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In Britain, the number of young single people living in shared accommodation is on the rise. While sharing may be positive when voluntarily chosen, those who are forced to share accommodation may have far more negative experiences. This paper examines how recent changes to the Shared Accommodation Rate of housing welfare have resulted in people having to share accommodation until the age of thirty-five. Our focus is on the experiences of young single women who are in receipt of housing benefit and are living on low or no income. The paper is based upon forty biographical interviews with people who have lived, or are living in, shared accommodation with strangers. It emphasises how, although having a roof over their heads, women living in shared accommodation often do not feel at home. Shared living resulted in domestic space being experienced not as a site of refuge, but as a place of insecurity and fear. The paper highlights how cuts to housing welfare have removed a vital infrastructure of care, leaving some young women in a position of heightened vulnerability. We hence propose that vulnerability should be conceptualised as a structural condition rather than an inherent gendered disposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to advance understandings of austerity's everyday affects by examining how neoliberal welfare retrenchment is lived, experienced and resisted. Drawing on interviews with young people in housing need, we demonstrate the ways in which day‐to‐day coping with welfare reform can lead to a state of fatigue, a gradual slow wearing‐out that comes with having to endure everyday hardship. Such weariness, we argue, is an integral part of understanding the everyday impacts of austerity. Yet despite the apparent centrality of weariness to issues such as precarity and poverty, there has not yet been sustained discussion into the idea of weariness itself. A common conceptualisation positions weariness as the antithesis of political action, where individuals are slowly worn down until they no longer have the strength or capacity to resist. However, this paper offers a more reparative reading of weariness, one which does not narrowly conceptualise weariness as simply a closing down. Instead we question whether weariness should necessarily always be equated with inaction. The paper focuses on forms of suffering and violence that are felt as a kind of steady on‐going form of endurance, rather than as a sudden eruption. We foreground affective moments that are neither passionate nor intense, but instead listless and still, generating feelings of inertia, flatness, impasse. The paper concludes with some reflections on what we term "the right to be weary," examining how weariness could be understood as a potential retreat from the relentless drive to move forwards, a form of passive dissent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concerns the use of photo-elicitation interviews in constructing migrant narratives of health and well-being. It argues that photo-elicitation can be particularly effective in producing nuanced understandings about relationships among culture, place and health. It explores how, through this method, subject-centred understandings of health and well-being are able to challenge dominant discursive constructions that tend to ‘other’ and potentially stereotype minority groups in explanations of health behaviour. The paper includes discussion of issues of power and representation in research with marginalized populations, which further elaborates the value of photo-elicitation in developing a non-essentializing view of minority groups. The paper concludes with comment on the potential value of this method in the formulation of health and social policies aiming to incorporate the views and needs of marginalized or minority groups. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]