By Leon Rosa Reichle, PhD Researcher at the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity (CURA), DeMontfort University. Twitter: @leonrrei
Introduction
The Methodologies for Housing Justice Resource Guide is published online in English and Spanish. The Resource Guide is an outcome of the 2019 Summer Institute on Methodologies for Housing Justice, convened by the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin (part of the Housing Justice in Unequal Cities Network). During the Summer Institute, we, a group of movement and university-based scholars from different cities around the world, collectively learned about, worked on and exchanged experiences with methodologies as political tools.
Instructors from different cities
In a row of inspiring sessions, we heard from different (activist) scholars from around the world: From Raquel Rolnik (University of São Paulo) on São Paulo’s Eviction Observatory, from Melissa García-Lamarca (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) on debt diaries in Barcelona and Athens, from Terra Graziani, Elana Eden, and Erin McElroy on the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project on the US west and east coast, from Pete White (LA Community Action Network, LA CAN) and Hamid Khan (Stop LAPD Spying) on people’s audits in Los Angeles, from Shayla Myers (Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles) on mapping and analyzing court records, from Amy Ritterbusch (UCLA) on participatory action research and the dangers of extractivist activism and scholarship, from Yusef Omowale (Southern California Library) on dominant discourses in dangerous methods (that serve to justify displacement, and create historical frames that blame local residents for harm), from Andrea Roberts (Texas A&M University) on participatory memory work and from Benjamin Dulchin (Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development) on displacement alert maps and speculation watch lists in New York.
What is the Guide about?
Based on our respective experiences in different movements and with different kinds of research, we formed working groups, to disseminate outcomes of our productive discussions and open up the collectively built spaces of knowledge in the Methodologies for Housing Justice Resource Guide. The guide is intended as an inspiration and open tool for movements fighting for housing justice. At its heart is the question: “can the “master’s tools” – Lorde’s famous phrasing – be used for purposes of building another world?” (Lorde in Rolnik, Roy, 2020 – introduction to the Guide). As critical housing and urban scholars inside and outside of academia we have tried to assemble a resource that proposes not just methods, but methodologies that take a partisan standpoint against hegemonic knowledge production.
“From and for movements, this guide is based on a political conception of methodology for housing justice, and not only criticizes but proposes tools to fight dominant methodologies which legitimize the violence of housing financialization, banishment and many other housing injustices of the outgrowths of racial capitalism.“
Acknowledgements
It was incredibly inspiring to work on this, all my thanks goes to everyone who made this possible, the editors Ananya Roy, Raquel Rolnik, Terra Graziani and Hilary Malson, all the wonderful colleagues, comrades and friends I met in the process and the great team I worked with: Amee Chew, Lauren Ilano, Tolu Lanrewaju-Kadri and Albert Lowe.
You find the guide here in English:
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/41g6f5cj
And here in Spanish: