Yutaka Dirks

Title: Instructor - Winter 2025
Email: y.dirks@uwinnipeg.ca

Biography:
Yutaka Dirks is a PhD student in Political Science at York University, where he received his Master’s degree in Political Science. His research examines the intersection of housing financialization and settler-colonialism within Canada. He seeks to unravel the contradictions inherent in commodified housing in settler-colonial states and better understand the potential of housing to simultaneously be a force of settler-colonial domination and a site of Indigenous freedom. His research interests also include social movements, policy change, and community organizing.

Yutaka has been involved in housing rights and homelessness activism and policy advocacy for the past twenty-five years in cities across Canada, including Calgary, Toronto, and Winnipeg. He worked for many years as a community organizer for a provincial legal clinic in Toronto and currently works as a policy and outreach advisor for a national housing policy non-profit organization. His scholarly and non-academic work has appeared in the Journal of Law & Social Policy, Alberta Views, The Los Angeles Review of Books, the Montreal Review of Books, Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution, Briarpatch Magazine, and elsewhere.

Courses:
HR-2540-050 Human Rights Advocacy