Erin Mcelroy
Biographic Data
| ID | 266142 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Erin Mcelroy |
| GIVEN NAMES | Erin |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcelroy |
| SIGNATURE | MCELROY E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Santa Cruz |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8130-9055 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 184 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Siliconization, technofascism, and their unbecomings
In this response essay, I reflect upon how some of the central themes of my book Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times (Duke University Press, 2024) speak to the contemporary technofascist moment, as well as ongoing practices of attempting to de–siliconize the future. I also offer fascist transformations currently transpiring on both sides of the former Iron Curtain, as well as the landscapes of gentrif…
Disciplining Through Landlord Technologies
Facial recognition and other surveillance systems are increasingly being deployed in low‐income housing across the United States, adding new scopic regimes into an already carceral propertied landscape. While there are numerous harms associated with facial recognition, for instance the reproduction of racial bias, the imposition of new landlord technologies also impels disciplinary and biopolitical control, abetting the reproduction of racial cap…
Silicon Valley Imperialism
When ‘Open’ is Still Far from Good Enough
What does “openness” mean when it comes to crafting digital tools and infrastructures for housing justice action research? This question is particularly urgent as global internet companies unleash new geospatial technologies to track and surveil. In this article, we examine the corporate software dependencies and organizational practices that the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP) have encountered in its counter-mapping work. Free and Open Sour…
Who’s afraid of postsocialist theory
Archiving the Housing Conjuncture
The past months have continued to exacerbate crises of housing, home, displacement, dispossession, and other state-sanctioned forms of violence and premature death. We witness erasure of histories, lives lived, belongings, and homes, which are intentional strategies to forcibly remove people from place and to make it seem as though they were never there. The authors thus document this conjunctural moment in radical housing struggles and collectiv…
Silicon Valley Imperialism
The work of landlord technology
Landlord technology-or the systems used by landlords to control and regulate tenant lives, spaces, and data-frequently promises "frictionless" building management and residential experiences. Yet services such as "digital doormen" and virtual property management platforms often create more work for tenants, particularly regarding decreased accessibility for tenants of color whose faces are unrecognized by biased algorithms used to administer buil…
Life-Affirmative Struggles for Home Across Borders
Issue 5.1 of the Radical Housing Journal (RHJ) examines the current state of struggles for housing and home amidst capital-accumulation-induced urban restructuring worldwide. The authors discuss the enduring impact of settler colonialism on land and housing rights, particularly for Indigenous peoples. Feminist, queer, and trans perspectives are brought to the forefront, emphasizing the leadership roles played by marginalized communities in housin…
Dis/Possessory Data Politics
In this article I place tenant screening data grabbing practices in tension with the ongoing work of housing justice-based tool making. While the tenant screening industry has spent decades amassing eviction data to facilitate the blocklisting of tenants with prior eviction records and thereby reifying racial capitalist geographies, housing organizers today rely on some of this same data to illuminate evictor networks and organize anti-eviction c…
Gentrification and State Violence
In this conversation, Andrew Szeto and Terra Graziani share more about their coedited chapter, “Gentrification & State Violence,” one of seven chapters comprising the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project’s 2021 atlas, Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance published by PM Press. Here Erin McElroy (also a Counterpoints editor) asks them how they conceptualize the interconnectedness of gentrification and state violenc…
Picturing the Homeless, Building International Solidarities
In this conversation, Rob Robinson shares reflections based upon decades of organizing and community building with tenants and homeless residents in New York City, as well as transnationally with groups based in Hungary, Brazil, Miami, Spain, and beyond. While Rob shares insights from his own experience being unhoused, he focuses upon ongoing work that he has been a part of since then with groups such as Picture the Homeless that have organized a…
Automating gentrification
This paper focuses on surveillance technologies that New York City landlords have been installing in low-income, public, and affordable tenant housing over the last decade. It looks at how new forms of biometric and facial recognition-based landlord technology automate gentrification and carcerality, reproducing racist systems of recognition and displacement. We offer these systems a genealogy and geography, looking at intersections of zoning, ge…
