‘Now they’re coming after our schools’: interrogating urban intimacies of children and displacement

ABSTRACT

Education scholars grappling with policy issues related to community and identity issues may pay attention to the work of emotion. Rationalist, psychological frameworks that bound many educational researchers’ policy analyses are limited in scope: the policy process is seen as a linear cause-and-effect process. A feminist geographic attention to this research offers a more complex understanding of the experiences of policy. Using children’s displacement by gentrification as an example, this commentary will show how a feminist geographic understanding of place attachment offers a more complete understanding of the effects of gentrification. Specifically, using the concept of the ‘intimate city’, I show how the global process of gentrification is entangled with the intimate embodiment of emotions. And in order to effectively study education policy, we must be attuned to how children embody their emotions.

KEYWORDS:

• Place
• displacement
• gentrification
• emotional geographies
• childhood

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Caroline Faria and Shawntal Brown for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Michael R. Scott http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1356-1224

Notes

1 All names of people and places other than the city are given a pseudonym to protect the privacy and work of the community members.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [grant numbers P2CHD042849, T32HD007081]. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.