Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Sociology

First Advisor

Adams, Julia

Abstract

Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York. This dissertation is a multi-method community study focusing on 21st century gentrification, concurrent socio-political changes, and their relationship to the ways residents understand and negotiate routine interpersonal relationships. The empirical core of the dissertation consists of three distinct yet interrelated papers on the social landscape of the contemporary Crown Heights neighborhood. These papers detail a range of approaches that residents adopt to better understand their own experiences of discrimination, gentrification, and efforts at reconstructing community and responding to change. Complemented by a chapter on the history of a single ‘representative’ Crown Heights apartment building, its patterns of rent increases and residents’ views of these dynamics, I address the following research questions: In what ways do social actors in Crown Heights navigate harm caused by discriminatory encounters? How might the sense of precariousness inform neighborhood residents’ view of neighborliness, the future of their neighborhoods, and their attachments to their communities? How are neighborly relationships affected by new patterns of eviction and displacement? As a whole, the dissertation makes three primary academic contributions. First, it illuminates the specific forms of precarity characteristic of the current wave of urban gentrification in New York City. Second, it offers a unique understanding of Crown Heights residents’ ideas about, and efforts to secure, community and belonging in response to racial and ethnic discrimination and displacement. Finally, via the concept of ‘performative primordialism,’ it presents an analysis of the ‘performance’ of racial and ethnic group identity, connecting notions of relational racial constructions alongside a Goffmanian lens of social interaction as a ‘performance.’

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