The House as a Laboratory of Capital: Finance, Housing, and Territory

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Join the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs for the virtual event “The House as a Laboratory of Capital: Finance, Housing, and Territory.”

This conversation will explore the hypotheses and lines of research we are developing by conceptualizing and problematizing the dynamics that are mobilized in relation to housing and expressed in urban space as an expanded territory of work and extraction of value. We want to account for the new forms of exploitation and expropriation that manifest as conditions of dispossession, generating situations of permanent transience that feed daily violence. From the financialization of the right to housing and to the city happening through the superexploitation of domestic work, as well as considering the strategies of de-domestication of the domestic, we will present insights from an ongoing investigation with an intersectional feminist approach to map these dynamics from Latin America.

Materials:
Feminist Map of the Housing Crisis, Villa 31 and 31 Bis, Buenos Aires, 2015-2020.
Asamblea Feminista de la Villa 31 y 31 Bis and NiUnaMenos. Design, maps and illustration by Iconoclasistas.

Natalia Brizuela is professor in the departments of Film & Media and Spanish & Portuguese at UC Berkeley, where she is also a project director and co-principal investigator for the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs. She is also affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory and Gender and Women’s Studies. Brizuela is the author of Photography and Empire; After Photography; and The Matter of Photography in the Americas. She is co-editor of the book series Critical South (Polity). She has curated a number of exhibitions in the United States and Argentina, among them The Matter of Photography in the Americas (Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, 2018) and No sé (El templo del sol) (Parque de la Memoria, Buenos Aires, 2014).

Lucía Cavallero is a sociologist and researcher at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, and member of the feminist collective Ni Una Menos. Her research focuses on feminist economies, and in particular debt and gender. She is also part of GIIF (Group for Feminist Research and Intervention). She is a research affiliate with the International Consortium of Critical Theory for the project “Debt, Vulnerability, and Forms of Care.” She teaches gender studies in Master of Arts programs at Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero and Universidad de Buenos Aires. She is the co-author of Una lectura feminista de la deuda (A Feminist Reading of Debt), published in Argentina by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (2019), in Brazil by Criação Humana Editora (2019), in Italy by Ombre Corte (2020) and in English by Pluto Press (2021).

Verónica Gago teaches political science at Universidad de Buenos Aires and is professor of sociology at Instituto de Altos Estudios, Universidad Nacional de San Martín. As a researcher at the National Council of Research (CONICET), she is also part of GIIF (Group for Feminist Research and Intervention). She is a research affiliate with the International Consortium of Critical Theory for the project “Debt, Vulnerability, and Forms of Care.” Gago is the author of Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies (Tinta Limón 2014, Duke University Press 2017), co-author of A Feminist Reading of Debt (with Luci Cavallero), Feminist International: How to Change Everything (Verso 2020), and numerous articles and books published throughout Latin America, Europe, and the United States. She is a member of the independent radical collective press Tinta Limón. She was part of the militant research experience Colectivo Situaciones, and she is now a member of Ni Una Menos.

Raquel Rolnik is a professor, architect and urban planner, with over 35 years of scholarship, activism, and practical experience in planning, urban land policy, and housing issues. Based in São Paulo, Brazil, she is head of the Department of Design and Planning at the School of Architecture and Urbanism at Universidade de São Paulo (FAUUSP). She has held various government positions including Director of the Planning Department of the City of São Paulo (1989-1992) and National Secretary for Urban Programs of the Brazilian Ministry of Cities (2003-2007). Since 2019, she has organized a Research Action Lab (LabCidade), based at FAUUSP, which includes as one of its main projects an Observatory of Evictions in metropolitan São Paulo. LabCidade is also working to build a network of organizations to advocate for the right to adequate housing and imagine alternative planning and projects. Rolnik is the author of several books, including Urban Warfare: Housing and Cities in the Age of Finance (Verso 2018), A Cidade e a Lei (studio Nobel 1997), and São Paulo Historia Conflito e Territorio (Tres Estrelas 2017).

Paula Freire Santoro is a Brazilian architect and urbanist based in São Paulo. She is professor of urban planning at the School of Architecture and Urbanism at Universidade de São Paulo (FAUUSP). With Raquel Rolnik, she co-coordinates research at LabCidade.

Presented by the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of California, Berkeley.