On the "physiological dope" problematic in housing and illness research: towards a critical realism of home and health

The housing and illness literature is fascinating because it represents a key battleground on which social science has waged an empirical war upon its traditional enemies in the natural sciences.* However, while this literature is of immense sociological importance, it has yet to attract any theoretical interest from sociologists - despite the recent surge of interest in the sociology of the body. In this article I attempt to fill this lacuna by developing a sociological critique of the housing and illness literature. Specifically, I argue that housing researchers' commitments to making social factors conceptually prior to, and thus an external trigger of physiological events might enable them to identify "bad housing" as a cause of illness. It cannot, however, enable them to explicate the variability and complexity of the relationship between housing, health and illness, namely why bad housing does not always cause illness, because it posits a conception of the human body as a "physiological dope", without agency. I suggest that this necessitates the embodiment of the epistemology of social science, so that pychosociological factors become infernal and integral (rather than external and prior) to physiological events. I develop this theme by "theory-building" a three-dimensional (socio-psycho-physiological) conception of the body that possesses reflexive agency. This enables me to explicate how things can and do "happen otherwise" in the housing/health/illness relationship, i.e. how and why some reflexive occupants of bad housing can remain in good health.