Welcome to an evening full of rent strikes!

Join us as we present a brand-new volume on the history of collective tenant action and organising. Since the nineteenth century, working-class families have predominantly relied on tenements for housing, with rents often consuming a large portion of their household budgets. There is a long and contested history of tenants taking collective action across time and contexts, including rent strikes, but international comparisons have been scarce.

Rent Strikes: A history of collective tenant actions across the world is a collaborative effort by 16 contributors from diverse countries to identify common patterns and global trajectories in the rich history of tenants’ strikes, spanning a period of almost 120 years from the early twentieth century to the Covid-19 pandemic.

It brings together local, national, and comparative case studies to illustrate the history of tenant mobilisation for the general public, connects with existing scholarship, and lays the groundwork for future research. Adopting a transnational perspective, it examines episodes of tenant struggles in North and Latin America, Northern and Southern Europe, and Oceania. In doing so, the book explores a range of actions, including petitions, demonstrations, boycotts and legal actions, and has a special focus on the part played by women in these movements.

This is a hybrid event; you are welcome to join us live or on Zoom.

Contact hannes.rolf@historia.su.se to get access to the Zoom room.

(OBS! Evenemanget hålls på engelska.)

Presenters:

Lucas Poy (editor), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Hannes Rolf (editor), Stockholm University

Commentator:

Dominika Polanska, Södertörn University

Chair:

Silke Neunsinger, Swedish Labour Movement’s Archives and Library