Contesting racialization in a neoliberal city: cross-cultural collective formation as a strategy among alternative social planning organizations in Toronto (original) (raw)
Related papers
This dissertation examines the complex roles the Parkdale Activity-Recreation Centre (PARC), a progressive social service agency, has played in Toronto’s gentrifying Parkdale neighbourhood. Emerging from the author’s experiences as a PARC worker, this research juxtaposes the agency’s rhetorical and material investments in opposing gentrification and neoliberalism with its ongoing momentum towards privatization, and spatial and social enclosure. It suggests that the key to understanding these contradictions lies in the construction of the enlightened bourgeois activist, a subject whose genuine desire for personal and political “goodness” both reinforces and obscures racial and gendered violence. Relying on an existing textual archive, ethnographic observation, and extensive interview data, this dissertation tracks the racial and gendered strategies of gentrification and neoliberalism through descending scales: the Parkdale neighbourhood; the institutional and spatial environments of PARC; and the interpersonal and intrapsychical relationships between and among PARC staff. At every level, the enlightened bourgeois activist emerges as both an architect and an effect of existing power structures. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that so long as we leave race and gender uninterrogated in our external and internal lives, the social work that we imagine to be emancipatory will reinforce those systems of domination we hope to oppose.
Making Good: Racial Neoliberalism and Activist Subjects in Toronto's Parkdale Neighbourhood
2016
This dissertation examines the complex roles the Parkdale Activity-Recreation Centre (PARC), a progressive social service agency, has played in Toronto's gentrifying Parkdale neighbourhood. Emerging from the author's experiences as a PARC worker, this research juxtaposes the agency's rhetorical and material investments in opposing gentrification and neoliberalism with its ongoing momentum towards privatization, and spatial and social enclosure. It suggests that the key to understanding these contradictions lies in the construction of the enlightened bourgeois activist, a subject whose genuine desire for personal and political "goodness" both reinforces and obscures racial and gendered violence. Relying on an existing textual archive, ethnographic observation, and extensive interview data, this dissertation tracks the racial and gendered strategies of gentrification and neoliberalism through descending scales: the Parkdale neighbourhood; the institutional and spatial environments of PARC; and the interpersonal and intrapsychical relationships between and among PARC staff. At every level, the enlightened bourgeois activist emerges as both an architect and an effect of existing power structures. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that so long as we leave race and gender uninterrogated in our external and internal lives, the social iii work that we imagine to be emancipatory will reinforce those systems of domination we hope to oppose. I was buoyed by the incredible generosity of the Murads (with the additional Rambukkana and Adames), who have extended me familial belonging in Canada. Zuwaina Murad, in her infinite vi patience (and knowledge of APA), helped me proof this beast of a dissertation. My incredible connection with Zahra Murad continues to be instrumental in making me the political, emotional and spiritual being that I am. Researching and writing has been a surprisingly positive experience for me because of my remarkable committee. Dr. Katharine Rankin and Dr. Barbara Heron have shown by example what it means to be truly socially and politically engaged academics. Both have offered essential insight throughout, and have done me the great kindness of reading hundreds of pages of drafts (like I said, long-winded). Barbara also loaned me books and met me for coffee when I was feeling panicked. I am honoured to have Dr. Nicholas Blomley, whose work I respect immensely and cite often, as an external appraiser and Dr. Izumi Sakamoto as an internal examiner. Most essentially, though, I want to thank Dr. Sherene Razack, without whom I would never have conceptualized, let alone finished, this research. As a professor, an adviser and a supervisor, she has gone above and beyond the professional requirements of her role time and time again, lending her formidable intellect and generous nature to this large and complicated project. Working with her has grown my sense of self as a writer, community organizer and a person. I am unspeakably honoured to know her, and forever grateful for her supervision and, more broadly, her political work. When all is said and done, my deepest thanks go to two people: Hume Cronyn and Bryan DePuy. Throughout this process, Hume has given so much more of his space, his time, and his incredible mind than I could possibly have hoped for. Our friendship makes me a more thoughtful, grounded person. Better, it fills me with wonder at the world. The arguments I present in this work were first hashed out over the dinner table, in the car, or at the back of a bar with Hume. Bryan, I do not even have words for. I honestly cannot believe that I get to spend my life with such a brilliant creature, a veritable polymath who gives so generously of his wisdom, clearheadedness, empathy and humour. I am still pinching myself hourly. Suffice to say, my ability to think through the difficult things in this dissertationmy ability to live my life at allis profoundly improved by his presence. I depend on his light, even as I am awed by it. I can barely stumble my way towards an adequate articulation of what he means. I'll leave it to Ian MacKaye: "We're blessed, not lucky." vii
Governing the “New Hometowns”: Race, Power, and Neighborhood Participation in the New Inner City
Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 2006
Inner city residents, once shunned and ignored by city planners, are now seen as a vital resource in United States urban redevelopment plans. This shift in perspective has come at a time when municipal elites routinely champion the neoliberal strategies of privatization, marketization, and consumerism across the urban policy spectrum. In this article, I draw upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a gentrifying neighborhood in Philadelphia to illuminate the ways in which race, power, and neighborhood participation shape urban governance. Against the governmentalist approach, which tends to present a totalizing vision of neoliberal rule, this article emphasizes the failures and instabilities of urban governance under contemporary conditions. In particular, I direct attention to the overlooked dynamics of racial politics as they play out at the neighborhood level, where attempts to encourage self-governance on the part of inner city residents are predicated upon post-civil rights era notions of diversity and multiculturalism. The imposition of this politics produces new forms of racial inequality and class division that, paradoxically, undermine neoliberal rule itself.
Discourse: Studies in The Cultural Politics of Education, 2011
Although Detroit is not a centre of global finance, and plays a declining role in global production, it nevertheless participates in the present remediation of the relationship between cities and the globe. Manoeuvring to reposition the city as the global hub of mobility technology, metropolitan Detroit's neoliberal leadership advances particular development strategies in urban education, housing, infrastructure, and governance, all with implications for social exclusion. This paper analyzes Detroit's neoliberal policy complex, uncovering how rituals of place-making and suburbanite nostalgia for the city intersect with broader struggles over the region's resources and representation.
This paper intervenes on the contemporary Canadian discourse that equates bourgeois self-making practices of progressive urban subjects with moves towards genuine spatial justice. Emerging from a three-year project assessing gentrification Toronto’s Parkdale neighborhood, the author probes the dissonance between the triumphalist rhetoric circulated by an anti-gentrification elite and the lived realities of displacement and violence in poor, racialized and mad communities. Using ethnographic observation and analysis of extensive interview data, this paper suggests that the ideas of inclusive urban development often rely on the ejection of intolerable bodies from the sphere of urban life and the simultaneous exaltation of ‘enlightened’ middle-class subjects as the authors and protagonists of social change. Yearning for a better future, this paper functions as a cautionary tale, a warning that so long as race and gender remain secondary sites of investigation and action, work for urban emancipation will reinforce those systems of domination it hopes to oppose.