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Schlichtman and Patch suggest that there is an elephant sitting in the academic corner: while urbanists often use 'gentrification' as a pejorative term in formal and informal academic conversation, many urbanists are gentrifiers themselves. Even though urbanists have this firsthand experience with the process, this familiarity makes little impact on scholarly debate. There is, Schlichtman and Patch argue, an artificial distance in accounts of gentrification because researchers have not adequately examined their own relationship to the process. Utilizing a simple diagnostic tool that includes ten common aspects of gentrification, they compose two autoethnographic memoirs to begin this dialogue. The mirrorAt the 2009 RC-21 conference in São Paulo, a young scholar began her presentation with the premise 'we all know that gentrification is bad'. Urban scholars rail against the process of gentrification and its destruction of working-class communities. We read about the waves of gentrifiers and the kinds of cafes, boutiques and new amenities that they bring. We express worry to our peers that the city is going to become a bastion of elitism or a generic suburb stripped of diversity. Often, we treat gentrification as a contemporary form of urban class and racial warfare (Smith, 1996). As urbanists, however, we increasingly notice an elephant sitting in the academic corner: many (dare we say most -'mainstream' and critical) urbanists are gentrifiers themselves. As Brown-Saracino (2010: 356) suggests, 'many of us have firsthand experience with gentrification'. But what difference has this made on our research? Very little. We have created an artificial distance in our analysis because we do not examine our own relationship to the data.The last few years have witnessed lively debates among urbanists on the topic of gentrification. Some of these debates have seemed quite personal. The truth is that those of us situated in the phenomenon of gentrification carry suppositions on the issue that are deeply rooted in our personal biographies. We agree with Maso (2001: 137) that the

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This article suggests a research tool, the temporal map, for ethnographers to employ in supplementing the accounts of urban change provided by local informants. Such a map, created using city business directories, can provide an external validity check to ethnographic research. The authors' tool allows urban ethnographers to extend contemporary ethnographic accounts backward to a period prior to the beginning of fieldwork. It provides a geo-temporal contextualization by fitting fragmented, geographically and historically specific ethnographic accounts into a broader area and across a broader period of time. The authors show how two ethnographic case studies were enhanced by such temporal maps. Their cases involve a redeveloped central business district in North Carolina and a gentrified neighborhood in New York City. TRACKING TEMPORAL CHANGE IN URBAN SPACEWhen geologists examine deep incisions in the Earth's surface, they often observe moraines, the glacial deposits of soil and rocks left at the margin of an ice sheet. The glacier has long since retreated or disappeared altogether, but evidence of its earlier presence remains. As ethnographers, we too find ourselves in a contemporary research setting trying to contextualize the remains of earlier, broader processes. We often arrive at the tail end of a longer set of events or during a particularly interesting phase without immediately witnessing the social glacier that left a particular deposit of activity.As urban ethnographers, we are haunted by the Marxist dictum that "all that is solid melts into air." Harvey (1989, p. 250) informs us that "transformations are wrought through the 'creative destruction' of the landscapes that went before." But what landscapes went before and what are the best ways to learn more about them? Without the time or resources to "revisit" a site (Burawoy, 2003), ethnographers--like geologistsdescribe historical moments that may crystallize decades of change. We are left with moraines of the built environment that serve as tantalizing hints of the past from which to construct a narrative leading to the present.

The recent resurgence of social and civic disquiet in the USA has contributed to increasing recognition that social conditions are meaningfully connected to disease and death. As a “lifestyle disease,” control of diabetes requires modifications to daily activities, including healthy dietary practices, regular physical activity, and adherence to treatment regimens. One’s ability to develop the healthy practices necessary to prevent or control type 2 diabetes may be influenced by a context of social disorder, the disruptive social and economic conditions that influence daily activity and, consequently, health status. In this paper, we report on our narrative review of the literature that explores the associations between social disorder and diabetes-related health outcomes within vulnerable communities. We also propose a multilevel ecosocial model for conceptualizing social disorder, specifically focusing on its role in racial disparities and its pathways to mediating diabetes outcomes.