New collaborative publications

In the last year, we have been working on several collaborative publication endeavors. We have experimented with a more popular content, with accessible articles in the local language (Romanian in this case), working together with an illustrator, and with an editorial team that also signs with a collective name - the Cutra collective. We have written "sister articles" that complete each other and refer to each other - about the interconnection between housing struggles, feminist struggles and struggles of Roma women, anti-war struggles, and survival struggles of the most precarious persons. All in the face of intense capitalist extraction.

Illustration Adela Holdon

The result are the "sister articles" "Life and Death Decisions - Reproductive Violence against Roma Women" by activist, researcher and community organizer Roxana Oprea, and "The War against the Poor" by Ioana Florea of the Sustain Action project.

Moreover, we have worked in the more "traditional" academic manner, developing a co-authored article with Enikő Vincze from the action group Social Housing Now!, published in the special issue of a high-ranked journal - European Urban and Regional Studies. But we are both militant researchers. Thus, our research on the financialization of housing, affecting people's housing conditions and the possibility for housing rights mobilizations, was informed by a critical stance towards capitalist advancements in our cities and lives.

Moreover, our analysis for the article "Institutional investors and the state: Reciprocal ‘catching-up’ in a ‘super-homeownership’ housing regime" stemmed from the East European context, less researched and always marked by the pressure to "catch up" with the West. Thus, we believe it is a contribution to understanding broader power relations in the field of housing, and the local-global tensions and negotiations between public interests and private profits. We are looking forward to your feedback!

New open access article out now