Welcome back to this week's module. This week, we are looking very closely at one of the issues around housing justice. That is not only at the heart of the ethics of this course, but is central to its practice. We're looking at modes of activism towards housing justice. The word activist has many meanings in many places. Many folks self identify as activists. Sometimes folks are called activists, not in a positive light. These worlds of mobilizing as ways of thinking about a political practice towards housing justice. Is the broad field of what we're going to call in this course activism for housing justice. Now, there's no way to teach activism other than by listening to activists themselves. So this week's module is a little bit different. I'm not going to teach it alone. Looking at you in this camera, we are going to collectively spend time with four extraordinary housing rights activists from India. Isaac Peral Silva based in Bangla, Abdul Shakil based in Delhi, Lakigas based in Jamshedpur. And Anlakan based in in Dior. These are all four Indian cities. Some are large metropolis is some are smaller Indian urban centers. And each of them has had decades of experience using different modes to build a life of political practice towards housing justice. Each identifies as an activist. And what we want to do together this time, is to spend time thinking and listening to them talk about housing justice and talk about activism. So today's video is only a guide to them in our collective practice to learn from the histories and practices of lives of activism, rather than theoretically speak about them as an idea. But what I want to give you is what to look for. When you go into these videos. In one of these videos, Silva, who you'll get to know very well very soon, says something very profound about activism and he says there are two main modes that motivate me. The first is to address power and those who hold it. The other is to engage with communities towards their own self determination. These two broad frameworks to address power institutions structures, but also to always keep the interiority of activism for communities themselves, not bound just by outcomes and impacts. Are the two registers of activism I want you to think about as you listen to these stories. There are four key questions I want you to follow. The first. Who do we organize and who do we organize as? This word organizes is pivotal. It's used in many parts of the world to describe a certain kind of mobilization with residents around questions of housing, but the word organized has many different kinds of stories. So, you will hear Shaquille talk about organizing residents of informal settlements in Delhi. A spatial basis of organizing communities who live together in particular kinds of urban geography. But you will also hear Silva saying that we should organize not as residents of a particular spatial community. We should organize transversally around questions of social identity. We should organize around religion and race and caste and ethnicity and tribe and language. The idea is not to resolve these two, but to put them into conversation with each other. What does it mean as an activist to think that one should organize around identity versus around space. You will hear all four of the activists talk about organizing around the notion of an urban residents of presence in the urban, of residents in the urban of citizenship in the urban. And they'll talk about the differences between presents residence and citizenship who gets to claim from the city. What kind of rights are given to those in the city? And this will link to many of the topics we've raised in the previous modules of who is seen as an urban resident and an urban citizen. We will also talk about organizing around more familiar forms of claims making like labor to organize as worker as contributor. But also writes based organizing that takes the basic notion of being human as enough of a basis from which to claim. The second question is to pay attention to the way in which activists decide what our demand should be. Now in this course, on housing rights activism, you will hear Lucky the speak and argue that the demand is not for a house, but for land. You will hear an and articulate the demand is for democratic participation in the electoral process of political representation to secure housing rights. You will hear different strategies in thinking about how one frames the issue at hand. Do we speak of rights or entitlements or both? Do we speak of material gains or recognition? How do we make claims about dignity as much as about material housing allowances or rent vouchers? How do we decide what to ask for, from whom and in what context? How do we frame our demands? The 3rd major question is to focus and learn the different kinds of tactics and strategies that are used by these activists. Pay attention to three or four of them. The first one will be immediately protest and direct action, mobilization standing in front of the bulldozers to prevent eviction. Every one of them will talk about the need at some point for direct action in public. But activism is not only about protests and direct action. So here, Lucky they talk about engagement with the institutions of government. Making residents visible to government schemes. Making residents visible to the census. To maps that articulate where people live. Arguing that if you are not visible on the map, you're not visible at all. But also here, Annan's counter to Lucky when he says the state is not only a welfare provider or benevolent, it often is also something in his words that has to be brought to its knees. So listen to his accounting of an election campaign that stopped electoral representatives from entering housing communities until they signed a charter of public demands. Think about this mix of collaboration and contestation when it comes of the engagement of activists to the state. Neither reducing them to eternal critical protests, not turning them into solution providers and last mile connectors for the State. How do we find balances outside these extremes? Think also about the way distinctions and strategies used when thinking about producing voice and narrative. Shaquille will talk about starting a newspaper written by the community for the community to control their own narrative and to counter social discourse about the perceptions of those that struggle for housing justice and communities. At the same time, Selva will remind you that not only are we in a position of thinking about producing our own literature, but that research and training is as much an agenda for activism as it is for the academy. And that activism constantly is in seek to produce knowledge. But in a different mode for different ends. And in a very different political economy, where that production of knowledge has to give to the community a sense of its own realities and a sense of control over their own narratives. Not extractive research that turns them into subjects of other people's data. So think in many ways also of a foundation where all of these events, direct action engagement with the state, engagement with the political and democratic system. The production voice and media are undergirded by something all four will tell you that if there is not an everyday presence in the life worlds of those whose rights activists fight for, then they can neither be credibility nor success. And at the end of it, all the other tactics and strategies that we speak about are rooted. They will remind us in an everyday presence in the life worlds on organizing, on issues that come up as they come up. Not to see movements only as strategy, but also as life itself. And the last question I want you to think through is to say and ask yourself and hear from them. How does one make a life like this? How does one become an activist? How does one survive as an activist? How do movements, what forms, what institutions, what organizational forms can sustain and hold lives of activism? So pay attention when they distinguish between starting campaigns, a particular organizational form versus belonging to non governmental institutions, another organizational form. Think closely when they talk about federations and unions as models of organizing movements. And distinguish them from structures and institutions that are linked in networks of different kinds. Networks, federations, unions, community groups, self help groups, collective activist groups, funded and non funded federations. All of these organizational forms hold forms and lives of activism differently. So these four questions are the animating questions of this module this week. I invite you to spend time with these four activists. I invite you to learn from their biographies of practice, and invite you particularly to think about the parallel histories of activism in your own cities. And use this moment to reach out and learn those histories, if you don't know them. Find these lives where you are and think again, what it means to not to speak of housing justice, to not reduce work in housing justice just to policy or the state or the right structure of the market. Which we've been talking about so far, but to struggle to sustain everyday struggle. In thinking about how housing justice has to be one. Not simply something that can be given by anyone actor. So he has to that struggle, he has to learning from histories of struggle. And I think this week, you will really appreciate how important activism is as much central to the question of housing justice as any other form of action within institutions that we may already be familiar with, enjoy listening.
