Research Justice/ Housing Justice: Undercommoning the University

Abstract

Powerful universities in unequal cities have a long history of extractive modes of research. Often located on stolen land, they continue to perpetuate colonial-racial logics of displacement and dispossession. In this paper, I put forward principles and practices of research justice that refuse such university-community dynamics and that instead center accountability and accompaniment. Through an auto-critical discussion of housing justice research collectives to which I belong, I make a case for fugitive scholarship as an inter-institutional space connecting academia and movements and put forward “undercommoning” as a fraught but vitally necessary transformation of the university.