Manissa Maharawal

Anthropologist – Oral Historian – Critical Geographer

I am a scholar of eviction, displacement, housing, race, inequality, social movements and cities. I am broadly interested in historical and contemporary struggles for social justice. I am an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University and am the author of Anti-Eviction: Contesting Tech-led Gentrification in San Francisco (UC Press 2026), an ethnography of activism and anti-gentrification organizing amidst the housing crisis in California. I live and work Washington DC.

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 have also been the recipient such awards as: The Alternative Geography Award from the American Association of Geographers (with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project); The Susan Garfinkle Prize in Digital Humanities from the American Studies Association (for Narratives of Displacement and Resistance); and The Emancipatory Practice Award from the Science, Knowledge, and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association (for Counterpoints)

My academic 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 among others. I have also published in venues such as The Guardian, N+1, AlterNet, The Indypendent, Racialicious, Counterpunch, and Waging Nonviolence, among other online and print periodicals, as well as in a number of edited books and anthologies.

I was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York.

Books

Anti-Eviction: The Fight Against Tech-led Gentrification in San Francisco (UC Press 2026)

Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas (PM Press 2021)