Jessie Speer
Biographic Data
| ID | 3674014 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jessie Speer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jessie |
| FAMILY NAME | Speer |
| SIGNATURE | SPEER J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Syracuse University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 204 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Dangerous Papers: Building an Archive of Antiprison Resistance
Archives are not straightforward repositories of history. Instead, they authorize which stories are remembered. In this article we apply the insights of cultural geographers and other influential scholars of archives to analyze the political dimensions of archiving activist histories. A small group of antiprison activists produced a personal archive during the 1990s and 2000s documenting brutality behind bars and efforts to dismantle solitary con…
Subalternity as displacement: Memoirs of homelessness and the struggle to be heard
Building on the writings of homeless and formerly homeless memoirists from the United States and United Kingdom, this paper examines how the voices and ideas of those who experience homelessness are consistently removed from public debate and historical memory. While people without homes are discussed at length in journalistic and academic texts, their own voices are rarely at the center of such conversations. Memoirists argue that this exclusion…
The City Is not Innocent: Homelessness and the Value of Urban Parks
This paper builds on contemporary memoirs of homelessness from cities across the United States to develop a more nuanced understanding of the use value of urban parks and green spaces. Based on analysis of over seventy memoirs, we synthesize the writings of nine memoirists who examine their relationship to green spaces in cities. Instead of framing nature as something pristine and distinct from society-or something dangerous and untamed-these wri…
A Collection of Stories, Poetry and Theories”: Homelessness, Outsider Memoirs, and the Right to Theorize
This paper argues that memoirs of homelessness advance a form of social theory that emerges from the lived experience of homelessness and housing displacement. While scholars have called for greater recognition of previously neglected forms of social theory, academic scholarship remains—in practice—overwhelmingly influenced by the theories of a narrow group of high-profile intellectuals and specialist textual forms. Life narratives, in particular…
Compassionate revanchism: The blurry geography of homelessness in the USA
In this article we move beyond the binary division between care and punishment in urban studies of homelessness to examine how caring institutions are themselves crucial to the punitive and exclusionary project of capitalist urbanisation. Based on ethnographic and archival analysis of homelessness management in Fresno, California, and Phoenix, Arizona, we show how punitive measures and institutions of care often emerge simultaneously and operate …
Migrants and city-making: Dispossession, Displacement, and Urban Regeneration
Urban makeovers, homeless encampments, and the aesthetics of displacement
This paper brings together geographic literature on homelessness and theories of aesthetics to analyse how city beautification projects in contemporary American cities promote the displacement of homelessness. Based on research conducted in Fresno, California, I argue that the seemingly innocuous realm of aesthetics often undergirds anti-homeless politics. In Fresno, officials sought to create a visual landscape that was conducive to middle-class…
The rise of the tent ward: Homeless camps in the era of mass incarceration
The politics of conceptualizing the carceral: A commentary on Moran et al. (2017)
This article responds to the call for debate opened by Moran et al.’s ‘Conceptualizing the Carceral in Carceral Geography,’ arguing that how geographers define the carceral has political implications for the work produced in this growing sub-field. While Moran et al. propose detriment, intent, and spatiality as three conditions of carcerality, this commentary instead suggests that geographers adopt Foucault’s metaphor of the carceral continuum as…
It's not like your home”: Homeless Encampments, Housing Projects, and the Struggle over Domestic Space
Based on an analysis of housing projects and homeless encampments in Fresno, California, this paper argues that both anti-homeless policing and housing provision mutually constrain homeless people's expressions of home, such that struggles over domestic space have become integral to the contemporary politics of US homelessness. In particular, this article asserts that contemporary homelessness policy is marked by a clash between competing visions…
The right to infrastructure: A struggle for sanitation in Fresno, California homeless encampments
In 2013, Fresno, California was home to more than 5,000 homeless people, many of whom took refuge in sprawling downtown encampments. Citing unsanitary conditions, Fresno officials implemented a policy of bulldozing the encampments while providing housing vouchers to a small number of residents. Yet homeless Fresnans by and large demanded the provision of sanitation in the encampments as an alternative to eviction. In doing so, they invoked their …
