WHEN: Monday, November 8 at 5pm ET

WHERE: Virtual (register here)

DESCRIPTION: How can we better understand and work to prevent displacement? The DRAN-MISTI Global Displacement Fellowship Program is an opportunity for research, engagement, advocacy and skill-building for MIT students interested in critically examining displacement and land rights on a global scale. In partnership with international organizations, civil society groups, and grassroots movements, students will contribute to strengthening our global network on displacement and land rights, advancing the frontiers of knowledge on displacement and its consequences, and influencing law and policy. As a pilot initiative, the 2022 cohort will be hosted at partner organizations based in Brazil, India, and South Africa. MIT undergraduate and graduate students from all disciplines interested in displacement research who aspire to build careers around the advancement of global housing and land justice through advocacy, research, policy, law, engineering in the public interest, public service in government, city planning, or other avenues are encouraged to apply.

WHEN: Friday, October 30 from 9:30-11am EST

WHERE: Virtual (register here)

DESCRIPTION: Housing is the front line against the COVID-19 pandemic — and yet, it fails to be seen as a matter of life-or-death. “Having no home, lacking space for physical distancing in overcrowded living areas or having inadequate access to water and sanitation has become a ‘death sentence,’ handed out predominantly against poor and marginalized communities,” affirms Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing Balakrishnan Rajagopal in his first report to the UN General Assembly. As countries grapple with the effects of COVID-19, the Special Rapporteur reminds us that the global housing landscape cannot return to a pre-pandemic scenario; doing so would mean the resumption of mass evictions, the expansion of homelessness, and the acceptance that the contours of urbanization are spatially shaped by discrimination in access to housing. How can we seize the current moment to actualize housing as a human right and imagine a better future for all?

Join us for a global academic panel discussion on the report of UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing, Balakrishnan Rajagopal, to the UN General Assembly: COVID-19 and the Right to Housing: Impacts and the way forward

WHEN: Wednesday, October 1 4 at 9:30am EST

WHERE: Virtual (register here)

DESCRIPTION: On the occasion of the completion of 20 years of the Housing and Land Rights Network (India) and the United Nations Housing Rapporteur Mandate, please join us for a historic event with all four UN Special Rapporteurs on Adequate Housing (current and former) to discuss Global Challenges to the Human Right to Adequate Housing, Role of the UN, and the Way Forward.

WHEN: Friday, September 4, 2020, 9am EST (10am Brasília time)

WHERE: Virtual livestream (register here)

DESCRIPTION: Please join us for a live-streamed panel discussion featuring MIT DRAN founder Balakrishnan Rajagopal, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, as part of the Campanha Despejo Zero / Zero Eviction campaign.

Simultaneous translation into Portuguese, English, and Spanish will be provided.

WHEN: Thursday, February 28, 2019, 12:00 - 2:00pm

WHERE: MIT Building 9, Room 9-450A

At a time of increasing displacement, gentrification and insecure housing, this event marks the release of the first report from MIT DRAN on the displacement and eviction crisis in Boston’s Chinatown.

"Chinatown residents are disproportionately elderly and 40 percent of families have children but are losing this working-class core,” says Karen Chen, Executive Director, Chinese Progressive Association. “Being displaced means not only loss of housing and increased stress, but also loss of social networks, multilingual social services, access to nearby jobs, a voice on issues that impacts our lives and much more.”

The report is the result of over 3 years of collaboration between DRAN and Chinese Progressive Association in Boston, and details the results of a displacement impact assessment using a tool that DRAN has developed. This is the first time in the US that a comprehensive displacement impact assessment, benchmarked against global human rights standards, has been used in a major city

WHEN: Tuesday, October 16, 2018, 12:30-2pm

WHERE: MIT Building 9, Room 9-451

Description:

This talk is an investigation into urban peripheralizations: trying to understand the processes we are witnessing in cities across the globe as working class, poor and racialized residents are being displaced out of city cores to peripheries where social marginalization is exacerbated by physical isolation.

My research is primarily informed by my day-to-day work running a project with newcomer teens in the deep suburbs of Vancouver BC, and the ongoing gentrifications of inner-core neighbourhoods I know and love, most especially my own. 

