Emplaced Research: Working with Dispossessed Communities

In this workshop, Michele Lancione and Erin McElroy will discuss their respective work in Romania, Italy and the USA, highlighting their respective methodologies of engagement and emplacement with dispossessed and racialised communities. They will focus on the ethical questions of doing such work and on its politics. The aim is to discuss non-extractive approaches aligned with the politics at stake in our contexts of work, including the academy.

This session will support attendees to:

• Reflect on the ethical challenges of doing research with dispossessed communities and urban settings;
• Acquire an understanding of the question that arise at the intersection of research and organising;
• Explore the possibilities offered by collaborative, creative and community-based methods to engagement and dissemination.

Michele Lancione is Professor of Geography at the Polytechnic of Turin, Italy, and Visiting Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Sheffield, UK. He is the co-director, with AbdouMaliq Simone, of the Beyond Inhabitation Lab, and corresponding editor at IJURR. He currently runs a European Research Council project on Inhabiting Radical Housing, and an Italian Ministry of University project on Precarious Housing in Eastern Europe. His latest monograph is titled ‘For a Liberatory Politics of Home’ (Duke University Press).

Erin McElroy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington, where their work focuses upon intersections of gentrification, technology, empire, and racial capitalism, alongside housing justice organizing and transnational solidarities. McElroy is author of ‘Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times’ (Duke University Press, 2024) and coeditor of ‘Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance’ (PM Press, 2021). Additionally, McElroy is cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project—a data visualization, counter-cartography, and digital media collective that produces tools, maps, reports, murals, zines, oral histories, and more to further the work of housing justice. At UW, McElroy runs Landlord Tech Watch, which produces collaborative research and collective knowledge on the dispossessive technologies of landlordism.

This training session will be delivered in person only at the University of Sheffield.

Bookings will close at 9am on Tuesday 10th June.

As places are limited, please book a place only if you are sure that you will be able to attend.

When booking, you must use your institutional (.ac.uk) email address and complete all fields of the booking form. Your booking will otherwise be cancelled, and you will need to re-book (subject to availability). Thank you for your understanding.