Doing What Counts: Following Eviction Data from the Community to the Court

This dissertation combines design and ethnography to study how public eviction records are generated and employed in the Southeast of the United States, a geography with historical roots in racial dispossession. This work investigates the challenges in collecting community data on pressing social issues and utilizing institutional civic data towards purposes that challenge the status quo. Stemming from a four year engagement with local housing activists, my research begins from the standpoint of tenant organizing spanning multiple projects. The investigation is conducted in the context of rapid gentrification and Private Equity acquisitions of residential properties that continues to climax as the Covid-19 pandemic plays out and leaves behind socio-economic and cultural residualities. I rely upon methods from the anthropological shift to "Study Up," viewing data from a design perspective to unpack how to design bricolage infrastructure of eviction mutual aid, data visualizations that identify plaintiffs (landlords) over defendants (tenants), and scaffolding community data collection against the court.