Henri Lefebvre: Spatial Politics, Everyday Life and the Right to the City
Chris Butler. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. ix and 183 pp., notes, bibliography, index. $48.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-415-53415-4); $145.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-415-45967-9); $44.95 electronic (ISB
Urban Interstices: The Aesthetics and the Politics of the In-Between
The right to infrastructure: A struggle for sanitation in Fresno, California homeless encampments
In 2013, Fresno, California was home to more than 5,000 homeless people, many of whom took refuge in sprawling downtown encampments. Citing unsanitary conditions, Fresno officials implemented a policy of bulldozing the encampments while providing housing vouchers to a small number of residents. Yet homeless Fresnans by and large demanded the provision of sanitation in the encampments as an alternative to eviction. In doing so, they invoked their …
Urban Interstices: The Aesthetics and the Politics of the In-Between
It's not like your home”: Homeless Encampments, Housing Projects, and the Struggle over Domestic Space
Based on an analysis of housing projects and homeless encampments in Fresno, California, this paper argues that both anti-homeless policing and housing provision mutually constrain homeless people's expressions of home, such that struggles over domestic space have become integral to the contemporary politics of US homelessness. In particular, this article asserts that contemporary homelessness policy is marked by a clash between competing visions…
Compassionate revanchism: The blurry geography of homelessness in the USA
In this article we move beyond the binary division between care and punishment in urban studies of homelessness to examine how caring institutions are themselves crucial to the punitive and exclusionary project of capitalist urbanisation. Based on ethnographic and archival analysis of homelessness management in Fresno, California, and Phoenix, Arizona, we show how punitive measures and institutions of care often emerge simultaneously and operate …
Urban makeovers, homeless encampments, and the aesthetics of displacement
This paper brings together geographic literature on homelessness and theories of aesthetics to analyse how city beautification projects in contemporary American cities promote the displacement of homelessness. Based on research conducted in Fresno, California, I argue that the seemingly innocuous realm of aesthetics often undergirds anti-homeless politics. In Fresno, officials sought to create a visual landscape that was conducive to middle-class…
The politics of conceptualizing the carceral: A commentary on Moran et al. (2017)
This article responds to the call for debate opened by Moran et al.’s ‘Conceptualizing the Carceral in Carceral Geography,’ arguing that how geographers define the carceral has political implications for the work produced in this growing sub-field. While Moran et al. propose detriment, intent, and spatiality as three conditions of carcerality, this commentary instead suggests that geographers adopt Foucault’s metaphor of the carceral continuum as…
The rise of the tent ward: Homeless camps in the era of mass incarceration
The City Is not Innocent: Homelessness and the Value of Urban Parks
This paper builds on contemporary memoirs of homelessness from cities across the United States to develop a more nuanced understanding of the use value of urban parks and green spaces. Based on analysis of over seventy memoirs, we synthesize the writings of nine memoirists who examine their relationship to green spaces in cities. Instead of framing nature as something pristine and distinct from society-or something dangerous and untamed-these wri…
Subalternity as displacement: Memoirs of homelessness and the struggle to be heard
Building on the writings of homeless and formerly homeless memoirists from the United States and United Kingdom, this paper examines how the voices and ideas of those who experience homelessness are consistently removed from public debate and historical memory. While people without homes are discussed at length in journalistic and academic texts, their own voices are rarely at the center of such conversations. Memoirists argue that this exclusion…
Migrants and city-making: Dispossession, Displacement, and Urban Regeneration
A Collection of Stories, Poetry and Theories”: Homelessness, Outsider Memoirs, and the Right to Theorize
This paper argues that memoirs of homelessness advance a form of social theory that emerges from the lived experience of homelessness and housing displacement. While scholars have called for greater recognition of previously neglected forms of social theory, academic scholarship remains—in practice—overwhelmingly influenced by the theories of a narrow group of high-profile intellectuals and specialist textual forms. Life narratives, in particular…
Henri Lefebvre: Spatial Politics, Everyday Life and the Right to the City
Chris Butler. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. ix and 183 pp., notes, bibliography, index. $48.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-415-53415-4); $145.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-415-45967-9); $44.95 electronic (ISB
