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Paper short abstract

This paper discusses a collaborative filmmaking project engaging with displacement, in a context marked by urban regeneration and gentrification. I show how the shared ‘sense-making’ that emerged through the project made displacement an object of collaborative, experimental and speculative enquiry.

Paper long abstract

Displacement in contexts marked by urban regeneration and gentrification is an affective and psycho-social process as much as it is a question of physical dislocation (Davidson 2009; Elliot-Cooper, Hubbard and Lees 2019, 2020). While physical dislocation and affective displacement may go hand-in-hand, affective displacement can occur without an immediate threat of physical displacement. As Elliot-Cooper et al. argue, at the core of gentrification induced displacement is a “[rupturing] of the connection between people and place” (Elliot-Cooper, Hubbard and Lees 2019). This paper critically and speculatively engages with displacement, discussing a collaborative filmmaking project between myself (an anthropologist) and Jimmy - a resident of a social housing estate in Poplar, east London, currently undergoing comprehensive redevelopment. Through a series of filmed walks around his neighbourhood, poetry recital, and explorations of his personal archive, the film project considered Jimmy’s estrangement from his urban milieu. We worked iteratively: filming, watching back, filming again, and sometimes sharing the resulting short films on local history Facebook pages. The use of a camera, screens and social media platforms captured and remediated the affective force of Jimmy’s urban milieu, opening up a shared space where we tried to ‘make sense’ of his affective displacement. Drawing on recent calls for a multimodal “anthropology of invention” (Dattatreyan and Marrero-Guillamon 2019) and theoretical considerations of ‘affect’ (Gregg and Seigworth 2010), I show how the ‘sense-making’ that emerged through our collaboration went beyond a representational engagement with displacement and made displacement an object of collaborative, experimental and speculative enquiry.