Event Details

Property as Technology: Mediating Race, Space, Data, and Displacement
Thursday, February 27, 5:00-6:00 pm, Humanities 412 (Interdisciplinary Media Lab)
This talk draws upon research from a forthcoming manuscript project on technology, media, property, and racial dispossession in postsocialist Romania and the post-Cold War San Francisco Bay Area. It also engages ongoing counter-cartographic with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project – a digital media mapping collective that abets in anti-displacement struggles, documentation, and analysis upon gentrifying terrains. Across both locales, I am interested in how property as technology, be it real estate or data, mediates urban space. In particular, I am interested in new forms of property technology, known as “proptech” by the real estate industry, or the platforms used in order to abed practices of landlordism, property management, building acquisition, and tenant surveillance. At the same time, I investigate proptech’s historical entwining of real estate  and data, and how these connections surface in the postsocialist present. Thus, I foreground what I describe as a connected approach to producing urban, media, and technology studies. Rather than employing a comparative framework, in which two distinct spaces are compared side by side, connected methods foreground entanglements across space and time. A connected approach also remains rooted in community organizing, and centers housing, data, racial, and media justice as fields of inquiry.