Stories from the Field with Daniela Aiello

About the Session

"Wins," losses, and setbacks: Contending with the colonial-racial legal geographies of tenant organizing in spaces of extreme housing exploitation

In present-day North America, struggles for housing justice are eminently rooted in complex legal and ongoing racial and colonial processes. In this talk, I draw on insights from my comparative ethnographic research across two sites of extreme housing exploitation: the single-room occupancy (SRO) and extended-stay hotels of Vancouver, BC and Atlanta, Georgia. Across these different geographies of severe precarity, uninhabitability, and landlord violence, I consider two examples of legal "wins" for increased tenant protections and rent control. Though housing struggle is so often strategically directed toward the law and achieving legal protections, these examples demonstrate how such 'brokering' approaches are severely limited by the landlord-property-law power nexus and, at times, back-fire against those most vulnerable and with the least control over their housing. Ultimately, I ask what a politics of deep relationality, that resources the generative livingness of tenants through organizing, reveals about what tenant power (re)possesses toward renewed political practices around place and home.

Register today to join our conversation about Daniela's research on tenant organizing!

Storyteller Bio

Daniela Aiello is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Penn State and an urban geographer studying colonial racial capitalism and its contemporary manifestations in housing injustice in North America. Drawing on qualitative, comparative, ethnographic, and a research-as-organizing approach, her work examines the historical present of dispossession through the context of multi-racial urban social movements for tenant organizing and eviction defense.

About the Series

The "Stories from the Field" series focuses on the "why" and "how" of community engagement and applied research. In each session, we invite speakers to tell us about their work and share stories that illustrate what this work actually looks like on the ground. We invite speakers to share why they approach their work the way they do, as well as some of the lessons they've learned along the way. Stories from the Field speakers represent a range of backgrounds, and their work spans an even wider range of topics. Our hope is that all of these stories highlight the challenges and opportunities of doing work with and for communities. Recordings of all previous talks can be found on our website.

Stories from the Field is hosted by Penn State's Center for Economic and Community Development, an applied research center dedicated to strengthening local and regional development in Pennsylvania and beyond.