Reflections on doing the work
In this collaborative reflection, members of City Life / Vida Urbana (based in Boston) and the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and New York City) describe more about their collectives and approaches to community-based and antiracist research, action, and knowledge production for housing justice in the US
Intensification of, and responses to, housing struggles in Brazil under the Covid-19 pandemic
The Covid-19 pandemic has severely impacted historically vulnerable populations in Brazil such as the unhoused and those living in tenements and quilombolas, and in particular black, brown and indigenous peoples. This has intensified issues of unemployment, indebtedness, precarious work and hunger among Brazilians who already faced various forms of violence. Yet important efforts have emerged to confront these conditions, such as the Zero Evictio…
Housing struggles in Romania and in Central Eastern Europe (CEE)
In this conversation two of our Editors (Erin and Michele) are encountering a number of comrades with whom we shared direct action and theorizing in Romania and beyond. They are Enikő Vincze and George Zamfir (from Cluj) and Ioana Florea and Veda Popovici (from Bucharest). In the paper we collectively reflect around the struggle for housing in Romania and in Central Eastern Europe (CEE), on the Western economic and State power on the East, on gra…
Corruption, Șmecherie, and Siliconization
This article explores socialist and postsocialist technoculture in postsocialist Romania, focusing upon both retrospective and speculative accounts of what did, and what could have, transpired beyond the purview of the state and of capitalism. Upon a backdrop of postsocialist Siliconization and Western anticorruption politics, it looks to queer, corrupt, and deviant technological practices that pervert normative and Western accounts of socialism …
Property as technology
This article considers how private property functions as a technology of racial dispossession upon gentrifying terrains, particularly in San Francisco amidst its ‘Tech Boom 2.0.’ By engaging with collective work produced with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP), by reading the film, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, and by foregrounding critical race studies and urban studies literature, I decenter the novelty of technology in contemporar…
Digital nomads in siliconising Cluj
This paper studies the arrival of digital nomads in Cluj, Romania. I focus upon double dispossession, in which ‘digital nomads’ allegorise technocapitalist fantasies by appropriating Roma identity on one hand, and in which Roma are evicted to make way for the arrival of Western digital nomads and tech firms on the other. While Roma are materially dispossessed as Cluj siliconises, they are doubly dispossessed by the conjuration of the deracinated …
Samuel Stein 2019
Data, dispossession, and Facebook
This article situates the 2015 rebranding of Zuckerberg San Francisco General within San Francisco’s technopolitical landscape. After Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg donated to the hospital, thereby acquiring naming rights, local toponymical tension percolated. This was in part due to Facebook’s gentrifying role in the city and the racial violence such processes constitute, as well as ongoing practices data colonialism. The latter includes Faceboo…
Deracinated Dispossessions
This paper challenges dominant geographies of urban theory by conceptualising the dynamics of displacement in Oakland through place-specific histories of racial/spatial politics. It argues that the repeated transposition of a San Francisco-based model of "tech gentrification" results in deracinated dispossessions , or accounts of displacement uprooted from grounded histories of racial violence and resistance. It also argues that, while urban scho…
Richard Walkers 2018
Mapping Dispossession, Mapping Affect
The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project
The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project is a data visualization, data analysis, and oral history collective documenting gentrification and resistance in the San Francisco Bay Area. In this article, we discuss the history and methodology of our narrative mapmaking, situating our work in the tradition of critical geography, critical race studies, as well as feminist and decolonial science studies. Aligned with activist work that is fighting for a future …
Deracinated Dispossessions
This paper challenges dominant geographies of urban theory by conceptualising the dynamics of displacement in Oakland through place-specific histories of racial/spatial politics. It argues that the repeated transposition of a San Francisco-based model of "tech gentrification" results in deracinated dispossessions , or accounts of displacement uprooted from grounded histories of racial violence and resistance. It also argues that, while urban scho…
