Rent Cultures Workshop
In June 2024, we were delighted to celebrate the start of our two-year collaboration with TORCH: we held a workshop to welcome new and returning members of the network, and to get a flavour for rent-focused research in Oxford. The workshop revolved around our definitions of ‘rent’ and our approaches to studying it. We had a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation across our disciplines—Geography, History, English, and more—and started to see common themes emerging.
We posed two key questions to attendees: ‘What does rent mean to you?’ and ‘How are you thinking about it, personally and in your academic work?’. In our discussion, we opened up a series of wider questions which will help us shape and define our programme of events over the next two years.
In answering the first question, we spent a long time considering rent within the framework of housing. We started to tease out the relationship between the rent crisis and other housing emergencies, such as the crash of the 2000s. One of our main threads was homeownership—and whether rent and ownership are opposite sides of the same coin. We considered the ideologies surrounding homeownership vs. rental and the ways in which each mode of living might map onto accepted narratives of ‘success’ and ‘failure’. How might this binary inform a nation’s sense of itself, and how is it embedded in policy? Historically, ownership meant enfranchisement: those with property were granted a stake in society. What happens when we break ‘rent’ down further, charting shifts over time and considering the distinctions between private and social housing? We noted how prominent the current rent crisis is in public discourse, and wondered whether this was because of its impact on the white middle class. This is the group to whom policy is addressed—not to those who experience the problem as chronic. How might we situate rent within wider conversations about the welfare network? This would mean tracing the connections between rent and health and considering the provision of old age care.
Within this framework, we discussed our understanding of rent as a relationship or dynamic. How far is this relationship personal, professional, transactional, and/or exploitative? We thought about the individual people who either participate in, or facilitate, rental transactions: tenants, landlords, and intermediaries. Rent-collectors, agents, absent landlords, and landladies aren’t just actors in the world, but cultural tropes, and they’ve been represented in diverse ways over time. The figure of the landlady, for example, tells us something about changing attitudes to women’s employment.
Because much of our discussion touched on the idea of a ‘crisis’, we naturally moved on to consider the forms rent activism takes—especially within periods of crisis and emergency. What might alternative models and arrangements of living look like? We heard about relationships to land and housing that privilege stewardship over profit, commodification, and individual ownership; about co-housing initiatives that come out of the rental crunch; and about displacement, rent strike, and the creative and generative reappropriation of space.
When it came to our academic work, we explored the methodologies we can (and do) use to understand rent, and asked how close we are able get to the way rent is experienced. Rent touches our everyday lives, shapes family and kinship structures, and informs our movement through the world. Some of us work with case studies—
considering a neighbourhood, perhaps, or a community. But there are questions about who defines the ‘community’, and about our means of accessing and representing rental stories. What does personal testimony look like over long stretches of history? We’ve all lived mobile lives, navigated housing markets, and encountered forms of precarity, which means we’re invested in these conversations above and beyond our explicit academic interests. But we acknowledged that rental injustice is felt most acutely by others—by the people who weren’t in the room. Our thinking about rent should take into account differences in class, race, gender, sexuality, disability, age, and nationality.
We also agreed how important it would be to consider rent in global, imperial, and neo-imperial contexts. Some of us are researching rent in individual neighbourhoods and among immigrant populations, and are especially aware that nations have distinct rental systems. At the same time, rent is a driving force in a global capitalist framework. In our ‘rentier society’, it is a form of investment over different scales—both a mechanism and a symptom of financialisation. And it intersects with technology in all sorts of ways, from the digitisation and automation of the individual tenant’s experience to the rise of AirBnb and ‘digital nomadism’.
Coming back to the name of our network—which draws attention to rent cultures—we asked if there is such thing as a rental aesthetics. Pinning this down would involve considering the presence of rent on page and stage: there is an extraordinary body of art and literature about rent. It’d also involve asking whether rent is a cultural formation that produces certain aesthetic regimes: from the so-called ‘sterility’ of care homes, to the look and feel of housing developments (codes, cards, numbers), to the parameters governing a tenant’s furnishings and decorations. Tenants, we thought, can be creative in the way they inhabit space.
Ultimately, we acknowledged that it is difficult to find a definition of rent that applies to all contexts over space and time, and that, while rent intersects with questions of housing, it is, itself, broader: we might say it’s a structure, a lens for thinking about our lives, and a metaphor or microcosm for financial models.
The workshop gave us much to think about, and suggested plenty of possible directions for the future as we develop our programme. The programme will involve collaborative readings of plays, film screenings, and a graduate reading group, alongside more traditional academic events between now and Trinity 2026. We are excited to continue these conversations at our future events.
