Jessie Speer

Jessie Speer is a critical human geographer whose 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 book, Bulldozed: Homeless Encampments and the Politics of Demolition, paints a complex and detailed portrait of everyday life in US encampments, showing how a combination of profit, punishment, and prejudice has produced a new "bulldozer approach" to homelessness in ways that mirror the demolition of informal settlements across the globe. At the same time, resistance movements have risen up to challenge displacement and dispossession. Combining national data with more than a decade of on-the-ground research, Bulldozed exposes the violence of US housing politics and offers visions for a more equal city.

Jessie's other research projects include literary analysis of memoirs and oral histories of homelessness, legal analysis of the nexus between migration and housing displacement in the United Kingdom, and participation in arts-based housing justice. 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.