Manissa M. Maharawal

About

I am a cultural anthropologist and critical geographer whose work focuses on eviction, race, displacement, activism and urban space. I am broadly interested in historical and contemporary struggles for social justice in cities.

My first book Anti-Eviction: Contesting Tech-Led Gentrification in San Francisco (under contract with University of California Press) is an ethnography of activism in the midst of the housing crisis in California.

My work has been published in Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Antipode, Sociological Quarterly, American Anthropologist, Anthropological Theory, Anthropological Quarterly, Abolition Journal, Radical Housing Journal. In addition it has been published in media outlets such as The Guardian, N+1, AlterNet, The Indypendent, Counterpunch, and Waging Nonviolence, among other online and print periodicals, as well as in a number of edited books and anthologies. I am also co-Editor of “Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement & Resistance” (PM Press 2021), a collaborative edited volume by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project.

My research and writing have been funded by the The American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the New York Council for the Humanities, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and The Center for Place Culture and Politics. I am also been the co-recipient of major professional awards from the American Studies Association (The Susan Garfinkel Prize in Digital Humanities) and the American Association of Geographers (The Alternative Geography Award).

I am the co-founder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project‘s Narratives of Displacement and Resistance project. This digital humanities and oral history project documents urban change and resistance in the San Francisco Bay Area by foregrounding the stories of people who have been, or who are being, displaced. As a trained oral historian I conduct life-history interviews with activists in order to explore how life history contributes to the formation of “radical” politics. Through collecting life-histories and placing them on a digital online map of the city, the project creates a living archive, documenting deep and detailed neighborhood and personal histories.