Canadian Sociology Book Award
Andrew Crosby’s Resisting Eviction: Domicide and the Financialization of Rental Housing is an engaging and compelling read that advances Canadian sociological understandings of housing financialization, community gentrification, household eviction, tenant organizing and housing resistance. Crosby argues that racial discrimination, property relations and settler colonialism underpin contemporary urban (re)development efforts, and these have resounding impacts on community connections and rights to affordable housing.
Resisting Eviction presents an in-depth case study of the deliberate destruction of homes—domicide—and tenant resistance against a multi-billion-dollar real estate investment firm in the Heron Gate neighborhood in Ottawa, on unceded Algonquin land. Crosby highlights the palpable contradictions between, on the one hand, public depictions of Canada’s capital city of Ottawa as “North America’s most liveable mid-sized city” while, on the other hand, large-scale, demolition-driven evictions that are displacing hundreds of people and destroying long-standing community bonds. Crosby's work elucidates the way in which new immigrants and immigrant communities are subject to political and corporate revisioning in the nation's capital.
The book utilizes political activist ethnography, rooted in Dorothy Smith’s institutional ethnography, which embeds activist researchers in the social struggles and socio-political questions they are investigating. Resisting Eviction demonstrates the distinctive goals and principles of political activist ethnography as a method, which, as Crosby writes, is a “form of qualitative inquiry that focuses on work with and for social movements”. Based on multiple years of research, evidence and data, and community engagement from 2018 to 2022, this book brilliantly demonstrates a rigorous and ethical research and methodological process.
The Canadian Sociology Book Award adjudication committee noted that the book is especially timely in the current context of Canada’s housing crisis and that it advances sociological perspectives on housing financialization and strategies of resistance in Canada through a decolonizing lens and with attention to intersections of classism and racism. His analysis of "livability" as an urban planning exercise indicates how it is grounded aesthetically in a vision that cannot abide low-income and racialized people cohabiting in the same urban spaces.
