Manissa Maharawal
Manissa Maharawal is a doctoral student in the Anthropology Department at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is a co-chair of Women of Color Network at CUNY and an editor of the “Findings” column in Anthropology Now. Her PhD research focuses on struggles over urban space, gentrification and contemporary youth social movements in the United States. She is broadly interested in historical and contemporary struggles for social justice and understanding dynamics of race, class, and gender in formation of political subjectivities. Her work has been published in American Anthropologist, Cultural Anthropology, The Guardian, N+1, AlterNet, The Indypendent, Racialicious, Counterpunch,Waging Nonviolence, among other online and print periodicals, as well as in a number of edited books and anthologies.
Collected Work
“Black Lives Matter, Gentrification, and the Security State in the San Francisco Bay Area”
This article analyzes the San Francisco Bay Area Black Lives Matter protests of 2014 in relation to the regional political economy of the tech-industry, the real estate booms, and the attendant ‘eviction epidemic’ in the region. It analyzes the regional political economy as the context in which these protests must be understood, argues that the protests created a regional protest geography that, in turn, was met by a regionalized repressive security state, and reads the disruptive practices deployed by these protests as a series of complex and sophisticated contestations which embodied connections among policing, gentrification, and the regional political economy.
Anti-Eviction: The Fight against Tech-Led Gentrification in San Francisco
In the early 2010s, San Francisco experienced a tech boom that created both great wealth and great inequality. The city became known for runaway gentrification, a major housing crisis, and an "eviction epidemic" of long-term tenants. This book tells the story of how residents built a powerful anti-eviction movement and how they fought—and sometimes won—a right to their homes and their city. Focusing on the stories of tenants facing eviction, Maharawal describes the different strategies for resistance that emerged as well as lessons for the broader national housing crisis, beyond California.