Dr Erika Martino

Graduated in 2023

Project Description

In Australia housing policy is driven by a neoliberal ethic of care and social housing is residualised as a social good. Alongside this, gendered social practices affecting housing affordability and security (e.g., scarce housing, employment and financial resources) marginalise women. Compounding women’s vulnerability is exposure to domestic and family violence (DFV) which exacerbates their need for housing support. This relationship remains invisible in housing data and policy as the causes and consequences of gender-based housing marginalisation remains disconnected from the causes and consequences of DFV. In this context, DFV responses such as safety planning remain individualised and situated within a health and criminal framework; largely disconnected from the public realm of social and affordable housing for women. In responding to this gap, it is worth considering how housing actors can support the normative aims of safety planning through the assembling of women’s housing; and specifically, how the practices and relations stemming from these partnerships are situated within a larger ethical framework. A feminist ethics of care provides a relational framing which can support the integration between housing and the normative aims of safety planning by reframing housing’s function as a “care infrastructure”. Consideration of how safety is assembled through a care lens can help to overcome the artificial separation of housing and support services; highlight how housing actors can be a social responder to women’s safety; and help us to think about housing projects as part of a wider societal network of collective forms of care and interdependency.

Supervisors

Professor Rebecca Bentley, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health
Associate Professor Ilan Wiesel, School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences