Resisting Root Shock in the Collapsed City: Constructing Community and the Fight to Stay Put through Tenant Organizing in Dublin

Mindy Thompson Fullilove's concept of 'Root Shock' captures the trauma caused by the mass displacement and dispossession associated with urban renewal. In the twenty years since it was published, such policies have set in motion waves of trauma and 'dispossessive praxis' (Lancione, 2024, p. 841), producing what Fullilove (2004, p. 99) calls 'a downward spiral of collapse'. Reflecting on the book's twentieth anniversary, in this paper we draw on root shock and ancillary concepts to reflect on what happens when the forms of community, reciprocity, and solidarity presupposed in analyses of residents' experience of displacement have already been hollowed out? We do so by examining how housing movements have had to simultaneously resist displacement and engage in active processes to create community, focusing on the experience of the Community Action Tenants Union (CATU) in Ireland. We show that the denial of roots requires the praxis of cultivating and nurturing their potential through tenant organizing.