Moderator and Tech Resident Ariana Faye Allensworth brings together local housing justice activists Erin McElroy and Fabian Rogers to discuss the merging of technology and real estate industries through what’s known as landlord tech or residential property technology. Speakers will explore the growth of surveillance and speculation technologies in housing and their impacts on renters and local anti-gentrification fights.

Ariana Faye Allensworth is an artist and creative leader based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work builds upon interests in liberatory education, visual culture, spatial politics, and community-based research. Allensworth brings over 10 years of experience as a cultural producer and arts administrator, specializing in arts education and social impact strategy. She currently works as a Senior Design Lead at IDEO and has previously held positions with The International Center of Photography, The Center for Cultural Power, Cultural Engagement Lab, Youth Speaks, and New Design High School. Allensworth is also a founding member of the New York City chapter of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, a research collective that produces data visualizations and storytelling projects that document the current housing crisis in New York City, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Erin McElroy is a postdoctoral researcher at the AI Now Institute at New York University, an interdisciplinary research center dedicated to understanding the social implications of artificial intelligence. McElroy is also the cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, a counter-mapping and digital storytelling collective that documents dispossession and resistance struggles upon gentrifying landscapes, focusing upon the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and New York City and cofounder of the Radical Housing Journal, a new peer-reviewed journal bringing together scholar-activist housing justice work transnationally. They earned their doctoral degree in Feminist Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a dissertation project entitled Unbecoming Silicon Valley: Techno Imaginaries and Materialities in Postsocialist Romania. This project analyzes the politics of space, race, technology, and displacement in Romania and Silicon Valley, as well as modes of resistance and deviance. Unbecoming Silicon Valley forges together the twin concepts of racial technocapitalism and Silicon Valley imperialism in order to understand temporal and racial entanglements in postsocialist space.

Fabian Rogers (he/his) is a Brooklyn-based community organizer. He has been on the frontlines with his neighbors resisting the use of facial recognition technology in their housing. Since their win, he has continued building awareness around surveillance, facial recognition, and the collection of biometric data in residential communities, civil, legal, and tech organizations. Fabian is one of the constituent advocates of Senator Brisport’s office offering resources and services to the 25th District.

There will be live captioning during this program. If you have any access needs, please contact access@pioneerworks.org. 

Please note, this online roundtable will begin promptly at the listed start time. In order to ensure the quality of instruction for all participants, late entry will not be permitted. 

This program is supported in part by public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.