[POSTPONED] Power at the Margins II: Mobilizing Across Housing Injustice

Friday, 03/13/20 03/15/20
Wurster Hall

This event has been postponed due to recent campus closures and cancellations from COVID19

Power to the Margins II: Mobilizing Across Housing Injustice
A conference of scholars and activitsts uniting together to discuss housing rights
March 13-15, 2020
Wurster Hall

Academics across the social sciences and humanities have long worked to theorize the people, spaces, and politics of the fringes of traditional housing. Homelessness, eviction, squatters’ rights, and the right to land all find their way into fruitful interdisciplinary scholarship, much of which links these struggles to broader questions of citizenship, governance, and exclusion. Meanwhile many of the same root problems motivate housing activists around the globe. These community organizing struggles create grounded, pragmatic critiques and strategies, as activists deploy popular education to empower those immediately affected and often situate their work within broader social justice movements, including labor, criminal justice, environmental, immigration, ethnic, racial, and caste struggles.  

PATM II grows out of the Constructing Solidarities through Power at the Margins initiative, and follows an initial symposium at the University of Illinois (September 2017) and conference at the University of Minnesota (March 2018). Our intention is to continue creating a space in which the unique work done by organizers and academics can collide, fostered by proximity that is rare across both divides both geographic and work-related in nature. All panels will include both organizers and scholars.

We are excited to open up registration for attending “Power at the Margins II: Mobilizing Across Housing Injustice.” The gathering will bring together over 140 scholars and community organizers working on issues of housing justice from across the Bay Area, US, and other countries in discussion across 25 sessions.

Seeking a change in the current scenario where academia, activists, and practitioners perform separately, our goal is to create a dedicated space for all who engage in work at the margins of traditional housing to come together. Sessions will address a range of issues including:

  • Defending and expanding affordable housing
  • Legal, civil, and human rights struggles of housing and homelessness
  • Intersections and alliances between housing justice and other movements including labor, health, environmental, gender, and racial justice.
  • Solidarity, lessons, and collaborations between academia and community organizing

The event will take place at Wurster Hall on the UC Berkeley Campus. The gathering will commence with a plenary panel “Defending Housing” Friday, March 13 5:30 – 7pm. It will then continue with full days of sessions on Saturday and conclude Sunday, March 15 at 1:30pm. For the schedule and list of panels and participants visit: https://sites.google.com/view/poweratthemargins2020/program?authuser=2

Registration is free, but limited. We encourage you to register ASAP to secure a spot. Registration is for the full day of sessions on Saturday and/or Sunday. We hope you will be able to join for both. The Friday evening plenary does not require registration and is open to the public. Click here to Register!