Rahim Kurwa
CLJ Faculty
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About
Assistant Professor
Dr. Kurwa’s work is focused on understanding how municipalities reproduce racial segregation in an era governed by fair housing law. His book project, Grounds for Eviction: Race, Mobility, and Policing in the Antelope Valley uses mixed methods to illustrate how a Los Angeles suburb polices and criminalizes the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program as a means to evict Black residents and reproduce racial segregation. His work has received awards from the American Sociological Association and Society for the Study of Social Problems. More broadly, he is interested in understanding the family implications of the policing of housing assistance, the interrelatedness of policing and segregation, and the history of policing in public housing and its successor programs. He received his PhD in Sociology from the University of California at Los Angeles in 2018.
Selected Publications
Peer-reviewed papers:
- Kurwa, Rahim. “Building the Digitally Gated Community: The Case of Nextdoor.” Surveillance & Society 17, no. 1/2 (2019): 111-117.
- Kurwa, Rahim. “Deconcentration without integration: Examining the social outcomes of housing choice voucher movement in Los Angeles County.” City & Community 14, no. 4 (2015): 364-391.
Papers under review:
- “The New ‘Man in the House’ Rules: How the Regulation of Housing Vouchers turns Personal Bonds into Eviction Liabilities”
- “Carceral Migration as Theory and Method: The Sociologies of Race, Space, and Legal Punishment” (with Susila Gurusami)
- “Policing to Segregate: Sketching the Contours of an Eviction Regime in Suburban Los Angeles”
Public writing:
- Policing’s Role in Racial Segregation: 50 Years After the Fair Housing Act. Los Angeles Social Science Forum
- Nextdoor in Context. Blink
Quoted in:
- On Nextdoor, the Homeless Are the Enemy. Rick Paulas, OneZero.
- Same city, different opportunities: Study maps life outcomes for children from Chicago neighborhoods. Cecilia Reyes and Joe Mahr, Chicago Tribune.
Notable Honors
2018, Graduate Student Paper Award, Racial and Ethnic Minorities Division , Society for the Study of Social Problems
2018 , Honorable Mention, Graduate Student Paper Award, Community and Urban Sociology