Public Scholarship

Histories of Seattle’s Rent Control Debates

Drawing primarily on archival documents from the Seattle Municipal Archives, I am developing a public scholarship project that traces the histories of rent control debates in Seattle from the 1970s onwards. This project consists of a podcast series and a StoryMap, which is a publicly-accessible, interactive website platform. Podcast episodes and the StoryMap will be linked here when they are published. The first episode of “Tenant Tales”, which focuses on Initiative 23, is linked below. 

Tenant Tales: Episode 1 – Initiative 23

Radical Housing Journal

The Radical Housing Journal is an open-source, action-oriented publication committed to publishing content and research about global housing issues and movements written by organizers in housing movements and scholar-activists. I am an editor with the RHJ and here are links to some of our editorials:

Public Op-Eds

I have written op-eds with colleagues that emphasize the importance of centring communities most impacted by housing crises in the development of housing policies and programs, as well as what actualizing a right to housing for everyone means in practice.

Acadammit: a Collective Podcast

With the Place + Space Collective, we developed Acadammit, an experimental podcast which was produced on unceded Coast Salish Territories. In Acadammit, we explore meanings of solidarity across disciplines, in conversation with folks with diverse backgrounds and ideas. The episodes explore decolonization, scholar activism, and burnout, as well as providing a short introduction to the Place + Space Collective.

You can read more about the podcast and listen to episodes at this link to our article in Society and Space Online.

Impacts of Hotels as Emergency Shelter During COVID-19

In 2020, I collaborated with colleagues in the UW Department of Real Estate and the King County Department of Community and Human Services to analyze the impacts of hotels as emergency shelter during the COVID-19 pandemic. When the pandemic began, some hotels in King County were used as a new form of emergency homeless shelters to reduce the number of people in high-density congregate emergency shelters in an attempt to reduce the spread of the virus. This was a mixed-methods study and in my role as a research assistant I supported qualitative research design, conducted interviews, data analysis, and publications. Study results are published in Housing Policy Debate as well as in a public report that was shared with government officials and policymakers.

The public report can be accessed at this link.