Hauntology: The emotional costs of social policy for mothers experiencing homelessness.

The article is concerned with the emotional effects of homelessness on women who are mothers. It develops a multi-disciplinary conceptualisation of ‘haunting’ to bring understanding to the ongoing grief and trauma associated with losing a home and children, and life within the liminal spaces of temporary accommodation. It explores how women’s embodied and affective experiences are not just responses to deeply distressing events, but inextricably intertwined with the unfurling of housing and child protection policies, sometimes long after a policy decision (eviction, child removal). Drawing on biographical research with 26 women, the article contributes new insights into both our limited understanding of women’s homelessness but also scholarly work that recognises the diffuse power of social policy and its harms. The article advances a novel understanding of women’s lived experience of homelessness by conceptualising and empirically investigating the emotional effects of policy decisions as hauntings that permeate past, present and anticipated futures.