Erin McElroy (they/them)

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.