“Building the housing movement through community history: the Community Action Tenants Union rent strike history project”
This seminar presentation will describe and reflect on a project that I have been working on for the past 18 months as part of a research group within the Community Action Tenants Union Ireland (CATU), which is about uncovering forgotten and suppressed histories of tenant organising and rent strikes in Ireland and leveraging these histories to build the present-day housing movement. The overall aim is to reflect on the project as a distinctive instance of the interaction between research and organising. In the presentation I will cover the background and motivations for the work including how it relates to important questions facing the housing movement, such as developing knowledge and organisational infrastructures, broadening the membership base and politicising tenants’ struggles. I will further describe how the project developed and played out in practice including challenges to collectivising the research work and what can be learnt both from the history of housing movements in Ireland and from the process of the doing the project itself.
sentation will describe and reflect on a project that I have been working on for the past 18 months as part of a research group within the Community Action Tenants Union Ireland (CATU), which is about uncovering forgotten and suppressed histories of tenant organising and rent strikes in Ireland and leveraging these histories to build the present-day housing movement. The overall aim is to reflect on the project as a distinctive instance of the interaction between research and organising. In the presentation I will cover the background and motivations for the work including how it relates to important questions facing the housing movement, such as developing knowledge and organisational infrastructures, broadening the membership base and politicising tenants’ struggles. I will further describe how the project developed and played out in practice including challenges to collectivising the research work and what can be learnt both from the history of housing movements in Ireland and from the process of the doing the project itself.
