
Biography
Erin McElroy is an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Washington. McElroy’s work focuses upon intersections of gentrification, technology, fascism, empire, and racial capitalism in the US and in Romania, alongside housing justice organizing, countermapping, and transnational solidarities. This informs the focus of their manuscript, Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times (Duke University Press in 2024), as well as two newer projects: one focused on geographies of technofascism, and one on landlord technologies of dispossession.
McElroy is cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project—a data visualization, counter-cartography, and digital media collective that produces tools, software, maps, reports, murals, zines, oral histories, and more to further the work of housing justice. Recently the collective published Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement & Resistance. Commitments to public scholarship also informs McElroy’s work coediting the Radical Housing Journal—an open access publication that foregrounds housing research and organizing transnationally.
At UW, McElroy runs the Anti-Eviction Lab, where much of the student and community partner driven research focuses upon Landlord Tech Watch—a platform dedicated to producing collective knowledge about landlord-driven surveillance techniques. Newer lab work is also focusing on technolibertarian urbanism in the US and beyond.
When it comes to teaching, McElroy's classes focus on technology, displacement, racial capitalism, digitality, US empire, surveillance, infrastructure, social movements, housing justice, anti-imperialism, and abolition. Fields explored include critical race and ethnic studies, feminist studies, urban studies, science and technology studies, urban geography, and digital geography.
Prior to joining UW, McElroy taught in the Department of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where they continue to collaborate with students and faculty. They earned a doctoral degree in Feminist Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz and conducted a postdoc at the AI Now Institute at New York University. Additionally, they are a core partner with the Housing Justice in Unequal Cities network based out of UCLA, and are a steering committee member of the Beyond Inhabitation Lab based out of the Polytechnic of Turin.
Research
Selected Research
- McElroy, Erin, and Liviu Chelcea. “Who’s Afraid of Postsocialist Theory?” Eurasian Geography and Economics, (May 2025): 1–13. doi:10.1080/15387216.2025.2510352.
- McElroy, Erin. “Undoing Landlord Technologies: Beyond the Propertied Logics of the Pandemic Past and Present.” In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, edited by Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin, 79–94. Duke University Press, 2025.
- McElroy, Erin. “Oraşul Viitorului: Beyond the Sliconisation of Postsocialist Cluj.” In Anti-Atlas: Critical Area Studies from the East of the West, edited by Tim Beasley-Murray, Wendy Bracewell, and Michal Murawski, 113–20. FRINGE. UCL Press, 2025. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/A/bo257337112.html. Download PDF
- McElroy, Erin, Matthew Martignoni, Jeantelle Laberinto, Priya Prabhakar, and Joseph Smooke. “Against Landlord Technology in San Francisco.” In Dispatches from the Threshold: Tenant Power in Times of Crisis, edited by Rae Baker and Alexander Ferrer, 95–107. Fernwood Publishing, 2025.
- McElroy, Erin. “Human Capital and Digital Citizenship: Postsocialism’s Urban Dispossessions.” In Urban Marginality, Racialisation, Interdependence, edited by Alexandrescu, Filip, Ryan Powell, and Ana Vilenica. Routledge, 2025. Download PDF
- McElroy, Erin. “Silicon Valley Imperialism: Contemporary Conjunctures.” Dialogues in Urban Research 3, no. 1 (March 1, 2025): 136–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/27541258251318989.
- McElroy, Erin. “Boycotting, Identifying, and Organizing Against Serial Evictors.” E-Flux, no. Spatial Computing (June 2024).
- McElroy, Erin. “The Work of Landlord Technology: The Fictions of Frictionless Property Management.” Environment and Planning D 42, no. 4 (August 1, 2024): 456–75. https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758241232758.
- McElroy, Erin. Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024.
- McElroy, Erin. “Techno-Imperialism.” In In Decoloniality in Eastern Europe: A Lexicon of Reorientation, edited by Ana Vilenica, 132–39. Novi Sad: Kuda, 2023.
