MMC’s 2025 Social Justice Academy Explores Housing Justice
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MMC’s Social Justice Academy, a college-wide series of talks and workshops led by the Department of Politics and Human Rights, returns this semester with a focus on an issue that has long since reached crisis proportions in New York City: housing.
Now in its fifth year, the academy kicked off in February under the theme “Home, Place, and Housing Justice,” exploring the relationship between land and housing justice to racial justice, democracy, and movements for freedom. Wide-ranging discussions led by historians, activists, and authors have examined the history of redlining and racial housing segregation, the tenants’ rights movement, and efforts to protect the lives of migrants at the border, among other things.
Students also visited the UN to learn more about its efforts to codify the right to housing as well as the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, which documents the experience of immigrant tenement residents in the city. The Social Justice Academy will run all semester, culminating in May.
Housing justice comes up frequently in PHR classes and, on a personal level, resonates with many students who often struggle to obtain it, said Marnie Brady, Ph.D., an associate professor of Politics and Human Rights who coordinated this year’s academy. Indeed, she said, several students in off-campus housing reported experiencing eviction proceedings and even bouts of homelessness.
“We’ve had quite a few students who’ve raised questions around how to interact with landlords as they begin to be part of New York City communities,” she said. “And others have brought to the fore some important analysis around what they are observing in relationship to gentrification and changes in New York City as well as their hometowns outside of it.”
With that in mind, this year’s series has several goals. As with past Social Justice Academies that have covered topics such as migration and labor, the first is to engage in intersectional analysis of systems and movements in a way that allows for experiential learning and connects students to a network of thinkers and organizers already working on the issues, Dr. Brady said.
“We’re really trying to understand systems of oppression and how they affect our communities and the larger city of New York in a way that allows for active learning and partnership with people using solution-based strategies to address some of the challenges that we’ve been studying,” she said.
PHR faculty share stewardship of the academy, with a different professor spearheading the effort each year and taking on a theme that reflects their expertise. Dr. Brady has been involved in the housing justice movement for the last 30 years, first as an organizer and now as an academic, conducting community-based research in partnership with housing justice groups.
She currently supports Right to the City, a national alliance of more than 90 community-based organizations fighting for housing justice and renters’ rights. Dr. Brady is the co-chair of the group’s policy committee and has been happy to introduce the alliance to the College community through the Social Justice Academy.
Another goal, she said, has been to boost opportunities for student leadership. To that end, Dr. Brady and PHR faculty established a student advisory board that assists in planning academy events, encourages participation among their peers, and gives voice to student concerns.
The board is currently comprised of 16 students who reflect a broad swath of housing experiences and have been able to connect and share freely despite their different perspectives. “It’s been a great, supportive group,” Dr. Brady said.
Hannah Adames ’26, a double major in PHR and Creative Writing with a minor in International Studies, is one of its members. The academy’s theme, Adames said, not only dovetails with her academic interests but hits home, as she is the granddaughter of Puerto Rican migrants who moved to the region after World War II and raised their family in housing projects. “Everyone deserves to have a home and a safe place they can go to at the end of the day,” she said. After hearing about the advisory committee through word of mouth, she tracked Dr. Brady down in the halls to ask about joining it.
Based on the board’s feedback, the second half of the Social Justice Academy in April and May will give students an opportunity to dream of better and more just futures in housing through an envisioning workshop led by Kasey McNaughton ’20, director of organizing at The Youth Alliance for Housing. “It will help us to be aspirational in thinking about the world we need, which is the world we’re hoping to build,” Dr. Brady said.
Other upcoming events will give students an overview of New Yorkers’ fundamental housing rights, with a focus on young renters. Dr. Brady and the student advisory committee also hope to create a separate workshop for students in MMC’s prison education programs at the Bedford Hills and Taconic Correctional facilities, exploring the unique housing issues they face both before and after incarceration. Students at these campuses will be provided access to recordings of guest speaker events.
Adames said that she and other advisory board members hope to establish the same atmosphere of openness and support at academy workshops that they’ve come to experience among themselves. “We want to be a bridge between MMC students and the academy,” she said. “We understand that it can be daunting to voice your opinions and your concerns, so we really try to make sure that the environment we’re fostering on the advisory board is being spread throughout the events.”
In many ways, that emphasis on support speaks to the heart of the Social Justice Academy; like many initiatives that got their start during the pandemic, it is, at its core, about fostering connection.
Indeed, when faculty launched the academy’s first series of workshops over Zoom in 2021, taking a critical look at the suffrage movement as it celebrated its 100th anniversary, they viewed it as an opportunity to bring together socially isolated faculty and students hungry for interaction.
Five years later, Dr. Brady said she was proud of what the academies had accomplished and what they say about PHR faculty’s commitment to affirming colleagues and their scholarship and bringing students “into authentic experiences with each other and with the importance of the issues they’re studying.”
Most of all, she is proud that the academies don’t simply diagnose problems that are understood to be complex but support students in seeing themselves as agents of change. “The antidote to the frustration that many students experience when coming to understand the different ways inequalities get produced is coming together with others, collaborating, identifying strategies, and being disciplined in methodologies,” she said. “These academies have been a place for all of that.”
Published: March 17, 2025
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