Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia

Research officer, LSE London, London School of Economics and Political Science

m.fernandez1@lse.ac.uk

Dr. Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia is a Research Officer at LSE London where she carries out investigations to do with the capital’s social, economic and political life, particularly around housing issues. She is a lecturer in Birkbeck's 'Culture Diaspora Ethnicity' MA and has taught gender and politics at Queen Mary University. She completed a PhD on the political, material and symbolic co-productions of public housing in Puerto Rico (LSE, Sociology-Cities), has and MSc in Gender and International Development and a BA in Philosophy and Women's Studies. She is interested in the links between housing displacement, urban development and activism; interdisciplinary approaches to processes of urban ‘othering’ including the imports of gender, race and postcolonial theories to cultural and urban studies; and in critical geographies of home. She has previously worked in the field of international human rights in the UK, U.S., and Puerto Rico.

Kathleen Scanlon

Research Fellow, LSE London, London School of Economics and Political Science

k.j.scanlon@lse.ac.uk

Kathleen Scanlon is a Research Fellow at LSE London. She has a wide range of research interests including comparative housing policy (across all tenures--social and private rented housing as well as owner-occupation), comparative mortgage finance, and migration. Her research is grounded in economics but also draws on techniques and perspectives from other disciplines including geography and sociology, and aims at improving the evidence base for policy decisions at national or local level. She is currently editing a book on Social Housing in Europe, to be published by Wiley in 2013. She has worked with a number of national and international institutions including the Council of Europe Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and Denmark's Realdania foundation. A collector of languages, she speaks Spanish, Italian, Serbian, Danish and a bit of French.

Christine Whitehead

Professor, London School of Economics and Political Science

c.m.e.whitehead@lse.ac.uk

Professor Christine Whitehead is an internationally respected applied economist whose research is well-known in both academic and policy circles. She directs a multi-disciplinary centre including anthropologists, sociologists and geographers. She has conducted an extensive programme of research on various aspects of the housing market, with special reference to housing finance and subsidies, social housing provision and land use planning, as well as on urban, industrial policy and privatisation issues. Major themes in her recent research have included analysis of the relationship between planning and housing, notably with respect to the S106 policy; housing needs assessments; the role and financing of social housing in the UK and Europe; developments in private finance; policy evaluation; and more generally the application of economic concepts and techniques to questions of public resource allocation with respect to housing, education, policing and urban regeneration.