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Abolitionist feminist researcher and activist Stephanie Guirand is our Image-Maker in Residence this autumn. Sharing insights from her doctoral thesis and film, Where Do Black Men Live?, she talks to George Kalivis about the intersections of housing injustice, incarceration structures and systemic racism, as well as community-led responses to policing, unseen lived realities and the importance of fighting back, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and beyond.

some of Cambridge’s leading progressive organizations have come together to form the Cambridge Progressive Electoral Collaboration. It includes eight local member organizations and two allied organizations. Member groups are: the Alliance of Cambridge Tenants, The Black Response Cambridge, Cambridge Democratic Socialists of America, Cambridge Housing Affordability Organizers, Cambridge Housing Justice Coalition, Cambridge Residents Alliance, Our Revolution Cambridge and the Solidarity Squad. Ally organizations include the Cambridge Education Association and Cambridge Retired Educators United.

The Black Response premieres its short film “Where Do Black Men Live?” – a fictionalized portrayal of the experiences of low-income and housing insecure Black men in Cambridge – Thursday at The Foundry, with a panel discussion afterward.

In 2020, when Cambridge native Stephanie Guirand’s doctoral dissertation field research on Black men and housing was suspended at Goldsmith, University of London, due to the pandemic, the work she’d done wasn’t lost.

“The contract language itself says that [SoundThinking] can share data recordings with law enforcement broadly,” Stephanie Guirand, a member of The Black Response and representative of the Camberville Stop ShotSpotter Coalition, said. “So that signals to us that the data, the recordings, are being made available to law enforcement — especially the Department of Homeland Security and ICE.”

The world’s collective witnessing of George Floyd’s murder sparked the uprisings of 2020. In March the world watched as Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts graduate student living in Somerville, was abducted by masked, plainclothes Ice agents. Her “crime”? She spoke up about an issue she cared about, the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza. Rumeysa’s abduction and many more abductions of ordinary working immigrant people compelled us to examine whether sanctuary city laws truly protect us.

In Cambridge, the technology is entirely located in The Port and Riverside neighborhoods, neighborhoods that have the highest concentration of Black, brown, low-income and immigrant residents, said Stephanie Guirand, a core team member of the organization The Black Response, in an interview. (SoundThinking, the company behind ShotSpotter, does not reveal the precise locations of its devices to police or the public, but data leaked to Wired.com allowed the group to map their placement.)

Have you ever wondered what police actually do?

Police claim to protect and serve, but since the formalization of modern policing, Black, Brown, Indigenous, poor, and immigrant populations have repeatedly asked: Who do they serve? Who do they protect? These questions have been at the heart of racial justice movements for decades; they’ve been chanted by crowds of thousands each time police have murdered another Black person. Since 2013, with the advent of Black Lives Matter, there has been a greater public awareness of police violence, its victims, and the systems that maintain this state violence.