The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project
The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project is a data visualization, data analysis, and oral history collective documenting gentrification and resistance in the San Francisco Bay Area. In this article, we discuss the history and methodology of our narrative mapmaking, situating our work in the tradition of critical geography, critical race studies, as well as feminist and decolonial science studies. Aligned with activist work that is fighting for a future …
Automating gentrification
This paper focuses on surveillance technologies that New York City landlords have been installing in low-income, public, and affordable tenant housing over the last decade. It looks at how new forms of biometric and facial recognition-based landlord technology automate gentrification and carcerality, reproducing racist systems of recognition and displacement. We offer these systems a genealogy and geography, looking at intersections of zoning, ge…
Digital nomads in siliconising Cluj
This paper studies the arrival of digital nomads in Cluj, Romania. I focus upon double dispossession, in which ‘digital nomads’ allegorise technocapitalist fantasies by appropriating Roma identity on one hand, and in which Roma are evicted to make way for the arrival of Western digital nomads and tech firms on the other. While Roma are materially dispossessed as Cluj siliconises, they are doubly dispossessed by the conjuration of the deracinated …
Data, dispossession, and Facebook
This article situates the 2015 rebranding of Zuckerberg San Francisco General within San Francisco’s technopolitical landscape. After Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg donated to the hospital, thereby acquiring naming rights, local toponymical tension percolated. This was in part due to Facebook’s gentrifying role in the city and the racial violence such processes constitute, as well as ongoing practices data colonialism. The latter includes Faceboo…
Property as technology
This article considers how private property functions as a technology of racial dispossession upon gentrifying terrains, particularly in San Francisco amidst its ‘Tech Boom 2.0.’ By engaging with collective work produced with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP), by reading the film, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, and by foregrounding critical race studies and urban studies literature, I decenter the novelty of technology in contemporar…
The work of landlord technology
Landlord technology-or the systems used by landlords to control and regulate tenant lives, spaces, and data-frequently promises "frictionless" building management and residential experiences. Yet services such as "digital doormen" and virtual property management platforms often create more work for tenants, particularly regarding decreased accessibility for tenants of color whose faces are unrecognized by biased algorithms used to administer buil…
Dis/Possessory Data Politics
In this article I place tenant screening data grabbing practices in tension with the ongoing work of housing justice-based tool making. While the tenant screening industry has spent decades amassing eviction data to facilitate the blocklisting of tenants with prior eviction records and thereby reifying racial capitalist geographies, housing organizers today rely on some of this same data to illuminate evictor networks and organize anti-eviction c…
Countermapping Displacement and Resistance in Alameda County with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project
Countermapping Displacement and Resistance in Alameda County with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project Erin McElroy (bio) Anti-Eviction Mapping Project arcg.is/10SKLX The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project is a data visualization, data analysis, and digital storytelling collective documenting dispossession and resistance upon gentrifying landscapes. As a collective of housing justice activists, researchers, technologists, artists, filmmakers, and oral hi…
Postsocialism and the Tech Boom 2.0
This paper portrays spatial and racial San Francisco Bay Area enactments of dispossession emergent in the wake of the ‘Tech Boom 2.0’, offering a contextual Cold War and postsocialist genealogy. Both the Dot Com Boom and its contemporary successor, I argue, are events only made possible by the cessation of the Cold War, which incited new consumer-driven Silicon Valley models. This facilitated Silicon Valley temporal penetration both into its peri…
Who’s afraid of postsocialist theory
Mapping Dispossession, Mapping Affect
The Digital Humanities, American Studies, and the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project
The Digital Humanities, American Studies, and the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project Erin McElroy (bio) In an era in which digital web mapping and data visualization projects have taken over the media and the twenty-four-hour news cycle, in which "gentrification" has become a buzzword used to describe urban mutations across the planet without nuance, what does it mean to be an anticapitalist, antiracist, and feminist digital cartography collective wor…
