Social Justice Academy Spring 2025: Home, Place, Housing Justice

The Department of Politics and Human Rights launches the Spring 2025 Social Justice Academy: Home, Place, and Housing Justice. This fifth interdisciplinary, semester-length, and college-wide academy features thought leaders and hands-on workshops illuminating theories and methods of enacting transformative social change.

ABOUT THE ACADEMY

If “freedom is a place,” as geographer Ruth Gilmore (2022) suggests, what does home feel like there ? What do we make possible if homes are where we can thrive, return, and remain? What is the relationship of land and housing justice to racial justice, democracy, and movements for freedom? How do we make and keep place with fellow inhabitants to withstand and challenge climate change, militarism and carcerality, financialization, and interrelated inequalities?

This year’s academy encourages radical imagination to envision how the world could be, and how we get there from here. We seek to evoke life worlds and lessons from past struggles for emplacement, belonging, bodily autonomy, safety, and justice in the context of stolen land, homes, labor, culture, and lives. In New York City, these examples abound — from the Munsee rebellion, Seneca Village, The ‘Coops’, First Houses, ballroom “houses,” and Lower East Side squats — to the renderings of Romare Beardon’s look-ins, the casitasof urban gardens, Faith Ringgold’s rooftops, MMC Prof. Betty Yu’s and the Chinatown Art Brigade’s light installations, and Mary Kathryn Nagle’s play, Manahatta . Inspired by recent proposals to address the urgency of the housing crisis, such as the NYC Community Land Act, the NYS “Green Social Housing” campaign, and the congressional bill, “The Homes Act,” as well as insights from the comparative study of housing decommodification in Vienna, Barcelona, and Montevideo, this academy considers the possibilities, limits, and necessity – in our city and elsewhere – of freedom as a place of land and housing justice, and a home of just futures.

Additionally, the academy is collaborating with faculty within the College’s Prison Education programs at the Bedford Hills and Taconic Correctional facilities to provide students at these campuses access to recordings of guest speaker events. Thank you to the various speakers who have agreed to be recorded.

Visit Politics and Human Rights for more information about the major and minor. Find academy-related individual events listings here or on MMC Engage to RSVP for academy key conversations, creative action, and site visits. For more information, write to socialjustice@mmm.edu.