Structures of feeling: the affective economies of private renting in the Majority World

Invited presentation at the Urban Studies Seminar Series, University of Glasgow (Oct-2023). Abstract:

The interest in the private renting sector as a mechanism generator of new inequalities is dominated by accounts of the Minority World. In these economically developed countries of sustained regulatory, market, welfare and tenant-activism institutions, much of the focus has fallen on proposing ways of increasing the sector’s efficiency and addressing tenants’ precarity. But what about the Majority World? 

 Advancing a Critical Interpretative Synthesis of the academic literature on renting in the Majority World and drawing on the method of ‘experimental comparison’, I aim to read the affective economies of private renting through Raymond William’s (1977) concept of ‘structures of feeling’ that is a ‘sense of a shared affective quality through which the present is rendered sensible and apprehended’. Through an inductive/deductive interpretation, I propose understanding the affective economies of private renting through three dominant structures of feeling: (a) greed and alienation, emerging through capitalist relations as exposed by Karl Marx (1867), and more recently Madden and Marcuse (2016); (b) ethics of care, emerging through the social infrastructure of diverse economies, as exposed by Karl Polanyi (1957), and more recently Gibson-Graham (2008); and (c) cruel optimism, emerging through the attrition of the conditions of possibility of the ‘good life’, as exposed by Lauren Berlant (2011). I apply this framework of interpretation to the very different historical presents of Eastern Europe, Western Africa (Ghana and Nigeria) and the Indian subcontinent. Rooted in broader theories of affect (Anderson 2014), it is hoped that the theoretical reading proposed shows that the lived experience of private renting is not only shaped by economic and political structures but also by structures of feeling through which the other two are both reproduced and questioned, potentially leading to the emergence of new everyday practices and institutional arrangements.