Postsocialism and the Tech Boom 2.0
This paper portrays spatial and racial San Francisco Bay Area enactments of dispossession emergent in the wake of the ‘Tech Boom 2.0’, offering a contextual Cold War and postsocialist genealogy. Both the Dot Com Boom and its contemporary successor, I argue, are events only made possible by the cessation of the Cold War, which incited new consumer-driven Silicon Valley models. This facilitated Silicon Valley temporal penetration both into its peri…
Richard Walkers 2018
Mapping Dispossession, Mapping Affect
The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project
The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project is a data visualization, data analysis, and oral history collective documenting gentrification and resistance in the San Francisco Bay Area. In this article, we discuss the history and methodology of our narrative mapmaking, situating our work in the tradition of critical geography, critical race studies, as well as feminist and decolonial science studies. Aligned with activist work that is fighting for a future …
The Digital Humanities, American Studies, and the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project
The Digital Humanities, American Studies, and the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project Erin McElroy (bio) In an era in which digital web mapping and data visualization projects have taken over the media and the twenty-four-hour news cycle, in which "gentrification" has become a buzzword used to describe urban mutations across the planet without nuance, what does it mean to be an anticapitalist, antiracist, and feminist digital cartography collective wor…
Countermapping Displacement and Resistance in Alameda County with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project
Countermapping Displacement and Resistance in Alameda County with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project Erin McElroy (bio) Anti-Eviction Mapping Project arcg.is/10SKLX The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project is a data visualization, data analysis, and digital storytelling collective documenting dispossession and resistance upon gentrifying landscapes. As a collective of housing justice activists, researchers, technologists, artists, filmmakers, and oral hi…
Samuel Stein 2019
Data, dispossession, and Facebook
This article situates the 2015 rebranding of Zuckerberg San Francisco General within San Francisco’s technopolitical landscape. After Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg donated to the hospital, thereby acquiring naming rights, local toponymical tension percolated. This was in part due to Facebook’s gentrifying role in the city and the racial violence such processes constitute, as well as ongoing practices data colonialism. The latter includes Faceboo…
Deracinated Dispossessions
This paper challenges dominant geographies of urban theory by conceptualising the dynamics of displacement in Oakland through place-specific histories of racial/spatial politics. It argues that the repeated transposition of a San Francisco-based model of "tech gentrification" results in deracinated dispossessions , or accounts of displacement uprooted from grounded histories of racial violence and resistance. It also argues that, while urban scho…
Housing struggles in Romania and in Central Eastern Europe (CEE)
In this conversation two of our Editors (Erin and Michele) are encountering a number of comrades with whom we shared direct action and theorizing in Romania and beyond. They are Enikő Vincze and George Zamfir (from Cluj) and Ioana Florea and Veda Popovici (from Bucharest). In the paper we collectively reflect around the struggle for housing in Romania and in Central Eastern Europe (CEE), on the Western economic and State power on the East, on gra…
Corruption, Șmecherie, and Siliconization
This article explores socialist and postsocialist technoculture in postsocialist Romania, focusing upon both retrospective and speculative accounts of what did, and what could have, transpired beyond the purview of the state and of capitalism. Upon a backdrop of postsocialist Siliconization and Western anticorruption politics, it looks to queer, corrupt, and deviant technological practices that pervert normative and Western accounts of socialism …
Property as technology
This article considers how private property functions as a technology of racial dispossession upon gentrifying terrains, particularly in San Francisco amidst its ‘Tech Boom 2.0.’ By engaging with collective work produced with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP), by reading the film, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, and by foregrounding critical race studies and urban studies literature, I decenter the novelty of technology in contemporar…
Digital nomads in siliconising Cluj
This paper studies the arrival of digital nomads in Cluj, Romania. I focus upon double dispossession, in which ‘digital nomads’ allegorise technocapitalist fantasies by appropriating Roma identity on one hand, and in which Roma are evicted to make way for the arrival of Western digital nomads and tech firms on the other. While Roma are materially dispossessed as Cluj siliconises, they are doubly dispossessed by the conjuration of the deracinated …
