Joanna Kusiak
Biographic Data
| ID | 1031685 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Joanna Kusiak |
| GIVEN NAMES | Joanna |
| FAMILY NAME | Kusiak |
| SIGNATURE | KUSIAK J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8964-6833 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 9 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 30 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 9 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Striking back with the law: Legal struggles against corporate landlords in Barcelona and Berlin
Corporate landlords have emerged as a new powerful actor of the housing crisis. Fuelled by financialised capital and operating simultaneously at a global and local scale, they have increased pressure on the housing markets. Urban social movements and tenants’ unions are reorganising through news strategies to adapt to new challenges. These include combining resistance on the streets with a strategic use of the law. This paper analyses the legal s…
Comparative urbanism for hope and healing: Urbicide and the dilemmas of reconstruction in post-war Syria and Poland
This paper expands the repertoire of comparative urbanism by putting forward a method of ‘hopeful comparison’, in which we explore an asynchronous comparison between post-war Poland and Syria. Similar to the way that Polish architects used urban design as a ‘practice of hope’ during the Second World War, contemporary Syrian architects are now drafting reconstruction plans even if their implementation does not seem politically possible. Yet what r…
Housing justice, mobilization, and financialization: A conversation from the Antipode Institute for Geographies of Justice
In June 2022, a group of activists, students, and scholars gathered in Barcelona for the 8th annual International Geographies of Justice Summer Institute (IGJ), Housing Justice in Unequal Cities, co-sponsored by Antipode and the UCLA Institute on Inequality and Democracy. IGJ attendees included people from within movement and activist spaces, academics, and non-profit organizations who share the common vision of working toward housing justice. Th…
Trespassing on the Law: Critical legal engineering as a strategy for action research
This paper proposes critical legal engineering (CLE) as a new methodology for legal‐geographic action research. While legal geography is on the rise, geographers rarely participate in legal or judicial process, and when they do – for example, as court expert witnesses – they merely respond to the pre‐established agendas of the legal system. I argue that legal geographers’ knowledge on the nature of law and its relations with society is a source o…
Rule of Law and Rules-Lawyering: Legal Corruption and 'Reprivatization Business' in Warsaw
Delving into the nexus between the state and informality, this paper discusses the informality of the legal and judicial systems. Produced by structurally powerful actors, this kind of informality is not so much legitimized by the law, but concealed within the very process of legitimization. To capture how legal engineering welds formalized laws with informal translations, I look at judicial outcomes that, while formally legal, are socially deleg…
Legal Technologies of Primitive Accumulation: Judicial Robbery and Dispossession-by-Restitution in Warsaw
Among the 'extra-economic means' that facilitate primitive accumulation, or accumulation by dispossession, the law plays a prominent role. But works on neoliberal urban restructuring rarely engage with concrete legal technologies. Analysing judicial property restitution ('reprivatization') in Warsaw, this article grasps the machine of accumulation by dispossession at a moment of faltering and exposes the distinctive legal technologies behind its …
Non-violent Resistance is Forceful: Interview on OWS with Susan Buck-Morss
Joanna Kusiak: You’re a politically engaged philosopher. You’ve signed a letter of support for Occupy Wall Street and CUNY’s student protests, you talk about OWS during your philosophical seminar and at the same time you claim there is no political ontology. Why? Susan Buck-Morss: My prejudice against ontology comes from reading Adorno and his virulent criticism of existential ontology as he sees it so powerfully expressed in Heidegger, but then …
Striking Dialectical Sparks from the Stones of our Cities: The Ernst-Thälmann-Monument in Berlin and Walter Benjamin’s Materialist Methodology
In his methodology as well as his political thought Benjamin remains faithful to the principle to proceed “always radically, never consistently”. Therefore, the greatest challenge for a contemporary city researcher inspired by Benjamin is to operationalise his materialist methodology. Benjamin’s anthropological materialism cannot be reached within the fixed limits of any discipline, but rather places itself “on the crossroads of magic and positiv…
Walter Benjamin i metodologia antropologicznego materializmu. Krzesanie dialektycznych iskier na metalowej głowie Ernsta Thälmanna
In his methodology as well as his political thought Benjamin remainsfaithful to the principle to proceed “always radically, never consistently”. Therefore,the greatest challenge for a contemporary city researcher inspired by Benjamin is tooperationalise his materialist methodology. Benjamin’s anthropological materialismcannot be reached within the fixed limits of any discipline, but rather places itself“on the crossroads of magic and positivism” …
Rule of Law and Rules-Lawyering: Legal Corruption and 'Reprivatization Business' in Warsaw
Delving into the nexus between the state and informality, this paper discusses the informality of the legal and judicial systems. Produced by structurally powerful actors, this kind of informality is not so much legitimized by the law, but concealed within the very process of legitimization. To capture how legal engineering welds formalized laws with informal translations, I look at judicial outcomes that, while formally legal, are socially deleg…
Trespassing on the Law: Critical legal engineering as a strategy for action research
This paper proposes critical legal engineering (CLE) as a new methodology for legal‐geographic action research. While legal geography is on the rise, geographers rarely participate in legal or judicial process, and when they do – for example, as court expert witnesses – they merely respond to the pre‐established agendas of the legal system. I argue that legal geographers’ knowledge on the nature of law and its relations with society is a source o…
