Research/Dissertation
Asher’s research focuses on the growth of the property guardianship industry in the United Kingdom. His research asks what we can learn about the housing affordability crisis and emerging regimes of housing tenure. Asher’s research traces the history and present of property guardianship to consider how private companies exploit the intentional and inevitable failure of government housing policy. Rather than approaching housing as a strictly local phenomenon, his work treats the housing affordability crisis as a nationwide constellation with neighborhood-level effects.
His research centers around three key questions:
How are regimes of private property changing in an already property-saturated society?
How does property guardianship (re)construct temporal relations between people, guardianship companies, and the state, and in what ways does this affect urban futures?
How do movements for housing justice organize to challenge the housing affordability crisis when increasing numbers of people are prevented from accessing traditional avenues of justice, such as tenants’ rights?