Rahim Kurwa

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice and Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). My work is broadly focused on the policing of housing, and I've published scholarship on this topic in Du Bois Review, Housing Policy Debate, City and Community, and Feminist Formations. My book, Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing, traces the past century of Black history in Los Angeles' northernmost outpost, known as the Antelope Valley, showing how pre-1968 methods of racial segregation in this region have been replaced today by policing. My other interests include the family implications of the policing of housing assistance, the interrelatedness of policing and segregation, and the history of policing in public housing and its successor programs.

Contact me at rak [at] uic.edu | Access my CV | Info for Letters of Rec | Zoom Link.

USC Slides | Berkeley Slides

Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing

Out now from University of California Press

Racist policing and unaffordable housing are central crises of the early 21st century. Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing tells the story of how the two intersect in the Antelope Valley, Los Angeles County’s northernmost outpost and a destination for those priced, policed, and evicted out of Los Angeles.

The book follows the valley’s segregated development after World War II, and the resulting emergence of Sun Village, an all-Black town whose civil rights organizing challenged the valley’s segregated neighborhoods, workplaces, and schools. It traces how the valley sought to defend itself as a white space, finally landing on policing as a mechanism of resisting racial integration after a new wave of Black families were pushed out of Los Angeles and into the valley at the end of the 20th century.

Indefensible Spaces offers a case study of the national crisis of the policing of housing, told through a history of Black organizing and resistance in one of Los Angeles’s most overlooked areas. The book shows how the policing of housing has rendered Black homes indefensible spaces, and how tenants and organizers across the valley have worked to overcome it, offering lessons for achieving housing justice across the country.

Visit UCPress.org to learn more about the book, purchase it in print, or download the free e-book.

Academic Writing

Reosti, A., Kurwa, R., & Bartram, R. (2024). Rental Housing and the Continuum of Carcerality. Theoretical Criminology.
Rocha Beardall, T., Kurwa, R., & Lewis, D. F. (2024). Mended Windows, Not Broken Windows: A Du Boisian Analysis of Urban Policing. City & Community, 0(0).
Kurwa, Rahim. 2023. "Policing, Property, and the Production of Racial Segregation." In E. Rosen and B. McCabe (Eds.), The Sociology of Housing (pp 291-304). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Preprint available on SocArXiv: download link.
Kurwa, Rahim, and Susila Gurusami. 2022. "Carceral Migrations: Reframing Race, Space, and Punishment." Social Service Review 96, no. 2: 353-388.
Gurusami, Susila and Rahim Kurwa. 2021. "From Broken Windows to Broken Homes: Homebreaking as Racialized and Gendered Poverty Governance." Feminist Formations 33, no. 1: 1-32.
Kurwa, Rahim. 2020. "Opposing and Policing Racial Integration: Evidence from the Housing Choice Voucher Program." Du Bois Review.
Kurwa, Rahim. 2020. “The New ‘Man in the House’ Rules: How the Regulation of Housing Vouchers turns Personal Bonds into Eviction Liabilities” Housing Policy Debate.
Kurwa, Rahim. 2019. "Building the Digitally Gated Community: The Case of Nextdoor." Surveillance & Society 17, no. 1/2: 111-117.
Kurwa, Rahim. 2015. "Deconcentration without integration: Examining the social outcomes of housing choice voucher movement in Los Angeles County." City & Community 14, no. 4 (2015): 364-391.

Reviews

Kurwa, Rahim. 2023. "An Equal Place Lawyers in the Struggle for Los Angeles." Law and Society Review. 57(3): 416-418.
Kurwa, Rahim. 2021. "The Upper Limit: How Low-Wage Work Defines Punishment and Welfare." Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews 50, no. 1: 33-35

Research Cited in Policy Briefs

Recorded Events

How Policing Became Property and How People are Fighting Back - UIC Institute for the Humanities:
Thinking about Subsidized Housing in a Welfare Rights Framework - University of Wisconsin Madison Institute for Research on Poverty.
Radical Reimagining: The Carceral State and Abolitionist Responses - Northwestern Journal of Law and Social Policy 2021 Symposium

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