Joey Simmons

Small Group Project 2026

Building histories from below: Learning about housing struggles from tenants’ storytelling and archiving

With Kirsteen Paton & Kirsten Lloyd & Dr Kate Wilson

The housing crisis is so entrenched, that evictions and gentrification have become an urgent inequality and legislation relating to housing has risen to the top of agendas in governments. ‘Solutions’ proffered are often narrow, temporary, small-scale interventions. Tenants on the sharp end of housing inequality have developed knowledge and alternative demands for housing justice. Archiving both historical knowledge and insights from tenant movements in real time can offer powerful interventions to challenge the narrow neoliberal housing imagination. As Derrida famously describes, the archive is orientated towards questions of the future. Developing a repository of knowledge on housing from tenants themselves, offering a ‘history-from-below’ through accounts of tenant organising, and presenting working-class demands for housing justice and legitimate political alternatives can challenge dominant neoliberal ideologies driving the crisis, and provide knowledge insight to the contemporary formation of class struggle as expressed through housing.

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Biography

Joey Simons is a writer and artist from Glasgow, currently artist-in-residence for the Glasgow Sculpture Studios Learning and Engagement programme.

His practice uses archival research, site writing, documentary poetry, video, montage and community workshops to explore the politics of collective memory and loss in Glasgow, with a particular lens on struggles around housing and the built environment. Joey is co-founder of the Glasgow Housing Struggle Archive and a board member for Living Rent and the Red Sunday School, and also works as lead reader for Open Book's Prison Programme.

Biographical details correct as of 26.06.25

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