The Blue House(s)

In Alice Springs housing is still one of the very big issues for people living on the Town Camps. Because our job as researchers at the Research Hub is to ‘make a difference’, so we need to keep exploring how we might do productive research in this important area. My concern here is to think about what is going on in the area of housing management, and to do this, I will use what is called in this paper the “Blue House” (others know it more formally as “number 5, Bilson Street”). The Blue House that I use in this paper to explore governance is what many (but not everyone) may think of (unambiguously) as an object. I want to reflect on how the various “players”, other participants in what the philosopher Kathryn Pyne Addelson (2002) would call the “ensemble cast” of housing in an Alice Springs Town Camp, are variously positioned by the house as an active socio-political object or entity (Addelson, 2002, pp.118-136), thus contesting the idea that it is an unambiguous, and therefore stable object.