Erin McElroy, University of Texas-Austin

Like many who produce collaborative research in both academic and non-academic spaces (and their many in-betweens), and like many who maintain a justice-based approach to scholarship, my approach to community-engagement has been an ongoing work in progress. As I have come to find, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to this mode of scholarship, and perhaps one of the most concrete lessons that I have learned is the work will invariably look differently project by project, relationship by relationship, place by place. That said, there some important threads that tether this work for me, which I briefly outline here.

First, to offer a bit of context, I have spent much of the past 15 years engaged in housing justice work in both Romania and the US. I also come from an interdisciplinary background informed by commitments made through land and housing justice organizing. In 2013, I cofounded the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP), a counter-cartography, digital media, and tool-making collective committed to producing public-facing work and popular educational materials to support housing justice work. Most of this work involves deep partnership with an array of community partners, from direct action mutual aid groups to housing non-profits, from arts-based organizations to university classes. While this project began in the San Francisco Bay Area, it now also maintains chapters in Los Angeles and New York City, and has also engaged in collaborations in Cluj and Bucharest.

I think what is significant to note here is that the AEMP is a collective of volunteers, and is not affiliated with any academic institution. Rather, the work that we make is grounded in commitments to tenants and housing organizers, and is not oriented towards peer-reviewed publications. For instance, we self-publish zines, paint murals, make public-facing tools, produce oral histories and films, write reports, and craft digital maps. We have also published public scholarship in an array of publications, and have also edited and published an atlas with PM Press. This collaboratively produced volume includes our own maps and contributions but also those of dozens of community members. While this type of work is often not considered “countable” in the eyes of academia, it does inform on-the-ground struggles and produces valuable research. Our Evictorbook tool for instance has been used to support tenants engaged in multi-building organizing who need to research what other buildings their landlords own. Our reports on the other hand have helped inform policy analysis. Our oral histories meanwhile archive collective knowledge about lived experiences in places undergoing gentrification.

While all of this AEMP work is catered to a public beyond academia, many of our members are students, and a few of us have become university professors. At the same time, we have also partnered with various university classes to work on particular projects, from video editing projects with high school students to oral history transcription projects with undergrads. We have also collaborated with the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA on LA-based projects, where some of us maintain affiliations.

Some of us who do work in academia have, over the years, also written about AEMP work or theorized AEMP data and stories in peer-reviewed writing. On one hand, this has offered us an opportunity to bring community-based analysis into the space of academia to help transform it from within, maintaining a feminist practice of situated knowledge production. Yet writing about the AEMP has brought challenges as well. There are always questions to think through involving authorship, voice, consent, and purpose. We have also occasionally encountered people hoping to join our project simply to write about it, which at times has felt extractive and which has required increased emotional labor and boundary-making from already over-extended volunteers. So this has been an ongoing work in progress.

While my own approach to AEMP has been informed ongoing commitments to community partners and coalitions, it has also informed my approach to teaching and pedagogy. In my classes I often teach students techniques such as storymapping, power mapping, and other forms of data visualization, that they then use to document contexts of gentrification locally or in their sites of research. I choose platforms that are accessible and free so that they can continue to experiment in using publicly available tools in their own work.

These pedagogical frameworks also show up in Anti-Eviction Lab which I run at UT, and through which I work with students but also the AEMP and other community partners to produce reports and analysis. Our main focus as of late has been Landlord Tech Watch, a public-facing platform dedicated to producing research on the various surveillance tools that landlords and property managers use to automate contexts of gentrification. In particular, we have been looking at platforms such as tenant screening, facial recognition building access, and neighborhood surveillance applications. Given that so many tenants are subjected to this technology yet so few understand its harms or how to organize against it, our hope has been to create work that can serve as a form of popular education.

All of this work is only possible due to the labor of so many tenants, volunteers, students, and more, and often it is messy in the boundaries it crosses and the many spaces it lives. Perhaps what unites it all however is a commitment to producing work to support on-the-ground housing organizing efforts, and in foregrounding movement building itself as a form of multifaceted knowledge production.