Issue 3.1

Tenant organizing, scholar activism, and global south perspectives as alternative infrastructures of knowledge production

This issue of RHJ offers a range of perspectives, analyses and themes to understand the many challenges that dwellers face when confronting and struggling for access to housing. Embedded within it, we present two special issues, one on tenant organizing and resistance, and a second on urban activist scholarship. We also include numerous conversations on COVID-19 and related housing struggles in the Global South.

doi.org/10.54825/WAMD5849

Cover image: Michele Lancione
Cover design: Felicia Berryessa-Erich

Editorial

The Long Read

Southern Conversations

Updates

3.1 Special Issue

Tenants organizing: precarization and resistance

In 2019 we organized a conference casting light on the housing crisis and especially on the historical and contemporary organization of tenants to contest housing inequalities. By placing housing struggles and tenants’ organization at the centre of the debate we aimed at exposing and politicizing current capitalist development and, hopefully, at proposing a different view of how housing can be organized and imagined by discussing how resistance can be used, with what effects and how it can be connected to other struggles. This special issue is a result of this conference dealing with tenants’ organization in different contexts examining how tenants organize(d), why and what could be learned from it. In this introducing text we give an overview of this field of research by asking why tenants’ mobilizations are important to study, what is still under-studied in the field and which perspectives are important to raise in future research.


Cover photo: Erin McElroy

Editorial

The Long Read

Conversations

Updates

3.1 Special Issue

On Activist*scholarship

Following a conference on Urban activism in 2019 and an article on activist*scholarship published in the last issue of this journal, we present here a reflection on how the recent convergence of housing activism and urban scholarship can contribute to articulate a new form of producing knowledge for action. The consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated many of the elements that were already stimulating outburst of rebellion throughout the world; the role of activist*scholars may be crucial to connect and convey local episodes into a global view, and way, for change.


Cover photo: Max Rabus and Patrick Daniels
https://www.instagram.com/_patrickdaniels_/
https://www.instagram.com/maxrbz/

Editorial

Reflections