Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

2-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Psychology

Advisor

Setha Low

Committee Members

Dana-Ain Davis

Cindi Katz

Melissa Checker

Alesia Montgomery

Subject Categories

Human Geography | Other Psychology | Urban Studies and Planning

Keywords

Gentrification, Resistance, Black Geographies, Brooklyn, Race

Abstract

This dissertation looks at how gentrification touches down, at the neighborhood and individual scale, in Crown Heights and reproduces experiences of racial inequality in home and place. Taking an historical materialist approach and drawing on residential oral histories, this study frames these reproductions of racial inequality as always-in-tension with ongoing acts of resistance from Black homeowners, renters, and long-term residents. Specifically, the research explores the conditions under which Black residents of a predominantly Afro-Caribbean neighborhood acquire and maintain—and in some cases lose—their housing and sense of place and belonging. These residents resist the varied tactics of anti-Blackness such as landlord and developer harassment, eviction, and displacement pressures that attempt to dispossess owners and renters from their homes and symbolically displace them from the neighborhood. I borrow Katherine McKittrick’s (2011) theorizing to characterize the neighborhood from the perspective of a Black sense of place and conceptualize Crown Heights as a space of contradictions that is continually constituted through the (re)claiming of home, belonging, and place arguing that these traditions of rootedness in place are acts of resistance themselves. I have found that familial traditions of care and ethnic/racial solidarity are central to residents’ resistance and struggle against dispossession and in maintaining footholds in home and place.

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