Jessie Speer

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics. My research examines how unhoused people contest normative domesticity and capitalist housing markets. My book Bulldozed: Homeless Encampments and the Politics of Demolition shows how a combination of profit, punishment, and prejudice has produced a new "bulldozer approach" to homelessness in the United States, in ways that mirror the demolition of informal settlements across the globe. Other research projects include literary analysis of memoirs of homelessness and legal analysis of the nexus between migration and housing displacement in the United Kingdom. Open-access versions of my publications are available here. I am currently developing new research on arts-based housing justice. As an artist, my own practice centres hand-cut collage, using discarded imagery to construct whimsical, absurd, and dreamlike visual worlds. These works mobilise humour, surrealism, and fragmentation to produce a form of political satire that interrogates the role of play in a world marked by relations of power. I recently completed a self-published art book Safe, Here, Now on the intersection of collage and mind-body healing. As a somatic practitioner, I explore embodiment as a site of political agency.

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My book Bulldozed — Homeless Encampments and the Politics of Demolition examines the demolition of homeless encampments in the United States as part of a larger attack on urban informality. This work is based on more than ten years of ethnographic and archival research in the California Central Valley as well as analysis of secondary sources nationwide. Thanks to a grant from the London School of Economics, the book will be available open access. See more here.

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Romola Sanyal, my colleague at LSE geography, does excellent research on refugee livelihoods and urban displacement in South Asia and the Middle East (see more here). She recently interviewed me about my forthcoming book for her podcast Displacement Urbanism.

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Vincent Lyon-Callo, who does incredible work on homelessness in the US, interviewed me recently for his new podcast Ending Homelessness. See more about his work here.

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This self-published booklet uses collage and affirmations to support people recovering from trauma or chronic illness. You can see the online version here. Feel free to contact me if you're interested in a print copy.

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I commissioned this map from Joe Stoll at the Syracuse University Cartographic Laboratory. It shows poverty levels in the city of Fresno, California alongside locations of major encampments and homeless shelters before Fresno’s anti-encampment task force was developed in 2013, when my research on encampments first began. Most camps were clustered in Fresno’s poorest neighborhoods. Poverty data from the 2008-12 American Community Survey.

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In this podcast, I talked with Brittany Hsieh and Alice Peultier at Planning for Justice about law, homelessness, and property in the United States.

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In cities across the globe, housing is being squeezed as families and individuals are relegated to increasingly smaller domestic spaces. In May 2025 my colleague David Madden and I organized a workshop bringing together researchers from across the globe examining this issue. One output of the workshop was a collectively produced zine (available here) combining research data and interview material with collage and found imagery.

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A short reflection in which I examine the nexus between migration and housing in the UK. Check out the full article here.

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Nicole Marie Burton of Petroglyph Studios made this illustration for the cover of my book Bulldozed — Homeless Encampments and the Politics of Demolition. All objects shown in the bulldozer represent the treasured belongings of people I spoke with, who in the course of camp demolitions lost wheelchairs, bicycles, family photographs and even an urn containing a grandmother's ashes.

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This is an image of temporary camp-style housing for unhoused people in Chico, California. I write about sanctioned encampments and their relationship to the carceral system in the United States here, in Political Geography.

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I wrote a chapter on homelessness in geography for the above book. You can find it here.

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A man sits in the demolished remains of his self-built home in Rio de Janeiro. I argue (in this short commentary in Dialogues in Human Geography), that Anglophone research on homelessness overfocuses on the Global North, and that a truly global scholarship must attend to the broader politics of housing precarity and informality.

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This is the Southern California Library where my colleague Stephen Jones and I worked to transfer an anti-prison archive at risk of being destroyed. We wrote an account of the archive and our labor of finding it a home. Read the full article in The Professional Geographer here.

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Bathrooms are political. I have written about unhoused people's struggles for access to sanitation services, including toilets, water, and trash services, in Urban Geography. You can read the article here.

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This photo was taken by my friend Mike Rhodes, who documents the demolition of homeless encampments in California. The woman who lived in the shanty being destroyed told Rhodes "that's my home." I have written about the politics of domesticity and encampment demolition in Antipode — A Radical Journal of Geography.

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Police often force unhoused people to give up their belongings and move into a shelter. This image was taken in downtown Phoenix, where my colleague Brian Hennigan researches the politics of homelessness. Together we wrote an article (here) in Urban Studies on the enmeshing of policing with homelessness services.

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Hostile architecture, pictured above in Singapore, is a feature of revitalizing cities worldwide. I argue (here, in Social and Cultural Geography) that urban revitalization tends to promote an elite aesthetic premised on the removal of unhoused people, while residents of homeless encampments often promote alternative aesthetics grounded in collectivity and reuse.