Erin McElroy’s work focuses upon intersections of gentrification, technology, digitality, empire, and racial capitalism in the US and in Romania, alongside housing justice organizing and transnational solidarities. This informs the focus of their recently published manuscript, Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times, with Duke University Press (2024).

McElroy is cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project—a data visualization, counter-cartography, and digital media collective that produces tools, software, maps, reports, murals, zines, oral histories, and more to further the work of housing justice. Recently the collective published Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement & Resistance (2021). McElroy has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and public scholarship pieces in venues ranging from Catalyst to Environment and Planning D to IJURR, from Public Books to The Boston Review to Shelterforce. Such commitments inform McElroy’s work coediting the Radical Housing Journal—an open access publication that foregrounds housing research and organizing transnationally. McElroy is a core partner with the Housing Justice in Unequal Cities network based out of UCLA, and is a steering member of the Beyond Inhabitation Lab based out of the Polytechnic of Turin.

At UW, McElroy runs the Anti-Eviction Lab, where much of the student and community partner driven research focuses upon Landlord Tech Watch—a platform dedicated to producing collective knowledge about landlord-driven data grabbing and algorithmic techniques.

McElroy teaches undergraduate and graduate classes focused on technology, displacement, racial capitalism, US empire, surveillance, infrastructure, social movements, housing justice, anti-imperialism, and abolition. Fields explored include critical race and ethnic studies, urban studies, science and technology studies, feminist technoscience, digital geography, urban geography, counter-cartography, critical data studies, critical digital studies, and more.

Prior to joining UW, McElroy taught in the American Studies Department at UT Austin. They earned a doctoral degree in Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz and conducted a postdoc at the AI Now Institute at New York University.