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Paper short abstract:

My project asks how diasporic communities negotiate place and engage with gentrification, focusing on Caribbean and Latin American Londoners in Notting Hill and Elephant and Castle, respectively. It does so through conducting participant observation and participatory visual methods.

Paper long abstract:

My thesis sustains that gentrification is lived as a diversity of experiences which have to do with place, public space and the everyday. For this reason, the overarching query is supported by three objectives: exploring processes of place-making through paying attention to participants' practices of visibility - understood as making and manifesting presence - , analyzing what they feel about the visions of place proposed by area developers, and finally, assessing their response to the changing urban landscape by considering acts of both collectively organized and intimate/informal resistance in public space.

The notion of the visual, running implicitly though the three objectives, is stretched through sensory ethnography as to account for those practices of visibility pertaining to different bodily experiences related to place and power. These have become manifest to me through paying attention to stage practices, conducting walking (or transect) and photo-elicitation interviews (through which I found that the visual opens the conversation to a multiplicity of embodied experiences).

What emerges thus far is that gentrification is not experienced as an all-encompassing "monster", but that responses to it are varied and that people may welcome some aspects of it and reject other interchangeably over time. In terms of negotiating, and navigating through, the changes to the landscape the two cases presented similarities, although different mannerisms. These include: artistic expression, through performances of traditional music, theater acts or street parades, community work and organizing, and finally, the tracing of personal routes aimed at deciding one's own experience/mapping of place.