ‘curating as a research process’ (Wells, 2007) that embraces creativity and experimentation in the production of public knowledge […..] it is a methodological commitment to collaborative knowledge production for creative public intervention and engagement’. Puwar and Sharma offer the idea of curatorial sociology through the medium of exhibitions, but it seems aptly applied to archives. Building an archive is an act of public sociology, it can offer alternative forms of knowledge which challenge the public or official record, a resource for knowledge, for popular education, for building power in working class communities.
Thinking about capturing the current conjuncture of housing inequalities and housing crisis and their deeper histories through a sociological practice, like Latour’s public assembly or Rosler’s it is a powerful tools for knowledge and debate it goes further community archives are not mere public knowledge, they are also a documentation of an experience, they offer receptacle to carry the violence of the housing struggle as an act of violent displacement, a traumatic event which communities and tenants experienced. What happens to the displaced, their injury, their story? They don’t just disappear, and they carry that pain and that knowledge with them. I hope that the archive might be place where this can be gathered, held, memorialised, located within the past and future housing struggles in the city. Archives foreground the importance of temporalities and memory in housing struggles. This memory of earlier housing struggles is vital to locating contemporary struggles within the wide historical struggles, challenging notions of presentism, and intergenerational knowledge. These struggles are not bounded and discrete, each drew on earlier movement activity, and spawned later periods of contention, they are what Gillan describes as vectors.
Kirsteen Paton
