FSEM 185   Gentrification

Faculty Profile for Professor Stern

Over the past two decades, gentrification has become a flash point in terms of conversations about urban renewal and development and, more recently, about rural revanchism. Reversing many decades of white suburban flight and fiscal asphyxiation, gentrification names a set of entanglements between the state, the private sector, and a set of cultural ideologies that have turned the idea of both inner city and the bucolic countryside from a space of racialized otherness, violence, backwardness, and failed public infrastructure to one of high culture, hipness, and health. Perhaps nowhere is this more visible and visceral than in New York State. From bike lanes to craft breweries in Bed-Stuy to glamping and bespoke cideries in The Catskills, the current historical moment is witnessing massive demographic and infrastructural shifts that, it’s argued, are recapitulating processes of dispossession and displacement that have marked power relations for millennium. Centering questions around capital and race, readings and class conversations offer an entrée into debates about the politics of memory, renewal, and the right to place in both urban and rural spaces in New York State. Students who successfully complete this seminar satisfy the Social Relations, Institutions, and Agents area of Inquiry or the Confronting Collective Challenges Liberal Arts Practice

Professor Mark Stern is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Studies whose interdisciplinary teaching and research looks at the relationship between education policy, urban policy, and political economy.