Oral Presentation The Institute of Australian Geographers Conference 2023

Conceptualising displaceability on stolen land (17866)

Priya Kunjan 1 , Libby Porter 1 , David Kelly 1
  1. RMIT University, Melbourne, VICTORIA, Australia

Australia is in the midst of a housing crisis, with the extent of this crisis commonly understood to be restricted to relatively recent incidences of mass housing insecurity and framed by Eurocentric modes of relating to home and emplacement. Often omitted from analyses of such dwelling precarity, however, are the ways in which ongoing Indigenous sovereignty and settler colonialism inflect experiences of dwelling, as well as theories of change underpinning policy and organizing initiatives seeking to achieve housing justice. Yiftachel's (2020) conceptualisation of 'displaceability' draws our attention to the conditions under which people are involuntarily distanced from the full resources and rights necessary for dwelling. We bring displaceability into conversation with Barker's (2018) approach to Indigenous territory as analytic in order to investigate what it means to dwell under conditions of precarity that are inextricable from settler colonialism's logic of elimination. This requires an expanded notion of dwelling that proceeds from acknowledging Indigenous sovereign relations to home as Country, reorienting approaches to understanding and addressing housing insecurity experienced by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Australia.

  1. Barker, J. (2018). Territory as Analytic. Social Text, 36(2), 19–39. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-4362337
  2. Yiftachel, O. (2020). From displacement to displaceability: A southeastern perspective on the new metropolis. City, 24(1–2), 151–165. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2020.1739933