Displacement beyond dislocation: Aversive racism in gentrification studies

Abstract

In this article, we argue for a critical gentrification studies that includes a more expansive and nuanced understanding of how displacement works, beyond the mapping and counting of dislocated bodies. As part of our argument, we introduce the concept of aversive racism to the geographical literature on displacement, pointing to this insidious mode of spatial practice that we argue is widely constitutive of place-making and place-taking processes in gentrifying areas. We do this by first providing a review and analysis of how displacement has been conceptualized and measured in existing geographical scholarship on gentrification, followed by a critical examination of the gentrification literature's engagement with race and racism, and a final argument for an affective approach within a Black geographies framing that encourages more analyses based on experiential encounters with more-than-physical displacement-by-gentrification.

Captive bodies, prison geographies, and the somatic carceral condition

“…We therefore propose an acknowledgement of the somatic carceral condition in terms of its material effects for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people—a condition that is likewise experienced across repressive spaces. Furthermore and beyond the scope of this paper, we point out that our conceptualization of the effects of prisonization at the scale of the somatic can add to the literature on other carceral spaces and spheres of violence, or what Pain (2019) calls “chronic urban trauma.” Scaling down to the soma offers support to, for example, studies of the emotional and psychophysical effects of aversive racism (Bloch, 2022a), understandings of Black place-making and the Black geographical imagination (Shabazz, 2015; Hawthorne, 2019; Winston, 2023), and displacement by gentrification that occurs in the register of the affective, implicit, psychic, and interpersonal (Atkinson, 2015; Bloch and Meyer, 2023; Davidson, 2009; Kern, 2012; Linz, 2021). Centering the somatic allows scholars to map intangibles not represented in quantitative data on exclusion, including stigma and shame.…”

“…This is surprising given the work feminist geographers have done to center positionality, reflexivity, and other “auto” approaches to geographical inquiry (England, 1994; Katz, 1994; Moss and Besio, 2019; Rose, 1997). Enlisting personally held data for use in more critical urban research, Bloch (2019, 2020; Bloch and Meyer, 2023) has delineated autoethnography as literally “the writing (graphy) about culture (ethno) from the perspective of personal experience and as mediated by the self (auto)” as a means of tapping into and relying on the somatic as an archive of stored, trauma-induced data. For yet other geographers who have advocated for centering the experiential self in research, autoethnography helps elicit a “knowledgeable perspective on the metropolis from the margins that is emotionally invested, grounded in place, saturated with local specificity, the ebb and flow of daily life, and what is going on behind the scenes” (Butz, 2010: 152).…”

Displacement and affective economies in gentrification research

“…The argument we develop in our initial paper is that while displacement remains a prevailing feature of gentrification, it is a process that functions through diverse rearticulations of people's embodied capacity to make place, only some of which manifest in physical mobility (Bloch and Meyer, 2023). We therefore contend that to limit our critical focus to observable, measurable dislocation – whether in the past, present, or future – is to oversimplify the process of displacement.…”