Rahim Kurwa
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice and Department of Sociology (by courtesy) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). My work is focused on understanding how municipalities reproduce racial segregation in an era governed by fair housing law. My book project, Apartheid's Afterlives: Policing Black Life in the Antelope Valley, uses qualitative and quantitative methods to illustrate how a Los Angeles suburb uses the criminalization and policing of the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program as a means to evict Black residents. My work has received awards from the American Sociological Association and Society for the Study of Social Problems, and I received the Early Career Researcher Award from the Surveillance Studies Network in 2019. More broadly, I am interested in understanding 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. I received my PhD in Sociology from the University of California at Los Angeles in 2018. I will be a visiting scholar at the American Bar Foundation in the 2021-2022 academic year.
Contact me at rak [at] uic.edu.
Access my curriculum vitae here.
Information about letters of recommendation here.
Publications
Peer-reviewed papers:
Gurusami, Susila and Rahim Kurwa. "From Broken Windows to Broken Homes: Homebreaking as Racialized and Gendered Poverty Governance." Feminist Formations 33, no. 1 (2021): 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.
Public writing:
Segregatory Consequences of the Carceral State. Housing Justice in Unequal Cities Conference Open-Access Volume.
Policing’s Role in Racial Segregation: 50 Years After the Fair Housing Act. Los Angeles Social Science Forum
Nextdoor in Context. Blink
News Coverage:
Study Examines “Man in the House” Rules in the Voucher Program. National Low Income Housing Coalition
Opinion: How white people used police to make L.A. one of the most segregated cities in America. Matthew Fleischer, Los Angeles Times
Think racial segregation is over? Here’s how the police still enforce it. Nikita Lalwani and Mitchell Johnston, Washington Post
On Nextdoor, the Homeless Are the Enemy. Rick Paulas, OneZero.
Same city, different opportunities: Study maps life outcomes for children from Chicago neighborhoods. Cecilia Reyes and Joe Mahr, Chicago Tribune.
Recorded events:
Northwestern Journal of Law and Social Policy 2021 Symposium - Radical Reimagining: The Carceral State and Abolitionist Responses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVzXkgh9lE0