Join housing activists and authors Madeleine Hamlin and Gretchen Purser at Autumn Leaves Books for a discussion of the new book Housing Justice: A Lexicon for Building Solidarity (PM Press, 2026).

Housing is being reshaped by financialization, dispossession, displacement, and resistance across global contexts. Housing Justice dissects common concepts such as “eviction,” “property,” and “social housing” and analyzes emerging terms like “carceral shelter" and “déracinement.” The book illuminates how language mediates the spatial, institutional, and affective dimensions of housing injustice and offers a shared starting point for imagining—and organizing—alternative futures.

Madeleine Hamlin is assistant professor of geography at Colgate University, where she also occasionally teaches in regional prisons. Her research examines the intersection of housing and the carceral state in US cities. In 2021, she was named an Emerging Scholar by the H.F. Guggenheim Foundation. Her work, which has also been supported by a fellowship from the Society of Woman Geographers, has been published in Antipode, Progress in Human Geography, and Urban Geography, among other outlets. Her forthcoming monograph with University of Chicago Press examines how policing shaped the trajectory of Chicago’s public housing over time, as well as the daily life of its residents.

Gretchen Purser is an associate professor in the Sociology Department at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. She is also the research co-director on advocacy and activism for PARCC, where she coordinates the Labor Studies Working Group. Her work has been recognized with a wide variety of publication awards from the American Sociological Association’s sections on Labor and Labor Movements, Marxist Sociology, Sociology of Human Rights, and Public Sociology. Since 2012, she has served as chair of the board of the Workers’ Center of Central New York. She is also involved with the Syracuse Tenants Union.