Debt Trap Nation, by Katherine Brickell and Mel Nowicki

Debt Trap Nation: Family Homelessness in a Failing State
Katherine Brickell (King's College London), Mel Nowicki (Oxford Brookes University/ King's College London)

Across England, one of the wealthiest yet most unequal nations in the world, families are being trapped in debt and homelessness. In Debt Trap Nation: Family Homelessness in a Failing State, Katherine Brickell and Melanie Nowicki take the reader inside this national scandal. Hundreds of thousands of children are living in "prison-like" hotel rooms and other deadly temporary accommodation for months, years and sometimes their entire childhood. Their book – and seminar – will offer an intimate and politically energised account of a failing state in technicolour. The decimation of social housing, an out-of-control private-rented sector, austerity, welfare cuts and a cost-of-living crisis has deepened poverty and fed a debt trap that consumes families and is now driving local authorities to bankruptcy. They argue that mothers and their children have not fallen into this trap, they have been pulled into it. It is time to rail against state-cultivated and politically convenient stigma that equates debt and homelessness with personal moral failure. It is time to flip the script. It is not families who are failing, families are being failed. Katherine Brickell is Professor of Urban Studies at King's College London. Her research is feminist in orientation and focuses on everyday domestic and working life with a particular focus on household debt. Related to this, she has longstanding expertise on family homelessness, domestic violence, forced eviction, and modern slavery. She is co-author (with Mel Nowicki) of the public-facing book Debt Trap Nation: Family Homelessness in a Failing State (2025), author of Home SOS (2020), and co-editor of the Handbook of Displacement (2020) and Geographies of Forced Eviction (2017). Katherine is current editor of Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers and was previously editor for Gender, Place and Culture. Mel Nowicki is Reader in Urban Geography at Oxford Brookes University, and Visiting Reader in Urban Geography at King's College London. Her research explores the lived experience of housing precarity and the rise of family homelessness and Temporary Accommodation in the UK and Ireland. Mel is also improving understanding of how shrinking domestic space is shifting our expectations of home. Her first book, Bringing Home the Housing Crisis: Politics, Precarity and Domicide in Austerity London, was published by Bristol Policy Press in 2023. Mel is co-author of Debt Trap Nation: Family Homelessness in a Failing State (2025) and co-author of Reconstructing the American Dream: Life Inside the Tiny House Nation (2025).

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