Homes for All, Cages for None: Housing Justice in an Age of Abolition

A conversation featuring Christina Heatherton and Craig Willse

In 2016, the Barnard Center for Research on Women assembled a Poverty Working Group to examine the state’s neglect and abandonment of poor people, people of color, and people with disabilities. The group asks how can we deepen our understanding of and resistance to the ways that the neoliberal state and racialized, classed, gendered, and ableist logics target the most vulnerable members of our communities for surveillance, control, precarious lives, and premature deaths.

In the first public event in this series, scholars and activists who work on issues of housing and homelessness in New York City imagine how we can take an abolitionist approach to resistance and how we can begin to build social systems that offer safety and equal resources to all citizens. Participants include Craig Willse, author of The Value of Homelessness: Managing Surplus Life in the United States and Christina Heatherton, Assistant Professor of American Studies at Barnard College.

This event was recorded on October 10, 2017 at Barnard College.