Making Place for My Space/Making Space for our Displacement: An Embodied Autoethnography of a Reflexive Communicative Urban Planner

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.