Legal Technologies of Primitive Accumulation: Judicial Robbery and Dispossession-by-Restitution in Warsaw
Among the 'extra-economic means' that facilitate primitive accumulation, or accumulation by dispossession, the law plays a prominent role. But works on neoliberal urban restructuring rarely engage with concrete legal technologies. Analysing judicial property restitution ('reprivatization') in Warsaw, this article grasps the machine of accumulation by dispossession at a moment of faltering and exposes the distinctive legal technologies behind its …
Striking back with the law: Legal struggles against corporate landlords in Barcelona and Berlin
Corporate landlords have emerged as a new powerful actor of the housing crisis. Fuelled by financialised capital and operating simultaneously at a global and local scale, they have increased pressure on the housing markets. Urban social movements and tenants’ unions are reorganising through news strategies to adapt to new challenges. These include combining resistance on the streets with a strategic use of the law. This paper analyses the legal s…
Striking Dialectical Sparks from the Stones of our Cities: The Ernst-Thälmann-Monument in Berlin and Walter Benjamin’s Materialist Methodology
In his methodology as well as his political thought Benjamin remains faithful to the principle to proceed “always radically, never consistently”. Therefore, the greatest challenge for a contemporary city researcher inspired by Benjamin is to operationalise his materialist methodology. Benjamin’s anthropological materialism cannot be reached within the fixed limits of any discipline, but rather places itself “on the crossroads of magic and positiv…
Walter Benjamin i metodologia antropologicznego materializmu. Krzesanie dialektycznych iskier na metalowej głowie Ernsta Thälmanna
In his methodology as well as his political thought Benjamin remainsfaithful to the principle to proceed “always radically, never consistently”. Therefore,the greatest challenge for a contemporary city researcher inspired by Benjamin is tooperationalise his materialist methodology. Benjamin’s anthropological materialismcannot be reached within the fixed limits of any discipline, but rather places itself“on the crossroads of magic and positivism” …
Non-violent Resistance is Forceful: Interview on OWS with Susan Buck-Morss
Joanna Kusiak: You’re a politically engaged philosopher. You’ve signed a letter of support for Occupy Wall Street and CUNY’s student protests, you talk about OWS during your philosophical seminar and at the same time you claim there is no political ontology. Why? Susan Buck-Morss: My prejudice against ontology comes from reading Adorno and his virulent criticism of existential ontology as he sees it so powerfully expressed in Heidegger, but then …
Rule of Law and Rules-Lawyering: Legal Corruption and 'Reprivatization Business' in Warsaw
Delving into the nexus between the state and informality, this paper discusses the informality of the legal and judicial systems. Produced by structurally powerful actors, this kind of informality is not so much legitimized by the law, but concealed within the very process of legitimization. To capture how legal engineering welds formalized laws with informal translations, I look at judicial outcomes that, while formally legal, are socially deleg…
Legal Technologies of Primitive Accumulation: Judicial Robbery and Dispossession-by-Restitution in Warsaw
Among the 'extra-economic means' that facilitate primitive accumulation, or accumulation by dispossession, the law plays a prominent role. But works on neoliberal urban restructuring rarely engage with concrete legal technologies. Analysing judicial property restitution ('reprivatization') in Warsaw, this article grasps the machine of accumulation by dispossession at a moment of faltering and exposes the distinctive legal technologies behind its …
Trespassing on the Law: Critical legal engineering as a strategy for action research
This paper proposes critical legal engineering (CLE) as a new methodology for legal‐geographic action research. While legal geography is on the rise, geographers rarely participate in legal or judicial process, and when they do – for example, as court expert witnesses – they merely respond to the pre‐established agendas of the legal system. I argue that legal geographers’ knowledge on the nature of law and its relations with society is a source o…
Housing justice, mobilization, and financialization: A conversation from the Antipode Institute for Geographies of Justice
In June 2022, a group of activists, students, and scholars gathered in Barcelona for the 8th annual International Geographies of Justice Summer Institute (IGJ), Housing Justice in Unequal Cities, co-sponsored by Antipode and the UCLA Institute on Inequality and Democracy. IGJ attendees included people from within movement and activist spaces, academics, and non-profit organizations who share the common vision of working toward housing justice. Th…
Comparative urbanism for hope and healing: Urbicide and the dilemmas of reconstruction in post-war Syria and Poland
This paper expands the repertoire of comparative urbanism by putting forward a method of ‘hopeful comparison’, in which we explore an asynchronous comparison between post-war Poland and Syria. Similar to the way that Polish architects used urban design as a ‘practice of hope’ during the Second World War, contemporary Syrian architects are now drafting reconstruction plans even if their implementation does not seem politically possible. Yet what r…
Striking back with the law: Legal struggles against corporate landlords in Barcelona and Berlin
Corporate landlords have emerged as a new powerful actor of the housing crisis. Fuelled by financialised capital and operating simultaneously at a global and local scale, they have increased pressure on the housing markets. Urban social movements and tenants’ unions are reorganising through news strategies to adapt to new challenges. These include combining resistance on the streets with a strategic use of the law. This paper analyses the legal s…
Law (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Political science (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Dialectic (3 works) · History (3 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (3 works) · Law (3 works) · Law and economics (3 works)