You cannot register for this meeting

"'Wins', losses, and setbacks: Contending with the colonial-racial legal geographies of tenant organizing in spaces of extreme housing exploitation" In present day North America, struggles for housing justice are eminently rooted in complex legal and ongoing racial and colonial processes. In this talk, I draw on insights from my comparative ethnographic research across two sites of extreme housing exploitation: the single-room occupancy (SRO) and extended-stay hotels of Vancouver, BC and Atlanta, Georgia. Across these different geographies of severe precarity, uninhabitability, and landlord violence, I consider two examples of legal “wins” for increased tenant protections and rent control. Though housing struggle is so often strategically directed toward the law and achieving legal protections, these examples demonstrate how such ‘brokering’ approaches are severely limited by the landlord-property-law power nexus, and at times, back-fire against those most vulnerable and with the least control over their housing. Ultimately, I ask what a politics of deep relationality, that resources the generative livingness of tenants through organizing, reveals about what tenant power (re)possesses toward renewed political practices around place and home. For more information & speaker bio: https://aese.psu.edu/research/centers/cecd/events/stories-from-the-field-with-daniela-aiello