During the spring quarter 2026, the Anti-Eviction Lab, run by Dr. Erin McElroy, is excited to recruit 1-2 undergraduate interns supported by the Halmo Geography Scholars Program. Students are expected to work 100 hours over the course of the quarter, and will be provided with $2,000.
The Anti-Eviction Lab brings together spatial, racial, and technological justice collective projects with student researchers. Housed at University of Washington, it prioritizes collaborative knowledge making in collaboration with groups such as the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. One of its current focuses is Landlord Tech Watch, aimed at producing scholarship and popular education materials related to the real estate industry’s surveillance and platform technologies that contribute to gentrification. Some of this involves investigative research based locally in Seattle, and some has a broader focus. Some also involves producing oral histories related to harms that tenants experience related to landlord technologies. The lab has also begun to study and map new technolibertarian cities being developed globally, investigating the various dispossessions that these new tech cities require.
During the spring quarter, there will be several students working in the lab: the Halmo Program Scholars as well as 1-2 graduate research assistants. The goal is for research during this time to be collaborative, though there will be some solo tasks as well. All researchers will meet together once a week with Dr. McElroy in Smith 402, and will communicate throughout the week via Slack project management software.
Tasks
There are several tasks that Halmo scholars will be assisting with, depending upon how many researchers join:
- Reading, coding, and organizing journalistic articles related to landlord technologies; Compiling a database of news and media articles related to property technologies and coding them by theme, location, and scale
- Mapping out the geographies and histories of various property technology companies and their usage, including here in Seattle
- Coding interview transcripts based upon an oral history and ethnographic project with tenants experiencing harms related to landlord technologies
- Creating illustrations and visualizations of landlord technological harms
- Reading, coding, and organizing journalistic articles related to the creation of technoliberarian cities globally
Interns will develop skills and experience in
Skills that will be useful to come in with, and/or further develop, during the course of the internship are listed below. You don’t need to be fluent in all of these to join the lab, though familiarity with 1-2 of them will be helpful.
- GIS and web mapping methods using ArcGIS, QGIS, Carto, and/or Mapbox software
- Data visualization tools such as D3, Tableau, or Canva
- Oral history, ethnography, and interview coding
- Collaborative research skills
- Media/news story analysis and secondary source research skills
- Database creation
What you will learn
- Frameworks for evaluating the relationship between technology, housing, and gentrification in Seattle and beyond
- Comparative analytic tools for understanding the impacts of the property technologies as well as urban tech clusters
- How to collaborate on a small but robust team of undergraduate and graduate students on a multifaceted project
- How to create workable databases for mapping and research
- Best practices for mapping and visualizing data
- Methods of creating public scholarship and popular educational materials
- How to organize and record conferences and workshops
- Best practices for coding interviews
How you will benefit
- You will have the opportunity to work one-on-one with Dr. McElroy and with other undergraduate and graduate students
- You will learn about ways to apply methods learned in the classroom to real world contexts
- You will refine various research skills and data visualization and mapping methods
- You will be listed as a member of the lab on the lab’s website and in other related publications