Dr. Matthew Desmond: A Voice of the People Series

A Voice of the People is a speaker series presented by the Portland'5 Centers for the Arts Department of Culture and Community. The series brings in voices who explore the intersections of identity, social systems, creativity, and how our social world sculpts our narratives.
Join the Department of Culture and Community for a powerful and illuminating conversation with sociologist and MacArthur Genius Dr. Matthew Desmond in the Newmark Theatre.
Princeton University sociologist Dr. Matthew Desmond was launched onto the national stage as an expert on contemporary American poverty with the publication of his Pulitzer Prize winning bestseller Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. Combining years of embedded fieldwork with painstakingly gathered data, Evicted transformed our understanding of inequity and economic exploitation in America.
Desmond’s latest book, the instant #1 New York Times bestseller Poverty, by America investigates why the United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages?
Desmond is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology and the founder and principal investigator of the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. In 2018, The Eviction Lab published the first-ever national dataset of evictions in America, collecting millions of data points going back to 2000, and it has gone on to serve as a resource hub for the millions of American renters who faced increased housing insecurity due to the COVID-19 pandemic.