INEQ Keynote: Understanding the Production of Housing Precarity by Katie MacDonald

How do we understand housing need, and how does that shape our responses to it? In this presentation, Dr. Katie MacDonald uses feminist theories to consider how housing vulnerability is a shared condition while housing precarity is created through systems and structures that stem from the commodification of housing. Drawing on her research in the Canadian context, she asks how particular imaginaries of housing rights influence how we think about the role of public housing. She examines how while the affordable housing sector attempts to address housing precarity, it is also implicated in its production in three ways – seeing housing vulnerability as inherent to particular population groups, relying on the precarious employment of housing workers, and seeing nonmarket and market housing as distinct and separate rather than connected. She concludes the presentation with some initial comparisons with the Finnish housing regime and presents a new project comparing Finnish and Canadian models. 

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Timings: Monday, 29 Sep 2025, 14:00–15:30

Format: Hybrid

Location: Faculty of Social Sciences (U37), Room 1053 (in person) and

(she/her) is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Athabasca University in Canada. She is interested in how people can work collectively to build equitable communities. Currently, she has two areas of research, looking at the experiences of policy implementation in nonmarket housing, and exploring experiences of transnational solidarity across difference. Katie will be a visiting professor at INEQ in the fall of 2026 and is excited to learn more about Finnish approaches to housing justice.

received her PhD in sociology in 2012 from the University of Helsinki. Her research interests cover the position of vulnerable citizen groups in welfare and housing policies and services. In the homelessness field, she has investigated these issues in the context of Housing First policies and participated also in the development of policies in various expert groups.  Currently, she works as a post-doctoral researcher in Y-Foundation, in a European Union funded research project, which investigates the adaptation of Housing First policies in four European countries.