Media Homes: Housing Precarity on Screen in Ireland, Portugal and the UK from the 2008 crisis to COVID-19.

This project aims to carry out ground-breaking work on European film and media representations of the home and their networks of production and circulation from the 2008 economic crisis to the COVID-19 emergency.

It will take as case studies Ireland, Portugal and the UK to investigate representations of the home, housing precarity and homelessness, focusing on the aspect of socioeconomic inequality across gender, race and class.

Its overall objective is to devise, through a strongly interdisciplinary methodology combining methods in the humanities with studies in the social sciences, a new, transnational model to analyse screen narratives of housing precarity, their production and circulation.

Across a range of documentaries, essay films, realist features and short non-fiction films the project will investigate the representation of an ongoing housing crisis and trace their intersections with the developing corpus of housing precarity in the lockdown and the pandemic.

Within this corpus, I will consider three modes of media activity: 1) representation 2) production and 3) circulation (distribution and screening).

The main research objectives of the action are: 1) to build a transnational corpus of media representations of the urgent challenge of housing precarity and inequality within European cinema and to provide an innovative model for its analysis across media genres, 2) to understand who the subjects producing this corpus are and whether filmmakers from a variety of gender, race and class backgrounds have equal access to representation or not 3) to understand how films about housing circulate across different platforms online and offline and in society at large 4) to investigate how these productions have been affected by the transformation of the home into a site of creative labour during the pandemic and how this intersects with socioeconomic inequality.