Time: 1:00 - 2:00pm Speaker: Dr Jesse SpeerVenue: City Centre Seminar Room (Bancroft 2.07)
Dr Jesse Speer, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow Losing home: Housing, displacement, and the American Dream
Over the past decade, new oral history archives and self-publishing platforms have led to an explosion in the production of memoirs and oral histories of homelessness. The growing genre of homeless life narratives can be read as a kind of urban theory that has been largely displaced from public memory. Based on analysis of hundreds of memoirs and oral histories of homelessness, this research highlights the violent geographies of the American dream, in which both political economies of urban housing and normative cultures of domesticity produce racialised and gendered cycles of displacement. In centering displaced voices and analyzing the connections between economic and intimate politics, it advances a socialist feminist approach to the study of contemporary housing and American life.