I am working to find the right analytical vocabularies to describe these processes: gentrification, displacement, dispossession, expulsion, banishment, resegregation, centrifugality ... and am interested in linking these question to a larger land politics and questions of neo-liberal restructuring, ownership and sovereignty: who gets to make what decisions for what land?

Bio:

Matt lives and works in East Vancouver on səlil'wətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) territory, with his partner and daughters.  He is the co-director of Solid State Industries, has founded and directed  many other community projects and continues to lecture globally. Matt's books and articles have been published on all six continents and translated into thirteen languages. His most recent books are What a City is For: Remaking the Politics of Displacement (MIT Press, 2016) and Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life (MIT, 2018, with Am Johal and Joe Sacco). Please see matthern.ca for more. 

WHEN: Thursday, March 22, 2018 - 12:30 - 2pm

WHERE: DUSP City Arena, 9-255

 This discussion will examine how dispossession and loss of land has taken hold for communities in Liberia and the Greater Boston region- from direct land grabs to processes of speculation- and the strategies communities are advancing to regain community control. Professor Brownell will speak to the work he has done to fight for the customary land and property rights of indigenous communities in Liberia and efforts he is currently leading to advance a global land tenure security index. Eliza will speak to the innovative approach to Community Land Trusts (CLTs) the network is building out and the different scales on which these efforts are taking hold- from neighborhood to municipal policy. *Speaker bios below*

SPEAKER BIOS  

Alfred Lahai Brownell Sr. is Founder/Lead Campaigner of Green Advocates International, Liberia’s first public interest environmental law and human rights organization, and a Distinguished scholar in Residence at Northeastern University Law School’s Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy. Alfred has been one of the lead campaigners advocating for the reform of Liberia’s land, extractive and natural resources sectors. He has provided legal support to local communities affected by natural resource extraction operations such as rubber and palm oil plantations and for many years also campaigned for the recognition of the customary land and property rights of indigenous communities throughout Liberia. Currently, Alfred is working with international land rights coalitions to spearhead establishment of a global land security index. Alfred holds a Bachelor of Science in General Agriculture from the University of Liberia, a magna cum laude JD/LL.B degree in law from the Louis Arthur Grimes School of Law of the University of Liberia, and an LL.M in Environment and Energy Law from the Tulane Law School, New Orleans, USA.

Eliza Parad, a Community Organizer at Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI), coordinates the Greater Boston Community Land Trust Network and together with it's land trust staff, provides Technical Assistance to emerging CLTs around Boston and beyond. The Greater Boston Community Land Trust Network supports current and emerging land trusts around resident-led planning efforts and long-term, collective control of land. The network works to promote the preservation of land for permanently affordable housing, community economic development, urban agriculture and open space. Eliza has been organizing since 2009 to prevent displacement, build resident power and advocate for affordable housing in Chelsea, Cambridge, Jamaica Plain and now Roxbury. At DSNI she is focused on engaging residents to impact development and get community control over public land.

WHEN: Thursday, November 28th, 12:30-3:00

WHERE: MIT Building 9, Room 9-255 (City Arena)

Please join DRAN for a two-part panel with insights from climate scientists, urban planners, and international development practitioners, exploring their views and experiences in the current and coming crisis of climate-induced displacement.

Part I will go through understanding the political, economic and historical contexts informing the impact by disasters on marginalized communities.

Part II will address how recovery and rebuilding approaches to affirm human rights and/or decrease the likelihood of future displacement.

Lunch will be served at 12:15.

WHEN: Tuesday, November 14th, 12:15-1:30

WHERE: MIT Building 9, Room 9-255 (City Arena)

Please join the DRAN for our upcoming talk, “Grey Space & Displaceability: New Foundations of Contemporary Urban Regimes” with Professor Oren Yiftachel of Ben-Gurion University, Bersheeba.

The lecture will offer a discussion about the changing nature of urban regimes, using a 'southeastern' perspective. It will focus on the growing prevalence of 'gray spacing' and the impact of 'displaceability' to the making of urban citizenship. The lecture will draw on research from Israel/Palestine used comparatively with other global locations.

A light lunch will be served.