“The Whole World Needs Housing” : The Formation of Common Notions through Expansive Learning in the Spanish Mortgage Movement la Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca

Since the beginning of the housing crisis in Spain in 2008, la Plataforma por Afectados de la Hipoteca (PAH) has grown to become one of the most dynamic and powerful social movements in the country. In my Master’s thesis, I use theories from political economy, Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), and a minor reading of the work of political philosopher Benedict de Spinoza, to look at the path two people who were “affected by mortgage” took from emotional and financial distress towards collective and transformative agency. Instead of leap-frogging from the personal crisis of our informants to the point of empowerment, I utilise the concept of expansive learning to dwell on the different stages in the process. Through the Spinozan concept of affects and contemporary neuropsychological theories of emotion, I distinguish between different instances of emotion and affect that the informants express as they reflect over how they chose to challenge the banks demanding that they give up their homes. Through collectively processing the hierarchies associated with debt and money, and by expanding the object of their activities from merely overcoming an untenable situation with their mortgage to a wider, shared framework of mutual aid, the informants show how expansive learning in the context of PAH appears as a joyful sensation of an increased capacity to act upon the world together with others. In this framework, expansive learning can, following Spinoza, be understood as a formation of common notions, as people who are dispossessed or risk dispossession encounter each other to find shared ground in their experiences and move from lonely, sad, and passive affects to a joyful and active feeling of collective power. To understand this process, I use thematic analysis together with a theory of affect and emotion to show how phases in the cycle of learning can be understood as successive transitions towards a joyful capacity to act upon the world together with others. Finally, I look at how the intrusion of global financial actors has imposed a serious threat and challenge to this local process of empowerment

Home in New York – if all goes well

Doctoral Student Kukka Ranta and Master Student Mikael Brunila, working at the CRADLE Center on Learning in Productive Social Movements project headed by Professor Yrjö Engestöm, have published an article “Home in New York – if all goes well” in the latest Yliopisto Magazine 7/2015 at the University of Helsinki. The article is about the New York City Community Land Initiative, a new coalition that is organizing low-income and homeless community members against homelessness and gentrification in one of the most unequal cities in the world that is also known as one of wealthiest centers in the Real Estate markets. The project is part of the Adacemy of Finland Research Programme: Future of Learning, Knowledge and Skills TULOS 2014–2017

Toward a Critical Toponymy Framework for Named Entity Recognition: A Case Study of Airbnb in New York City

Critical toponymy examines the dynamics of power, capital, and resistance through place names and the sites to which they refer. Studies here have traditionally focused on the semantic content of toponyms and the top-down institutional processes that produce them. However, they have generally ignored the ways in which toponyms are used by ordinary people in everyday discourse, as well as the other strategies of geospatial description that accompany and contextualize toponymic reference. Here, we develop computational methods to measure how cultural and economic capital shape the ways in which people refer to places, through a novel annotated dataset of 47,440 New York City Airbnb listings from the 2010s. Building on this dataset, we introduce a new named entity recognition (NER) model able to identify important discourse categories integral to the characterization of place. Our findings point toward new directions for critical toponymy and to a range of previously understudied linguistic signals relevant to research on neighborhood status, housing and tourism markets, and gentrification.Comment: Accepted at EMNLP 2023 (main track

Learning in Productive Social Movements

Peer reviewe

Learning to common, commoning as learning : The politics and potentials of community land trusts in New York City

Through a study of a coalition to promote community land trusts in New York City, this article asks how collective learning unfolds in the context of activism against gentrification and displacement. Drawing on Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), we illustrate how the coalition develops as it confronts the contradictory nature of commodified land and housing and navigates the contradictions and other challenges entailed in the process of commoning. Understanding this as a learning process is critical to understanding the politics of urban commoning practice and of particular approaches to it such as community land trusts (CLTs). © 2020, Okanagan University College.Peer reviewe

When Everything Is "Nearby": How Airbnb Listings in New York City Exaggerate Proximity (Short Paper)

In recent years, the emergence and rapid growth of short-term rental (STR) markets has exerted considerable influence on real estate in most large cities across the world. Central location and transit access are two primary factors associated with the prevalence and expansion of STRs, including Airbnbs. Nevertheless, perhaps due to methodological challenges, no research has addressed how location and proximity are represented in the titles and descriptions of STRs. In this paper, we introduce a new methodological pipeline to extract spatial relations from text and show that expressions of distance in STR listings can indeed be quantified and measured against real-world distances. We then comparatively analyze Airbnb reviews (written by guests) and listings (written by hosts) from New York City in order to demonstrate systematically how listings exaggerate proximity compared to reviews. Moreover, we discover spatial patterns to these differences that warrant further investigation