Hi, I’m Hannah Absalom. I started at the University in 2018 in Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, completing my PhD in 2023. I moved to INLOGOV/DPAP to complete an ESRC Fellowship.
My thesis examined the application of behavioural insights in English social housing. Through this study, I have grown interested in relational approaches to policy-making and research. I’m particularly interested in how a relational conceptualisation of the home makes visible the material and emotional processes that ‘make’ a home. In other words, I am exploring how something we understand intuitively, that home is an emotional place, can underpin social housing policy and practice. I am of the view that social housing practice could be brought into closer alignment with what is important to tenants about their home and landlord services by working with this conceptualisation. Due to my 18 years working in social housing practice, I appreciate how hard it is to bridge the gap from academic research to practice. This is reflected in my engagements with the sector, where I regularly speak about my research to practitioners and tenants. In particular, I enjoy working with a group of tenants who participated in my research and are now taking active roles in shaping my research agenda.
Over 2022-2023, I secured two rounds of ESRC Impact Acceleration Account grants and won a cash prize from a sector award scheme called the ‘William Sutton Prize’. I explored the role of emotional insights in practice, writing my first report advocating for an understanding of home as an emotional place and highlighting the institutional barriers that inhibit such an approach from emerging in practice. I also explored the utility of emotional and psychological insights with a group of tenants in a project called ‘Feeling at Home’. A pivotal moment was facilitating a workshop where we explored what made the participants angry and fearful about their home and landlord services. This was a highly moving workshop and resulted in a guide to co-producing domestic abuse plans with involved tenants and community representatives. This workshop also resulted in my Fellowship research called ‘Home Encounters’.
Home Encounters examines how tenants and landlord representatives ‘meet’ each other in the tenant's home. Tenants reported that these encounters could be emotionally fraught experiences, and the aim is to co-produce recommendations with tenants and practitioners to improve the experience of home visits. It is timely as social housing has been under the spotlight, and many social landlords are undertaking a ‘Home Audits’ programme. The home encounters research, and the domestic abuse focus evidence of the value of research in exploring the emotional dimensions of how the home is experienced.
The next challenge I aim to explore is the use of environmental sensors in the homes of general needs tenants. Such sensors are well evidenced in care home environments but are under-researched in the context of social housing where no support need justifies their use. They are being installed by social landlords due partly to concerns about mould and cold in tenants' homes. I aim to host a public conversation about the use of the technology in tenants' homes, as I am concerned that tenants are being excluded from the decisions to install the sensors. I’m interested in how the sensors impact how tenants relate to their homes, their ‘selves’, and their landlord, in addition to exploring the claims made of the sensor's utility in effectively reducing the problem of mould and cold in homes.
If you are interested in hearing more about Hannah’s research, or exploring future collaboration options, please contact her via email at h.absalom@bham.ac.uk