Urban Interstices: The Aesthetics and the Politics of the In-Between
The right to infrastructure: A struggle for sanitation in Fresno, California homeless encampments
In 2013, Fresno, California was home to more than 5,000 homeless people, many of whom took refuge in sprawling downtown encampments. Citing unsanitary conditions, Fresno officials implemented a policy of bulldozing the encampments while providing housing vouchers to a small number of residents. Yet homeless Fresnans by and large demanded the provision of sanitation in the encampments as an alternative to eviction. In doing so, they invoked their …
The politics of conceptualizing the carceral: A commentary on Moran et al. (2017)
This article responds to the call for debate opened by Moran et al.’s ‘Conceptualizing the Carceral in Carceral Geography,’ arguing that how geographers define the carceral has political implications for the work produced in this growing sub-field. While Moran et al. propose detriment, intent, and spatiality as three conditions of carcerality, this commentary instead suggests that geographers adopt Foucault’s metaphor of the carceral continuum as…
It's not like your home”: Homeless Encampments, Housing Projects, and the Struggle over Domestic Space
Based on an analysis of housing projects and homeless encampments in Fresno, California, this paper argues that both anti-homeless policing and housing provision mutually constrain homeless people's expressions of home, such that struggles over domestic space have become integral to the contemporary politics of US homelessness. In particular, this article asserts that contemporary homelessness policy is marked by a clash between competing visions…
The rise of the tent ward: Homeless camps in the era of mass incarceration
A Collection of Stories, Poetry and Theories”: Homelessness, Outsider Memoirs, and the Right to Theorize
This paper argues that memoirs of homelessness advance a form of social theory that emerges from the lived experience of homelessness and housing displacement. While scholars have called for greater recognition of previously neglected forms of social theory, academic scholarship remains—in practice—overwhelmingly influenced by the theories of a narrow group of high-profile intellectuals and specialist textual forms. Life narratives, in particular…
Compassionate revanchism: The blurry geography of homelessness in the USA
In this article we move beyond the binary division between care and punishment in urban studies of homelessness to examine how caring institutions are themselves crucial to the punitive and exclusionary project of capitalist urbanisation. Based on ethnographic and archival analysis of homelessness management in Fresno, California, and Phoenix, Arizona, we show how punitive measures and institutions of care often emerge simultaneously and operate …
Migrants and city-making: Dispossession, Displacement, and Urban Regeneration
Urban makeovers, homeless encampments, and the aesthetics of displacement
This paper brings together geographic literature on homelessness and theories of aesthetics to analyse how city beautification projects in contemporary American cities promote the displacement of homelessness. Based on research conducted in Fresno, California, I argue that the seemingly innocuous realm of aesthetics often undergirds anti-homeless politics. In Fresno, officials sought to create a visual landscape that was conducive to middle-class…
The City Is not Innocent: Homelessness and the Value of Urban Parks
This paper builds on contemporary memoirs of homelessness from cities across the United States to develop a more nuanced understanding of the use value of urban parks and green spaces. Based on analysis of over seventy memoirs, we synthesize the writings of nine memoirists who examine their relationship to green spaces in cities. Instead of framing nature as something pristine and distinct from society-or something dangerous and untamed-these wri…
Subalternity as displacement: Memoirs of homelessness and the struggle to be heard
Building on the writings of homeless and formerly homeless memoirists from the United States and United Kingdom, this paper examines how the voices and ideas of those who experience homelessness are consistently removed from public debate and historical memory. While people without homes are discussed at length in journalistic and academic texts, their own voices are rarely at the center of such conversations. Memoirists argue that this exclusion…
Dangerous Papers: Building an Archive of Antiprison Resistance
Archives are not straightforward repositories of history. Instead, they authorize which stories are remembered. In this article we apply the insights of cultural geographers and other influential scholars of archives to analyze the political dimensions of archiving activist histories. A small group of antiprison activists produced a personal archive during the 1990s and 2000s documenting brutality behind bars and efforts to dismantle solitary con…
Sociology (12 works) · Political science (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Law (8 works) · Homelessness and Social Issues (7 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (6 works) · Art (5 works) · Economic growth (5 works)