Article
Making Place for My Space/Making Space for our Displacement: An Embodied Autoethnography of a Reflexive Communicative Urban Planner
Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies
(2019)
Abstract
Styled as a letter to my multiple selves, this autoethnography performs a cultural politics of gentrification embodied in my journeys as a community activist, urban planning practitioner, and scholar collaborating with marginalized communities of color in cities. Based on these experiences I uniquely theorize displacement by engaging my affective feelings of empowerment, complicity, melancholy, and self-healing. Critically theorizing my various selves in dialogue with social context, I map my intersectional identities onto larger discourses of community advocacy, racial capitalism, subaltern studies, and decolonization. Ultimately, I argue that another radical self/us/we is possible and point to present-day forms of community organizing and popular education that offer pathways to resist displacement and transform cities toward the arc of social justice.
Keywords
- gentrification and displacement,
- urban planning,
- racial capitalism,
- subaltern studies,
- decolonization,
- activism
Disciplines
Publication Date
2019
DOI
10.1177/1532708619879197
Citation Information
George Villanueva. "Making Place for My Space/Making Space for our Displacement: An Embodied Autoethnography of a Reflexive Communicative Urban Planner" Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies Vol. 20 Iss. 2 (2019) p. 157 - 166 Available at: http://works.bepress.com/george-villanueva/14/