This month we continue our series of posts aimed at presenting the most recent research developments of the Lab’s Core Team. We are going to feature all of our researchers who are working as part of the ERC Inhabiting Radical Housing (IRH) project, the FARE Precarious Housing in Eastern Europe project, or who are pursuing their own individual Marie-Curie or USF fellowships.
We continue with Ana Vilenica, an ERC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Lab.
Ana Vilenica is dedicated to building and understanding internationalism in struggles for home in the so-called Americas. She believes that inhabiting a research position is one of the available ways to access resources to do movement making work. Her work revolves around fostering internationalism and contributing to the making of a different kind of “international community”. It encompasses relationships of comradery, friendship, and radical love, and involves radical listening, acknowledging our mutual vulnerabilities, giving time to each other, and holding space for each other to learn and navigate our own paths without judgment. Her work is a love letter to people involved in tenant struggles, the struggles of those who lack control over their housing conditions, and those engaged in building tenant power in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Los Angeles, New York, and Vancouver.
She firmly believes that conducting research with and about struggles should not be an individual act of collecting data for some abstract general good but rather a contribution to preserving moments of our collective wisdom for and about our worldmaking. Ana is committed to radical listening, fostering conversations and making spaces for people to share their own analyses. Over the past two years, she has cared into publishing parts one and two of the Conversation Series “Pursuing Tenant International: Learning from the Struggles for Home in Abya-Yala” in the Radical Housing Journal, where she is a member of the editorial collective. She sees RHJ as a nod in our international networks dedicated to building people power. Parts three and four of the Conversation Series are forthcoming in 2024 and 2025.
Currently Ana has two forthcoming papers: a book chapter “International Tenent Power Movement for Our Time: Learning from the Los Angeles Tenants Union and Autonomous Tenant Union Network” and a journal article “Grammars of Tenant Internationalism from and for Elsewhere: Learning from the Struggles for Home in Abya Yala”.
Her previous work has focused on housing struggles and social movements across unequal Europe, with a particular emphasis on Eastern Europe. In 2023, she published two co-authored articles: Gadji Feminism(s) in Serbia: “Racial Privilege and ‘Intersectional’ Solidarity in an East European Semiperiphery” in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies and “CHF-indexed Housing Debts and the Housing Struggle in Serbia in the City- analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action in Special Feature: “Dependent financialization and urban struggles in East Europe”, as well as edited volume Decoloniality in Eastern Europe: A Lexicon of Reorientation published by kuda.org. She is currently working on a co-edited volume, Urban Marginality, Racialization, and Interdependence: Lessons from Eastern Europe, forthcoming with Routledge. For the same volume, she co-authored a book chapter, “Urbanization of Racial Capitalism in Serbia: Transition, Racialization, Evictions.”
In 2024, Ana is returning to Europe and hopes to secure resources to produce an encounter of organizers she has met during the past two years to talk about popular education and internationalism in struggles for home.
Recent publications
- Vilenica, Ana (Ed.). Decoloniality in Eastern Europe: A Lexicon of Reorientation. First edition. Novi Sad: New Media Center_kuda.org, Novi Sad, 2023.
- Vilenica, Ana, Milan Škobić, and Nemanja Pantović. “CHF-Indexed Housing Debts in Serbia: Dependent Financialization, Housing Precarity and Housing Struggles.” City 27, no. 3–4 (July 4, 2023): 636–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2023.2229200.
- Pražić, Ivana, and Ana Vilenica. “Gadji Feminism(s) in Serbia: Racial Privilege and ‘Intersectional’ Solidarity in an Eastern European Semiperiphery.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 44, no. 2 (2023): 70–97. https://doi.org/10.1353/fro.2023.a902527.
Picture: Activists gratify commemorating Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women on the streets of so-called Vancouver, 2024. Photo by: Ana Vilenica.