This virtual event is a part of the Virginia Festival of the Book, which is free to attend and open to the public. To attend, please register to take part on Zoom here, or simply make plans to watch the livestream on Facebook at facebook.com/vabookfest.
In this virtual event, MacArthur “Genius” and Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond will discuss his book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. Desmond will talk about his work on housing access and affordability as well as broader, longstanding issues of critical importance to the health of our nation: income and housing insecurity. He will be in conversation with Kevin McDonald, UVA’s Vice President for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Community Partnerships.
Desmond’s Eviction Lab at Princeton, launched in 2017, recently released the Eviction Tracking System, which monitors eviction filings in real time across a set of American cities, and, in partnership with Columbia Law School professor Emily Benfer, a policy scorecard for each state, distilling the contents of thousands of newly-released emergency orders, declarations, and legislation into a clear set of critical measures included in, and left out of, state-level pandemic responses related to eviction and housing.
About the Author: Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, is the founder of Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, which maintains the first-ever national dataset of evictions in America, collecting millions of data points back to 2000. Desmond is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. In 2015, he was awarded the MacArthur “Genius” Grant for “revealing the impact of eviction on the lives of the urban poor and its role in perpetuating racial and economic inequality.”
About the Moderator: Kevin McDonald is the University of Virginia’s Vice President for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Community Partnerships. He joined UVA after serving as the chief diversity officer and vice chancellor for inclusion, diversity, and equity at the University of Missouri System and the University of Missouri – Columbia.