On 26 November 2020, 1.00-2.30 PM GMT, Dr Jessie Speer, who has recently joined the Department of Geography and Environment and the Urbanisation, Planning and Development research cluster, is to give a research seminar talk as part of the UPD Research Seminar Series.
Her talk is titled ‘The shape of displacement: Examining housing loss through life narratives of homelessness’. Its abstract is as follows.
Over the past decade, new oral history archives and self-publishing platforms have led to an explosion in the production of memoirs and oral histories of homelessness. This paper emerged from research on hundreds of contemporary memoirs and oral histories of homelessness from across the United States. I argue that testimonial accounts of homelessness challenge commonly held assumptions about urban housing displacement as a discrete, localized, or one-time occurrence. By taking the life course as the starting point of analysis, rather than a single neighbourhood or household, displacement no longer looks like a linear movement from point A to point B. Instead, a new shape emerges, one that is profoundly unstable and paradoxical, and that stretches beyond the scale of the home.
Dr Jessie Speer
Zoom link available here.
This series is organised by Dr Ryan Centner. Contact r.o.centner@lse.ac.uk with any questions.
