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Virtual Book Launch

Virtual Book Talk | Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing

11/01 Monday | 6pm

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NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge invites you to a book talk for Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing featuring the author Andrew Ross in conversation with Kimberly Johnson, Tom Sugrue, and moderated by Caitlin Zaloom.

Through visceral, frontline reporting from the motels and encampments dotting central Florida, renowned social analyst Andrew Ross exposes the overlooked housing crisis sweeping America’s suburbs and rural areas, where residents suffer ongoing trauma, poverty, and nihilism. As millions of renters face down evictions and foreclosures in the midst of the COVID-19 recession, Andrew Ross reveals how ineffective government planning, property market speculation, and poverty wages have combined to create this catastrophe. Urgent and incisive, Sunbelt Blues offers original insight into what is quickly becoming a full-blown national emergency.

Andrew Ross is a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University and a social activist. A contributor to the New York Times, the Guardian, and the Nation, he is the author of many books, including The Celebration Chronicles, Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City, and Nice Work if You Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times.

Kimberley Johnson is a professor and the Director of Graduate Studies at the Social & Cultural Analysis department at New York University. Johnson’s research focuses on urban and metropolitan politics, federalism and intergovernmental relations, race and ethnic politics, and American political development, particularly the intersection between state and society. Kimberley is the author of numerous articles as well as two books, Governing the American State (Princeton University Press) and Reforming Jim Crow (Oxford University Press). She is currently working on a book manuscript, Dark Concrete, which explores American urban political development during the 20th Century with a focus on Oakland, California, and Newark, New Jersey. Before joining NYU, Johnson was the EBH Chair in Urban Studies and Political Science at Barnard College, as well as the Director of the Barnard-Columbia Urban Studies Program.

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.

Caitlin Zaloom is a professor of Social & Cultural Analysis at New York University who studies the cultural dimensions of finance, technology, urbanism, and economic life. Her latest book, Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost, explores how the financial pressures of paying for college affect middle-class families. Zaloom is also author of Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London, co-editor of the recent volume Antidemocracy in America and the forthcoming The Long YearA 2020 Reader, and founding editor of the Public Books, which was a 2021 finalist for a National Magazine Award. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and has been featured in The New York Review of Books,TheNew York TimesThe Atlantic,and The Chronicle of Higher Education among others.

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