Dr Jessie Speer

Jessie Speer joined the Department of Geography and Environment as Assistant Professor in 2020. Her research examines struggles over urban and domestic space at the margins of housed society. She engages political economic, feminist, and postcolonial approaches to urban displacement to examine how unhoused people contest normative domesticity and capitalist housing markets.

Her current book project, based on in-depth ethnographic and archival research, examines the demolition of homeless encampments in the United States as part of a larger attack on urban informality. Other projects include literary and historical analysis of memoirs and oral histories of homelessness, legal analysis of the nexus between migration and housing displacement in the United Kingdom, and the development of activist community archives.

Jessie formerly practiced law in California, working at legal aid clinics assisting people experiencing domestic violence and eviction. She holds a PhD in Geography from Syracuse University and has received fellowships and awards from the Mellon Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, British Academy, and Antipode Foundation.