- McElroy, Erin. "Dis/possessory Data Politics: From Tenant Screening to Anti-Eviction Organizing.” International Journal of Urban and Region Research, 47, no. 1 (2023): 54–70.
- McElroy, Erin, and Manon Vergerio. “Automating Gentrification: Landlord Technologies and Housing Justice Organizing in New York City Homes.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 40, no. 4 (August 1, 2022): 607–26.
- McElroy, Erin. “Digital Cartographies of Displacement: Data as Property and Property as Data.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 21, no. 4 (May 5, 2022): 357–71.
- Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance. Oakland: PM Press, 2021.
- McElroy, Erin. “Speculating Upon San Francisco’s Futurity: From Shell Company Evictions to Decolonial Action.” In Housing Displacement: Conceptual and Methodological Issues, edited by Guy Baeten, Carina Listerborn, Maria Persdotter, and Emil Pull, 97–112. Routledge, 2020.
- McElroy, Erin. “Property as Technology.” City 24, no. 1–2 (2020): 112–29.
- McElroy, Erin. “Corruption, Șmecherie, and Siliconization: Retrospective and Speculative Technoculture in Postsocialist Romania.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 6, no. 2 (November 7, 2020): 1–26.
- McElroy, Erin. “Housing, Cartographic, and Data Justice as Fields of Inquiry: A Connected Approach to Mapping Displacement.” In Housing Justice in Unequal Cities, edited by Ananya Roy and Hillary Malson, 29–36. Los Angeles, CA: Institute on Inequality and Democracy, 2019.
- McElroy, Erin. “Digital Nomads and Settler Desires: Racial Fantasies of Silicon Valley Imperialism.” Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies 10, no. 1 (July 25, 2019): 215–49.
- McElroy, Erin. “Data, dispossession, and Facebook: techno-imperialism and toponymy in gentrifying San Francisco.” Urban Geography 40, no. 6 (2019): 826–45.
- McElroy, Erin, and Alex Werth. “Deracinated Dispossessions: On the Foreclosures of ‘Gentrification’ in Oakland, Ca.” Antipode 51, no. 3 (2019): 878–98.
- McElroy, Erin. “Digital Nomads in Siliconising Cluj: Material and Allegorical Dispossessions.” Urban Studies, 57(15): 3078–3094.
- Atanasoski, Neda, and Erin McElroy. “Postsocialism and the Afterlives of Revolution: Impossible Spaces of Dissent.” In Reframing Critical Literary, and Cultural Theories, edited by Nicoletta Pireddu, 273–97. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
- Maharawal, Manissa M. and ErinMcElroy. “The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project: Counter Mapping and Oral History Toward Bay Area Housing Justice.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 108, no. 2 (2018): 380–89.
- McElroy, Erin. “Postsocialism and the Tech Boom 2.0: Techno-Utopics of Racial/Spatial Dispossession.” Social Identities 24, no. 2 (March 4, 2018): 206–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2017.1321718.
- McElroy, Erin. “Countermapping Displacement and Resistance in Alameda County with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project.” American Quarterly 70, no. 3 (2018): 601–4.
- McElroy, Erin. “The Digital Humanities, American Studies, and the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project.” American Quarterly, 70, no. 3 (2018): 701-707.
- Maharawal, Manissa M., and Erin McElroy. “In the Time of Trump: Housing, Whiteness, and Abolition.” In Contested Property Claims: What Disagreement Tells Us About Ownership, edited by Maja H. Bruun, Mikkel Thorup, Patrick Cockburn, and Bjarke S. Risager, 109–25. New York: Routledge, 2017.
- McElroy, Erin. “Mediating the Tech Boom: Temporalities of Displacement and Resistance.” Journal of the New Media Caucus 13, no. 1 (2017): 38–57.
- McElroy, Erin, and Andrew Szeto. “The Racial Contours of YIMBY/NIMBY Bay Area Gentrification.” Berkeley Planning Journal 29, no. 1 (2018): 7–44.