DCRP Lecture | Contesting Dispossession: Immigrants and the Struggle for Housing in Madrid | Sophie Gonick

Thursday | Aug 26, 2021

Lecture will be Held In-Person in 106 Bauer Wurster Hall and Livestreamed Livestream: https://vimeo.com/537809775 Since 2011, Spain’s right-to-housing movement has inspired habitational struggles across the globe. Academic and activist attention has looked to its repertoires of action; its ideologies of housing, property, and debt; and the subsequent electoral victories of many of its most visible faces. There has been little attention, however, to the presence and influence of immigrants within the movement. In this talk, Dr. Gonick uncovers Madrid’s histories of homeownership and immigration to demonstrate the pivotal role of Andean immigrants within anti-eviction efforts, as the first to contest dispossession from mortgage-related foreclosures and evictions. She reveals how experiences of migration on the one hand, and previous engagement with indigenous mobilizations on the other, produced dissent in a moment of housing crisis. In so doing, she reflects on the salience of immigrant activism within struggles for just shelter and more equitable regimes of urban property.

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Dr. Gonick is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis at NYU, where she teaches in the Metropolitan Studies Program. Her work examines property regimes, immigrant activism, and housing justice. She has also written about new municipalism in Spain and the United States. Her first book, Dispossession and Dissent: Immigrants and the Struggle for Housing in Madrid, was published by Stanford University Press in 2021.