Circle of Thought Lecture – Jordan Camp

            Circle of Thought Brown Bag Lunch Series Presents Jordan Camp

Interpreting the Housing Crisis in Los Angeles: Race, Class, and Dispossession

Jordan T. Camp, Visiting Scholar at the Institute of American Cultures and the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA, will discuss “Interpreting the Housing Crisis in Los Angeles: Race, Class, and Dispossession.”

Camp’s lecture will explore California as an epicenter of the current housing and economic crisis. With the state experiencing half million foreclosure cases between 2008 and 2010 – the highest number in the country – these economic trends have only exacerbated a preexisting housing crisis in African American, Latino, and poor communities in a city already known as the U.S. capital of homelessness. Yet instead of discussing the historical roots of this ongoing crisis, state and mass media representations of poverty and homelessness in the city have more often focused on purported individual responsibility, criminality, and lawlessness. This talk examines how such moral panics have endorsed the dispossession, displacement, and incarceration of poor communities of color, and concludes with observations on how social movements are redirecting the conversation. Camp is the co-editor of Freedom Now! Struggles for the Human Right to Housing in L.A. and Beyond (Freedom Now Books, 2012).

The lecture will take place on Thursday, May 30, 2013, in the Bunche Library and Media Center, Haines Hall 135, from noon until 1:00pm. All-day parking ($11) and short-term parking (payable at pay stations) are available in Lots 2, 3 or 4 (enter the campus at Hilgard and Westholme avenues). If you would like to support the Bunche Center, its students and its programs, please visit https://giving.ucla.edu/Bunche. As of April 22, 2013, UCLA is smoke-free and tobacco-free. The use of cigarettes, cigars, chewing tobacco and all other tobacco products, as well as electronic cigarettes, will be prohibited on UCLA’s campus and at sites owned or fully leased by the university. For more information, please visit: https://ccle.ucla.edu/course/view/UCLA_tobacco_free_task_force.