UT Humanities Center Conversations & Cocktails: Breaking Boundaries 2021-22 Series – Jessi Grieser

What We Talk About When We Talk About Gentrification

Gentrification is happening in cities across the United States and around the world. While it often gets framed in terms of urban renewal and development of new resources, these framings can obscure the real ways it impacts residents in the gentrifying locale. Drawing on ten years of research in a historically Black neighborhood in Washington, D.C., Professor Grieser demonstrates the discourse strategies existing Black residents use to position themselves against gentrification, and in turn, to lay claim to their neighborhood as Black Space.

Jessi Grieser is associate professor of English linguistics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and is principally interested in the ways that race identity is performed and realized through language. Her book, The Black Side of the River: Race, Language, and Belonging in Washington, D.C. is forthcoming 2022 from Georgetown University Press. 

Free and open to the public, but registration is required.