Virtual Book Talk | Dispossession and Dissent: Immigrants and the Struggle for Housing in Madrid
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NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge and NYU Cities Collaborative invites you to a book talk for Dispossession and Dissent: Immigrants and the Struggle for Housing in Madrid featuring the author Sophie Gonick in conversation with Gwendolyn Wright, Michael Goldman, Vicente Rubio-Pueyo, and moderated by Thomas J Sugrue.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, complex capital flows have ravaged everyday communities across the globe. Housing in particular has become increasingly precarious. In response, many movements now contest the long-held promises and established terms of the private ownership of housing. Immigrant activism has played an important, if understudied, role in such struggles over collective consumption. In Dispossession and Dissent, Sophie Gonick examines the intersection of homeownership and immigrant activism through an analysis of Spain’s anti-evictions movement, now a hallmark for housing struggles across the globe.
Madrid was the crucible for Spain’s urban planning and policy, its millennial economic boom (1998–2008), and its more recent mobilizations in response to crisis. During the boom, the city also experienced rapid, unprecedented immigration. Through extensive archival and ethnographic research, Gonick uncovers the city’s histories of homeownership and immigration to demonstrate the pivotal role of Andean immigrants within this movement, as the first to contest dispossession from mortgage-related foreclosures and evictions. Consequently, they forged a potent politics of dissent, which drew upon migratory experiences and indigenous traditions of activism to contest foreclosures and evictions.
Sophie L. Gonick is Assistant Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU with an emphasis on Global Urban Humanities. A scholar of urban planning and history, poverty, and race and gender, Gonick was educated at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned both a Master’s in City Planning (2010) and a Ph.D. (2015). Before joining SCA, she was an Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow at NYU’s Center for European and Mediterranean Studies.
Gwendolyn Wright is an architectural historian, author, and co-host of the PBS television series History Detectives. She is a professor of architecture at Columbia University, also holding appointments in both its departments of history and art history. Besides “History Detectives”, Dr. Wright’s specialties are US architectural history and urban history from after the Civil War to the present. She also writes about the exchange across national boundaries of architectural styles, influences, and techniques, particularly examining the colonial and neo-colonial attributes of both modernism and historic preservation.
Michael Goldman is Associate Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Author of Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Globalization and editor of Privatizing Nature: Political Struggles for the Global Commons, he is finishing a book manuscript on “Cities under Financialization” and co-editing one on the “Social Lives of Land.” Goldman was recently awarded the endowed Dr. V.K.R.V. Rao Chair Professor at the Institute for Social and Economic Change in Bengaluru, India, and has received awards including the McKnight Presidential Fellowship at the University of Minnesota, Agrarian Studies at Yale, Ciriacy-Wantrup at UC-Berkeley, NSF research grant, and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.
Vicente Rubio-Pueyo teaches as Adjunct Instructor at Fordham University Modern Languages Department. PhD in Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies from SUNY Stony Brook. Rubio-Pueyo is currently working on a book manuscript on political cultures in Contemporary Spain. A Spaniard living in the US since 2006, his research, writing and political participation have always been oriented towards a “political translation” of sorts, by helping to build resonances and mutual understanding between movements and organizations in the US, Spain, Latin America and Europe, from Occupy and 15M to Podemos and Municipalism. He is a member of Minim Municipalist Observatory and Instituto de Estudios Culturales y Cambio Social (Spain). His writings both on Spanish and US politics have been published by Public Books, InTheseTimes, CTXT, El Salto and Rosa-Luxemburg Stiftung, among others.
Thomas J. Sugrue is Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History and Director of the Cities Collaborative at New York University. He is the author of four books, including the prizewinning, Origins of the Urban Crisis, and editor of four others, most recently Immigration and Metropolitan Revitalization (2017) and Neoliberal Cities (2020). He has contributed to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, the Washington Post, the London Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Nation, and Salon. He is a frequent commentator on modern American history, politics, civil rights, and urban policy. Sugrue has given nearly 400 public lectures throughout the United States and Canada, as well as in Europe, South America, the Middle East, and Asia.