Date: TBD

Time: TBD

SPECIAL

CFP 74 - Author Meets Critics: Author Meets Critics: Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing by Rahim Kurwa, University of California Press, 2025
Room: TBD

Sponsor: Program Committee

Organizer &

Presider: Theresa Ysabel Rocha Beardall, University of Washington

Description: 

Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing offers a vivid case study of the national crisis of the policing of housing, told through a history of struggle over Los Angeles’ northernmost outpost, the Antelope Valley. It opens on a place of refuge, exchange, and experimentation, then follows its postwar turn toward segregation and militarization. It centers Black residents who fought back by building Sun Village, an all-Black town and hub for civil rights organizing. After the civil rights revolution, the valley defended itself as a white space, using policing for racialized eviction and exclusion through sweeps, citations, and landlord pressure. In the early 2000s, displaced tenants organized, stayed housed, and forced change through abolitionist struggle for housing justice.

Author:

Rahim Kurwa, University of Illinois Chicago

Critics:

Louise Seamster, University of Iowa

Zawadi Rucks-Ahidiana, University at Albany

Chris Herring, UCLA

Frank Edwards, Rutgers University

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