Dear Beyond Inhabitation friends,
Lab member Ana Vilenica, who is presently researching transnational housing movements in the Americas, has just released a Call for Papers for the 2023 AAG Conference. Please do contact her directly with your abstract if you are interested in joining this panel on grassroots internationalism!

Call for Papers: Grassroots internationalism in radical housing movements

Panel Organizer: Ana Vilenica, DIST, Polytechnic of Turin, Italy

The racialized financialization of housing has been expanding worldwide  in recent decades. Often, it is accompanied by the emergence of large-scale transnational landlords with negative impacts like accumulating debt, rising housing costs, housing precarity, houselessness and evictions.  Concurrently, the pandemic and current energy crises paired with skyrocketing costs of living have only worsened living conditions for many including those already struggling for housing. These transnational racialized processes of capital accumulation have varied with place-specific effects due to a “world system” of entangled capitalist, colonial, racist and patriarchal threads underpinning logics of housing, home and homemaking. Cooperative and autonomous housing movements worldwide–including tenants unions, right to housing and anti-eviction groups, squatters, houseless people’s movements, and landless people’s organizations–have been articulating a grassroots internationalist response to this transnational “domestic” violence by explicitly identifying their concerns as existing beyond the local scale.

This session will center research trajectories that take seriously radical housing internationalism from below across multiple geographies, temporal scales, and theoretical and empirical perspectives. Topics may include: the politics of translocal, transnational and transcontinental radical housing networks; collective action as a means of internationalism in RH movements; the politics of language in translocal, transnational and transcontinental radical housing movements; anti-colonialism, anti-racism and anti-patriarchal transnational politics in RH organising; radical care politics in transnational RH movements; the politics of the commons and transnational RH organising; and obstacles and problems in grassroots radical housing internationalism(s).

Send titles and abstracts to Ana Vilenica (ana.vilenica@polito.it) by October 31, 2022  for consideration.