The Housing Studies Association announces this year’s results.

Valerie was a housing researcher of compassion and conviction. She believed in the power of research to challenge and change policy by exposing the injustices of life in urban society. She was also a passionate advocate of community engagement and action. Valerie’s interests were wide-ranging and her achievements many. One her most notable contributions was her joint authorship of Race, Class and State Housing (1987). Written with Jeff Henderson, this seminal work exposed the processes of institutional racism in public housing.

The prize is financed through donations made in Valerie Karn’s memory from her daughter and other family and friends. The prize winner is awarded a gift voucher and receives support towards the professional production and dissemination of the winning paper. The prize is awarded each year at the Housing Studies Association Annual Conference.

The winner of the Valerie Karn prize for 2025 is:

Manon Burbidge – Unpayable bills, black mould and broken cookers: Exploring refugees’ lived realities of energy poverty through a Photovoice project in Greater Manchester.

Manon is a PhD researcher at the University of Manchester, where she’s investigating the drivers and experiences of energy poverty amongst refugee communities living in the UK and its links to wider inequalities. She has a background in Physical Geography (Durham University, UK) and Human Ecology (Lund University, Sweden). She also worked as a research associate on EU-funded projects around energy poverty, renewable energy access and energy communities prior to starting her PhD. Her research interests are broad, spanning energy, housing, justice, gender, migration and climate change.

The study

Refugees living in England are more likely on average to be vulnerable to energy poverty, yet literature on their lived experiences and how they navigate the UK energy system remains rare. As a contribution towards filling this research gap, the paper presented the results of a participatory photography project, undertaken with seven refugees in Greater Manchester, to explore the energy-related issues that they faced in their everyday lives.

Through a combination of words and photographs, the results show how ordinary, everyday household objects represent the prioritisations and trade-offs that the participants are forced to employ to manage their energy use in the face of low incomes and high energy costs.  The findings highlight the need to centre the seemingly mundane, everyday “things” that so often go unnoticed, which can reveal detailed insights into how a lack of energy is experienced and entangled with stories of seeking asylum, debt, fear, identity and homemaking.

In addition, highly commended entrants for 2025 are:

• Garett Grainger (Manchester Metropolitan University), What Barriers Do Administrators Face Whilst Upgrading their Data Assemblage?
• Neftalem Emanuel (Oxford University), From Neglect to Distress: How Disinvestment in Local Authority Housing Affects Resident Wellbeing.

You can learn more about the Valerie Karn prize on the HSA website: https://www.housing-studies-association.org/pages/the-valerie-karn-prize