Beyond Housing Injustice: Expanding Community Connection Through Research
Research notes:
The interconnectedness of economic greed in the face of housing inaccessibility and environmental disaster
Racism and the commodification of housing
Hope for Resistance—chronicling women-led Resistance and the Black Power movement
Foregrounding the role of Black and women-led movements of resistance in the legacy of housing justice organizing
Centering the perspectives of low-income Black and Brown communities
Historical storytelling through zines and graphical depictions such as maps and collaging
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This year’s Scholar and Feminist Conference, “Housing Justice/ Housing Futures,” engaged attendees in conversation centering on the reimagination of housing accessibility as we know it. Leading up to the event, I worked on curating a reading list for our communities to deepen their study. As housing injustice exists within the fractured web of other unjust structures of power, it was difficult to delineate the scope of such a list. I knew I wanted to offer materials directly connected to the presentations and offer attendees a chance to extend their thinking beyond one weekend in late February, but I struggled with how exactly to do so. A self-posed question illuminated the way: What exactly is central to the work spearheaded by the presenters? Aspects of community and colonialism came up time and time again through my scouring. In addition to furthering dialogue, I knew I wanted to highlight the predominantly Black, Brown, and Indigenous femme voices integral to fights against evictions, claims over ceded land, gentrification, and efforts to rightfully return spaces of living, learning, and recreation.
As an education student, I’ve read about and dreamed of being engrossed in a form of collective study. Within my college experience, group assignments and in-class discussions are often the only times that my individualized learning is shared with others. I think curation like the type I was tasked to do here is precious. It has allowed me to think critically about manifestations of imperial power beyond unrightful claims to land and share it with others to hopefully blossom into discursive life. To me, this is a form of ongoing storytelling.
My offering, two pages of reading materials, will become a continuous story as readers make their own connections, pursue their own searches, and find themselves in the texts and systems of oppression, where they are complicit and where subjected.
Looking back now, it would have been useful to include resources on how to go about this deconstruction. I am reminded of what bell hooks writes about the consciousness-building educators must embark on to cultivate a practice of love. A self-awareness of this kind imbues not only classrooms with care but also households and community spaces. It is my hope that all who attended the conference and all who did or may still look over the reading list will be able to curate spaces of care within themselves and with others, wherever they are.
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The conference started off on a Friday night with a multi-media dance installation by Sydnie Mosley Dances. Dancers performed a choreopoem called “PURPLE” that invited attendees to begin thinking through the conference themes with interactive movement and reflection. It was the organizers’ hope that this opening choreopoem would serve as the perfect precursor for the discussions to come, encouraging an opening of self and prompting the collective to hold together their lived experiences and positionalities within the frame of housing.
On Saturday, the program consisted of panels and workshops that linked together housing, public education, and healthcare. The speakers were long-time organizers involved in local and national coalitions, scholars and researchers, cultural workers, and artists. Through panels, films, and workshops, they addressed the interconnected systems, experiences, and histories that make up housing injustice while proposing modes for organizing from art-making to on-the-ground community work to policy change.
The reading list below is composed of scholarly articles, reports, profiles, news snippets, books, and statements, many of which are written by or feature the conference’s speakers. Materials vary in purpose. Some explore the correlation between housing market variability and displacement, and others construct frameworks for a forthcoming future characterized by what the conference refers to as a “just and equitable pursuit of home.” Though the name of the conference suggests a singular focus on housing, the presenters and the reading list below look beyond housing commodification to examine its roots and prolific outgrowths.
As I read and selected readings for this list, it was critical to me that the selected pieces foregrounded the affected lives and livelihoods of Black and Brown people, and chronicle the power of Black women-led organizing in this struggle, like the poor women from North America and Latin America who formed tenant organizations or neighborhood associations to protect their families and districts from developers and governments violence. These women are a living testament to Keisha Khan-Perry’s proposed “global sisterhood” of Black feminist practice.
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Ashe Lewis compiled the following reading list for the 48th annual Scholar and Feminist Conference, Housing Justice / Housing Futures. Download the PDF here.
Lisa Bates, “Albina Zone,” Black Freedom Beyond Borders: Memories of Abolition Day, January 1, 2020.
Robert D. Bullard, Race, Place, and Environmental Justice after Hurricane Katrina: Struggles to Reclaim, Rebuild, and Revitalize New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, 1st edition (Boulder, CO: Routledge, 2009).
Randy Ford, “Creating Better Housing Opportunities,” accessed February 23, 2023.
Tomashi Jackson and Eric Mack, Tomashi Jackson: The Land Claim, ed. Corinne Erni et al. (Water Mill, New York: DelMonico Books/Parrish Art Museum, 2022).
Erin McElroy, “Property as Technology,” City 24, no. 1–2 (March 3, 2020): 112–29.
Keisha-Khan Y. Perry, Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil, 1st edition (Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2013).
Keisha-Khan Y. Perry, “Social Memory and Black Resistance: Black Women and Neighborhood Struggles in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil,” The Latin Americanist 49, no. 1 (2005): 7–38.
Elora Lee Raymond et al., “From Foreclosure to Eviction: Housing Insecurity in Corporate-Owned Single-Family Rentals,” Cityscape 20, no. 3 (2018): 159–88.
Akira Drake Rodriguez, Diverging Space for Deviants: The Politics of Atlanta’s Public Housing (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021).
Akira Drake Rodriguez, “The Misunderstood History of Gentrification: People, Planning, Preservation, and Urban Renewal, 1915–2020,” Political Science Quarterly 137, no. 3 (September 1, 2022): 629–31.
Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, Ananya Roy, and Chris Carlsson, Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement & Resistance, Illustrated edition (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2021).
Vanessa Thill, “Lucid Gestures Digital Catalog,” November 13, 2014.
Rhonda Y. Williams, Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century, 1st edition (New York: Routledge, 2014).
Rhonda Y. Williams, “Race, Dismantling the ‘Ghetto,’ and National Housing Mobility: Considering the Polikoff Proposal,” Northwestern Journal of Law and Social Policy 1 (2006): 96–109.
Rhonda Y. Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against Urban Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).