Reflections on doing the work
In this collaborative reflection, members of City Life / Vida Urbana (based in Boston) and the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and New York City) describe more about their collectives and approaches to community-based and antiracist research, action, and knowledge production for housing justice in the US
Intensification of, and responses to, housing struggles in Brazil under the Covid-19 pandemic
The Covid-19 pandemic has severely impacted historically vulnerable populations in Brazil such as the unhoused and those living in tenements and quilombolas, and in particular black, brown and indigenous peoples. This has intensified issues of unemployment, indebtedness, precarious work and hunger among Brazilians who already faced various forms of violence. Yet important efforts have emerged to confront these conditions, such as the Zero Evictio…
Gentrification and State Violence
In this conversation, Andrew Szeto and Terra Graziani share more about their coedited chapter, “Gentrification & State Violence,” one of seven chapters comprising the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project’s 2021 atlas, Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance published by PM Press. Here Erin McElroy (also a Counterpoints editor) asks them how they conceptualize the interconnectedness of gentrification and state violenc…
Picturing the Homeless, Building International Solidarities
In this conversation, Rob Robinson shares reflections based upon decades of organizing and community building with tenants and homeless residents in New York City, as well as transnationally with groups based in Hungary, Brazil, Miami, Spain, and beyond. While Rob shares insights from his own experience being unhoused, he focuses upon ongoing work that he has been a part of since then with groups such as Picture the Homeless that have organized a…
Automating gentrification
This paper focuses on surveillance technologies that New York City landlords have been installing in low-income, public, and affordable tenant housing over the last decade. It looks at how new forms of biometric and facial recognition-based landlord technology automate gentrification and carcerality, reproducing racist systems of recognition and displacement. We offer these systems a genealogy and geography, looking at intersections of zoning, ge…
Life-Affirmative Struggles for Home Across Borders
Issue 5.1 of the Radical Housing Journal (RHJ) examines the current state of struggles for housing and home amidst capital-accumulation-induced urban restructuring worldwide. The authors discuss the enduring impact of settler colonialism on land and housing rights, particularly for Indigenous peoples. Feminist, queer, and trans perspectives are brought to the forefront, emphasizing the leadership roles played by marginalized communities in housin…
Dis/Possessory Data Politics
In this article I place tenant screening data grabbing practices in tension with the ongoing work of housing justice-based tool making. While the tenant screening industry has spent decades amassing eviction data to facilitate the blocklisting of tenants with prior eviction records and thereby reifying racial capitalist geographies, housing organizers today rely on some of this same data to illuminate evictor networks and organize anti-eviction c…
Archiving the Housing Conjuncture
The past months have continued to exacerbate crises of housing, home, displacement, dispossession, and other state-sanctioned forms of violence and premature death. We witness erasure of histories, lives lived, belongings, and homes, which are intentional strategies to forcibly remove people from place and to make it seem as though they were never there. The authors thus document this conjunctural moment in radical housing struggles and collectiv…
Silicon Valley Imperialism
The work of landlord technology
Landlord technology-or the systems used by landlords to control and regulate tenant lives, spaces, and data-frequently promises "frictionless" building management and residential experiences. Yet services such as "digital doormen" and virtual property management platforms often create more work for tenants, particularly regarding decreased accessibility for tenants of color whose faces are unrecognized by biased algorithms used to administer buil…
Silicon Valley Imperialism
When ‘Open’ is Still Far from Good Enough
What does “openness” mean when it comes to crafting digital tools and infrastructures for housing justice action research? This question is particularly urgent as global internet companies unleash new geospatial technologies to track and surveil. In this article, we examine the corporate software dependencies and organizational practices that the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP) have encountered in its counter-mapping work. Free and Open Sour…
Political science (22 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Law (18 works) · Gentrification (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Economics (9 works) · Media studies (9 works) · Art (8 works) · Eviction (8 works) · Politics (8 works)