Author Archives: Rahim

Call for Applications: Summer Institute on Methodologies for Housing Justice

Methodologies for Housing Justice:
A Summer Institute for Movement-Based and University-Based Scholars

The Summer Institute on Methodologies for Housing Justice brings together movement-based and university-based scholars to address key needs and gaps in housing and planning research. A part of the Housing Justice in #UnequalCities Network, which is housed at the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin and supported by the National Science Foundation, this class advances research methodologies that tackle pressing housing issues and build power for advocacy and community organizations.

The course will be led by Ananya Roy, Director of the Institute on Inequality and Democracy and Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography at UCLA, and Raquel Rolnik, Professor of Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo, and former UN Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing. They will be joined by movement-based and university-based scholars who will lead different modules of the class, including Benjamin Dulchin, Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, New York; Melissa García Lamarca, People’s Debt Diaries and Barcelona Laboratory for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability; Terra Graziani, Anti-Eviction Mapping Project; Shayla Myers, Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles; Yusef Omowale, Southern California Library; Amy Ritterbusch, UCLA.

Summer Institute goals: Examine the structural mechanisms of dispossession and displacement in unequal cities, such as financialization, and cover the methodologies needed to pinpoint, analyze, and expose these mechanisms.Study and implement the use of data and research to support forms of resistance, to contribute to public pedagogy, and to generate alternative housing and planning policies and programs.Think through the politics and ethics of data including who collects and controls data and how data is used and for what purposes.Adopt a comparative and transnational approach to housing research by thinking from Los Angeles and learning from struggles in other parts of the world.Participants should come prepared with key questions they would like to explore in the conversation around housing justice. Working in small groups, participants will put together a Methodologies for Housing Justice Resource Guide. This open-access volume will be a critical resource for defining housing justice as a field of inquiry. 

Location: University of California, Los Angeles, and Los Angeles Community Action Network.

Summer Institute dates: Participants are expected to be in class 9:00 am–5:00 pm each day for the duration of the five-day Summer Institute (August 5–August 9, 2019). Continued work on assignments is expected through the following week and a final project will be due on August 16, 2019.

Funding and credits: Tuition will be waived for all accepted Summer Institute participants; enrollment is limited to 30 people. Limited fellowship stipends are available for participants involved in movement-based work. Arrangements may be made for UCLA students to develop this work further and receive academic credits.  

Eligibility: Graduate students, early career investigators, and movement-based researchers.

Application deadline: May 15, 2019

Applicants notified: May 24, 2019

Apply here

2018 Lynd Award Recipient: Career Reflections

Nancy Denton
SUNY Albany
CUSS Newsletter, 2019 Winter, Vol 32, No 1

At the end of my first year of retirement from the University at Albany, I was thrilled to receive the Robert and Helen Lynd Lifetime Achievement Award from the Community and Urban Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association. As I examined the list of others who had won it, I was humbled and extremely grateful to my nominator and to the committee who chose me. Winning this award, along with retirement, has given me the perfect opportunity to reflect on my career as an urban sociologist. And as I’m sure others would agree, urban sociology is a particularly rewarding field as you are able to investigate “real” problems that affect “real” people. (Of course my demographic training led me to do this from a data perspective, not one of actual on-the-ground engagement in the urban landscape. But be that as it may.)

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