What role does activism play in academic research? We talked to housing struggles activist and BCNUEJ researcher Melissa García about her upcoming book on mortgage debt in Spain and the challenges of bridging academia and activism.
by Franziska Link and Ana Cañizares
“Activism is what inspires my work as an academic”, says Melissa García-Lamarca, human geographer and researcher at BCNUEJ. We are sitting just outside the ICTA building (Institute of Environmental Science and Technology) at the UAB campus, where Melissa also teaches Urban Political Ecology to masters students. In between that, conducting research, and being a mother, she is finishing her new book “Non-Performing Loans, Non-Performing People: Life and Struggle with Mortgage Debt in Spain”, published by University of Georgia Press and due for release next fall.
Based on her PhD thesis that she completed in Manchester back in 2016, the book focuses on the impact of mortgage debt in Spain as a result of the 2008 financial crisis. The title juxtaposes the financial term non-performing loans, (NPLs)—which refers to a bank loan unlikely to be repaid in full or on time by the borrower—with the notion of “non-performing people”, which is how banks, Melissa says, see people who can’t pay. “They are treated as objects with which to speculate and make money off of.”
Her research focused on the lived experiences of people facing evictions and foreclosures and how they “collectively organize against those processes.” During her fieldwork and interviews, she observed that “people who were not white Spaniards had different terms and conditions in their mortgage and had more experiences of exploitation,” leading her to add a racial analysis in her book.
Melissa´s interest in social and racial issues goes back a long way. “When I was a child, I wanted to be an astronaut. And then I thought to myself, how can we go to outer space when we don’t even know enough about our own world?” She was further influenced by her experience living in Mexico City where she moved at the age of 12 as a result of her father’s work. There, she saw the wrath of globalization with her own eyes. “I lived a very privileged life there, but I saw lots of poverty; lots of people living on the street, which really troubled me. I remember on the school bus, we used to go through a huge informal settlement, and then from one day to the next it was demolished. Six months later there was a huge Walmart there.” Her desire to make sense of it all led her to study Geography and Economics with a minor in International Development at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. “I was finally able to put words to what I’d seen.”
In 2012 during her doctoral studies in Manchester, she became interested in grassroots activism and how it could challenge a system driven by financialization and speculative investment. The evictions taking place in Spain in the aftermath of the housing crisis became the main subject of Melissas research. She was particularly inspired by a video of the now-mayor of Barcelona Ada Colau, then a spokesperson of the PAH movement (Platform for Mortgage-Affected People, in English) advocating for a change to the mortgage law. “She called out the government and bankers who were saying that the mortgage system worked fine. The video went viral and I was just blown away from a distance. That’s part of what pushed me to choose my case.”
Mobilizations to stop the eviction of an occupied housing block in Salt, Girona, Catalonia in October 2013.
Melissa´s research drew her into the heart of the movement during its peak in 2013-14, when in Catalunya alone there were about 70 PAH groups. She attended over 60 assemblies and dozens of actions in Barcelona to block evictions and achieve debt forgiveness, sleeping overnight at a BBVA bank in Sabadell to protest several mortgage debt cases in what turned out to be one of PAH’s longest bank occupations. After two weeks, the bank gave in to the activists’ demands. “Sabadell is a working-class city and the PAH in Sabadell is more openly anti-capitalist.”
The courage Melissa witnessed among activists left a lasting impression. “It was incredible to see the level of mutual aid, support and care. I was very inspired by the people I got to know who had lost almost everything but were fighting and winning battles for housing stability and building a movement.” She says that many protesters, which included working-class Spaniards and many immigrants from Spain but also from Latin America, Morocco and other parts of Africa, had no background in mass mobilizations of any kind. “I saw people come to assemblies that were suffering so much they couldn’t even talk. Yet after one or two months they were speaking in front of 200 people. It was really powerful to see people become empowered through the movement.”
PAH bank occupation in Barcelona, Catalonia, 2014.
PAH occupation in BBVA, Sabadell, Catalonia, 2014.
Initially, Melissa worried how she would be perceived given her position as a researcher. But coming from a broad mix of backgrounds, people were generally open to everyone. Still, Melissa’s aim was not merely to ¨use¨ the activists for research purposes. “I think it’s important as an academic to be aware of your privilege and your position. So, even from the first day when I presented myself in the assemblies, I said, you know, I want to learn from you but I also want to give back by helping whatever way I can. The collaboration left a long-lasting impact on Melissa´s relationship with academia: “It was such a powerful movement that changed me in so many ways; I went in as a researcher and came out as a housing activist”.
Her first-hand experience as an activist has led her to critique certain aspects of how mainstream academia functions today, in particular the pressure to publish in high-impact journals. “Ultimately, how many people actually read them? Academic outputs are often just not relevant for what activists need.” Instead, she would rather “produce more material and resources that are useful and accessible to society”. Upon finishing her PhD, she wrote a two-page summary of her research in simple language and presented it at an assembly. She subsequently became engaged in the movement as an activist for many years, contributing to various commissions and campaigns, among other activities.
Melissa speaking at a press conference on behalf of PAH Barcelona, Barcelona, June 2016.
Due to the constraints of the pandemic and having recently become a mother, Melissa hasn´t been very active in campaigning lately. “Being in academia, you feel the pressure to spend more time producing [academic articles], whereas engaging more with activists is often seen by the academic system as wasteful.”
One of her recent projects, however, combines both her housing justice scholarship and her ambition to produce accessible resources with and for activists. Since 2017, she is a member of the Radical Housing Journal, an online, open access publication that covers “pre- and post-crisis housing experiences and activist strategies from around the world.”
Fieldwork in Glasgow in May 2019 with Melissa´s partner on the right, and her recently born daughter in a buggy (left).
Melissa was recently awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowship for her project CLIMATE JUST HOME that brings together her research on housing with her research on green inequalities at BCNUEJ (GreenLULUs). “There’s this huge problem now with all this sustainable climate-adapted housing—it’s for rich people, right? A lot of the research on sustainable housing provides very technical solutions focused on architecture and engineering, but we need people-oriented solutions that are affordable for working-class and minority residents.” Her empirical research will focus on the Basque city of Vitoria-Gasteiz, awarded the status of global green city in 2019. But the reality, Melissa explains, is that “there are still regular evictions and people living in precarious housing situations.” Using different quantitative and qualitative techniques like spatial analysis, participatory mapping and ethnography, the project will draw Melissa back into the field of activism, which she’s very excited about. “Supposedly green and sustainable cities like Vitoria-Gasteiz still have significant housing problems. I want to learn from social movements, from the people who are affected, to find out what can be done to change that.”
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Photos by Melissa García-Lamarca. Top photo by Franziska Link
