Abstract. This article offers an empirical account of the emotionally charged processes involved in the social production of territory. I draw from ethnographic interviews with displaced leaders of socio-territorial movements in Medellín, Colombia, who are resisting what I call double displacement. First, they were displaced from the Colombian countryside due to conflict and now, decades later, they are again being displaced, this time from their informal settlements due to urban development. Founders of settlements are now leaders of social movements, who reside on the periphery of the city and make claims to their neighborhoods using the slogan that they have a “right to the territory”. I examine this case of double displacement to demonstrate the emotional and political aspects of re-territorialization by non-state actors at the urban scale. I argue that by applying a socio-territorial approach to examining the impact of double displacement, we recognize non-state territorialization as a realization and expansion of social power.

Academic and community research partnerships have gained traction as a potential bridge between the university and local area to address pressing social issues. A key question for developing justice-oriented research is how to integrate best practices for creating genuine, authentic research partnerships. In this paper, we discuss the process of building a critical community-engaged project that examines how urban redevelopment changes neighborhoods within immigrant and/or communities of color. Focusing on Long Beach, California, in this article, we detail the development of a mixed-methods study that involves undergraduate students and community members as co-collaborators. We discuss the use and outcomes of co-walking as method, emphasizing observational findings, as well as the process of building team collaboration. We find that neighborhoods in Long Beach are changing rapidly in terms of the use of greening, increased technology integration within neighborhoods, and modern aesthetics, revealing that new residents will likely be younger and single residents with disposable income and no children. From this process, we identified a more critical question for the research project: “Development for whom?”. We argue that co-walking as method is an observational and relational process that assists with the foundational steps of building a critical community-engaged research project.

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