Erin McElroy Video Now Online
Erin McElroy, the cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, was recently invited by Arts and Research Center to deliver a Visual Activism talk! This talk was co-sponsored by BCNM. In her talk, McElroy speaks on racist housing policies and exploitation of these policies done by Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump. She also highlights the racist housing policies in the Bay Area and the numerous evictions that have been occurring during the pandemic. Throughout her talk, she speaks of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and how this map helps illustrate who the landlord or evictors were and where these evictions took place.
From abstract:
Erin McElroy is a postdoctoral researcher at New York University’s AI Now Institute, researching the digital platforms and technologies used by landlords in order to surveil, track, and racialize tenants. Erin is cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, a data visualization, critical cartography, and multi-media collective documenting gentrification struggles and forms of resistance, while also creating data and tools in order to support the work of housing justice. Erin earned a doctoral degree in Feminist Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a focus on the politics of space, race, and technology in Romania and Silicon Valley, and is an editor of the Radical Housing Journal.
About the Visual Activism series: How has visual culture played a role within the social movements of the last several decades, such as #BlackLivesMatter and Extinction Rebellion? How, we might ask, is activism made visible; how does it erupt (or disappear) with collective fields of vision? Drawing upon Black South African queer photographer Zanele Muholi’s term “visual activism” as a flexible rubric that encompasses both formal practices and political strategies, this series interrogates visual cultures of dissent, resistance, and protest.
This talk is co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for New Media. Visual Activism is sponsored in part by a Creative Discovery Grant from UC Berkeley’s Arts + Design Initiative.