North American field guide: Kenneth Pietrobono's queer landscape of US Empire

“North American field guide: Kenneth Pietrobono's queer landscape of US Empire” offers a meditation on the photographic and exhibition strategies of Queens-based artist Kenneth Pietrobono. Chambers-Letson argues that Pietrobono builds a critique of the imperial and exclusionary practices of the US state by appropriating and (re)deploying the state's appurtenances of power, resignifying the landscape on which US nationalism is constructed and over which US power is exercised. As a point of critical entry, Pietrobono builds upon feminist and queer representational strategies, refusing direct figuration of the body while emphasizing the body of the spectator in the art encounter. Inviting the spectator to project a range of bodies into the landscapes that Pietrobono offers up, the artist asks the spectator to make connections between embodied experiences of race, gender, and sexual difference and the exercise and expansion of US Empire.     

Fighting Housing Discrimination in Europe

ABSTRACT

There is no exact European equivalent to the U.S. Fair Housing Act. The member states of the European Union (EU) have transposed into law the EU Racial Equality Directive of 2000 that prohibits discrimination in, among other things, access to the supply of goods and services, including housing, on the basis of race. Most housing discrimination case law so far comes from nonbinding decisions of the European Court of Human Rights and European Committee of Social Rights under the revised European Social Charter of the Council of Europe. This article explains how the European context of discrimination and segregation differs from the American, reviews the major legal conventions establishing equal rights in housing, protected classes, and key precedents. It discusses how mixing policies in social housing are the primary mechanism to reduce residential segregation in Europe. The special case of extreme discrimination against the Roma is presented, before concluding with some comparative observations.