Presentation short abstract

This presentation explores how mould is mobilised to protest housing and wider injustices in the UK context. It argues that mould acts as both material and metaphor, bringing attention to forms of racialised blame generated through UK migration, housing and welfare regimes.

Presentation long abstract

This presentation explores how mould becomes lived and known as a materiality to protest urban injustice. It presents ethnographic research involving biographic interviews and creative workshops with 50 Somali mothers experiencing housing distress in temporary accommodation in Birmingham, UK. These methods explored the everyday practices through which residents (re)produced scientific and medicalised evidentiary regimes in a hostile state context. Following the mobilisation of mould in and through women’s struggles for safe homes, we argue that mould acts as both material and metaphor, bringing attention to forms of racialised blame generated through UK Hostile Environment and housing policies. We show how the subjects of such policies mobilise mould – and its perceived impact on their bodies - as sites of evidence to hail the state. Drawing on STS, anthropological and geographic literature, this paper is part of a broader move to understand how toxic evidence is mobilised within the relational politics of post-welfare states.