A collective study lab

Erin McELROY

Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin

Erin McElroy is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and is cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project—a counter-cartography and digital media collective that produces maps, tools, and stories to support the work of housing justice in gentrifying cities. Erin’s research focuses on the intersections of property, eviction, technology, data, and empire in the US and Romania, from contexts of racial dispossession and technocapitalism to housing justice and anti-imperial organizing. Their newest project, Landlord Tech Watch, is a collective effort dedicated to mapping out the harms associated with landlord surveillance technologies such as biometric cameras and tenant screening algorithms. Erin is also an editor of the Radical Housing Journal, an open access journal that brings together housing organizers and researchers transnationally.

Selected publications

Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, ed. Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance. Oakland: PM Press, 2021. 

McElroy, Erin. “Data, Dispossession, and Facebook: Techno-imperialism and Toponymy in Gentrifying San Francisco.” Urban Geography 40, no. 6 (2019): 826-845.

McElroy, Erin. “Corruption, Șmecherie, and Siliconization: Retrospective and Speculative Technoculture in Postsocialist Romania.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 6, no. 2 (2020): 1-26.