Displacement, Emergence and Change Reading List
Everyone deserves to live a life free from poverty and a chance to thrive. Billions of people around the world don’t have enough money to pay for food, housing, clean water, access to health care or education. In this reading, watching, and listening list, the authors and creators illustrate the many challenges people face as a result of capitalism, colonialism, inequality and poverty. This list provides many great resources on social movements, recognizing and resisting settler colonialism, homelessness and housing precarities. Readers will gain a deeper insight to the importance of understanding how communities respond to displacement to ensure families, livelihoods and living environments thrive.
Recommendations provided by Laura Pin, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Guelph.
Reading
Housing Justice in Unequal Cities - Edited by Ananya Roy and Hilary Malson (2019)
Rooted in radical social movements knowledge, the editors argue that housing justice also requires a commitment to research justice, endeavoring to build epistemologies and methodologies that are accountable to communities that are on the frontlines of banishment and displacement.
Poor Housing A Silent Crisis - Edited by Josh Brandon and 
Jim Silver (2017)
This edited collection about the affordable housing crisis in Canada offers both critique and alternatives. A central theme in the collection is that the private, for-profit housing market cannot meet the housing needs of low-income Canadians, and, therefore, governments must intervene and provide subsidies.
Stolen City: Racial Capitalism and the Making of Winnipeg - By Owen Toews (2018)
Through a combination of historical and contemporary analysis this book shows how settler colonialism, as a mode of racial capitalism, has made and remade Winnipeg and the Canadian Prairie West over the past one hundred and fifty years.
Evicted - By Matthew Desmond 
(2016)
This book made a splash, partly because of the way it plays with genre using a narrative approach to follow eight families in Milwaukee as they navigated the housing system. The main text focuses on the experiences of each family, while the footnotes are crammed with discussions of academic references.
Watching
Angry Inuk - Directed By: Alethea Arnaquq-Baril
Displacement, colonialism, and the fight to stay all tackled in this documentary about the Inuk seal hunt, that is beautiful, humorous, and sad.
Listening
Housing Journal Podcast - “The Best Housing Research from the Best Taylor and Francis Housing Journals”
For the truly housing policy nerd. What this podcast lacks in creative branding, it makes up for in utility, featuring interviews and discussions of the latest housing research.
Ear Hustle (Podcast)
Carceral systems play a huge role in displacement and the production of housing precarity. This podcast is produced by people currently and formerly incarcerated in San Quentin prison, and talks about daily life inside the prison and stories from the outside, post-incarceration
Displaced (Podcast)
The world is facing the largest displacement crisis since World War II as numerous humanitarian emergencies rage on. On Displaced, members of the International Rescue Committee take a deep dive on three major themes: the future of war, refugee resettlement, and displacement from climate change.
Interactive
The Story of Africville - Canadian Human Rights Museum
(Interactive Exhibit)
Black people have lived in Nova Scotia since before the founding of Halifax in 1749. However, it was only after the American Revolution, in the late 1700s and early 1800s, that large groups of Black settlers began to arrive in the province. Many of them were former enslaved people who had been promised freedom and land in Nova Scotia, but when they arrived, they encountered white settlers who viewed them as inferior.
Because of racism, Black settlers were pushed to the margins of society and forced to live on the most inhospitable land. Despite this, they persevered, developing strong, vibrant communities. Africville was one such place.
BTTM FDRS - By Ben Passmore, Ezra Claytan Daniels
(Graphic Novel)
Once a thriving working-class neighborhood on Chicago’s south side, the “Bottomyards” is now the definition of urban blight. When an aspiring fashion designer and her image-obsessed BFF descend upon the hood in search of cheap rent, they discover something far more seductive... and deadly. This Afrofuturist graphic novel explores gentrification and cultural appropriation with a clever blend of horror and humor.
Resources
Homeless Hub - Canadian Observatory on Homelessness
The Homeless Hub is a web-based research library and information centre focusing on research on unhoused people. They also include information on methodology and ethics for researchers working with unhoused or underhoused constituencies.
Housing Justice in #UnequalCities Network
A research coordination network that brings together research communities whose work analyzes key geographies of housing precarity (evictions, homelessness, displacement, segregation, informal settlements) and examines established and emergent practices of housing justice (eviction blockades, community land trusts, housing cooperatives and commons, tenant organizing, homeless unions, social rent, land value tax).
Migratory Notes is a smart weekly guide to rapidly changing immigration issues for journalists, policymakers, lawyers, academics, advocates, and immigrants themselves.
Guelph-Wellington Task Force for Poverty Elimination
With the goal of taking local action and advocate for system and policy change to address the root causes of poverty, GWTPE has a wealth of research on housing, poverty and food-insecurity in the City of Guelph and Wellington County.