We Are The Gentrifiers

In comparing our building–a redone calendar factory–with the other dwellings in our neighborhood–more typical Montreal brick duplexes or triplexes–I often joke that we are the gentrifiers. But it’s actually not a joke at all. I knew this intellectually, but now it’s been driven home for me. We are now literally (in the literal sense of literally) a textbook case, or at least a journal article case.

In Jan Radway’s classic “Ethnography Among Elites,” an essay I had occasion to cite this weekend, she has a line about ethnographers studying people with “commensurate” means of representation. One of the results of such a state of affairs is that the ethnographer may come “upon a counter-representation–if not a full-fledged critique–of herself as the other of another’s discourse” (9).

The thing is, sometimes in cultural studies it’s not even that distance. Sometimes the means of representation are not commensurate but the same. Here is a long passage from Sharon Zukin’s “Consuming Authenticity” (Cultural Studies 22:5) on gentrification (a subject on which I think she is one of the best writers–if not the best)

In the East Village, consumption spaces swung dialectically between the populist culture of the commercial mainstream and the neighborhood’s cheap restaurants, bars, and photocopy shops, before developing entrepreneurial outposts of difference. So, too, in Wicker Park, Chicago, new residents at first liked the atmosphere of Sophie’s Busy Bee, a greasy spoon cafe whose ‘ambiance screamed authenticity.’ But old and new patrons harbored different expectations of the consumption experience. Waitresses at the Busy Bee grew impatient with young artists and musicians who wanted to linger all day over a single cup of coffee, and to these new patrons that coffee really was not very good. After a new arrival in the neighborhood opened the Urbis Orbis Cafe´ in a converted warehouse, new residents flocked to it. Just a few years later, the Busy Bee shut down, while Urbis Orbis earned praise from Rolling Stone as ‘the coolest place [in Chicago] to suck down a cappuccino.’ When housing in the neighborhood grew more expensive, the space above the cafe´ turned into a futon and furniture store, ‘an interesting contrast to the discount furniture outlets that . . . lined the commercial strip a block away on Milwaukee Avenue for decades.’ (730)

When I was in university, my friends Wayne and Lisa moved in to Wicker Park while she was at the U of Chicago Divinity School. I ate my first-ever pierogis at the Busy Bee, which I regarded as a quaint neighborhood joint. I remember the opening of Urbus Orbis and reading some alternative newspaper or something while drinking tea (as a non-coffee drinker I can’t comment on that part of her argument). And I remember being sad when the Busy Bee closed, since it was a regular part of our visits to our friends. If I’d thought about it, I should have understood the connection (I had read Loft Living as an undergrad and it is still one of my favorite books on cities) but there it is, by the same author who provided me with my first understanding of gentrification. Except this time my life and the lives of my friends are folded into the story.

The article continues and discusses food (and other kinds of) shopping and I see the same patterns she describes in how we exist in our neighborhood. We shop in the shoe store at the corner (though I am more likely to make a special order than get something off the wall), but we unlikely to frequent the bar with the older working class men, some of whom start drinking at 10am. We love the Lebanese, Greek, Haitian and Salvadoran grocers but wouldn’t think of buying consumer electronics from the discount place down the block. We are patrons of the new coffeeshop on Guizot and the new bakery on Liège, but not the greasy spoon breakfast joint down the block (though my stepdad tried it once). We enjoy the diversity and eclecticism of our neighborhood (hey, rent is cheap enough that one of Canada’s great luthiers is 2 blocks from me) but if enough people like us were to move it, it would eventually turn into chain stores and upscale boutiques (cf parts of the Plateau).

Zukin’s article is mostly about New York, and gentrification is not the same in Montreal to be sure, in part because global capital is slowed by language laws (hence no Whole Foods across from the Marché Jean-Talon) and the real estate market here is entwined with the politics and economics unique to Quebec. But I did not just see myself in her side-example of Chicago. When she discusses Brooklyn neighborhoods like Park Slope, I also visited friends who were part of that process, and indeed a colleague is now writing a book about parts of the new economy that more or less happened in her living room (I exaggerate, but still).

A dual income, no kids couple living in a loft, where we have home offices. I keep a list of restaurants I like* on this very blog. We are, by all measures, the gentrifiers.

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* an addition from last night: Robin des Bois

Some parts of the economic crisis might still have to do with overproduction

The academic gloom-and-doom stories are moving north. Fresh off a New York Times story about new PhDs having trouble finding jobs in a year when so many searches are being cancelled, the Globe and Mail reports (a few years too late) that maybe minting all those extra PhDs wasn’t such a great idea after all. As I have said before, I think it’s a patently bad idea to wantonly expand PhD programs in any country without regard to what the students are being trained to do or where they will wind up, but it’s an especially bad idea in a small country like Canada.

There’s much more to say about this, but the only thing I’ll add for now is that given the speed of academic job markets, we are looking at “snapshot reporting” here and the real question is how the market will look over the next few years. Right now, administrators are simply running scared in many places, which inevitably strikes fear into faculty and students.

A Glimpse of the Future of English-Language Higher Education

For obvious reasons, I can’t discuss many details of the admissions process to our graduate programs in Communication Studies in this space (so please don’t ask if you applied and are reading this). However, I must note a change this year which I think may foretell of something bigger to come down the road. Every year, our MA program gets a sizable number of applications from around the world, a sizable subset of which from students who evidently saw our program listed on some website but have no idea what we do, or who DO know what we do but whose educational system is so completely alien to ours that they are ill-prepared to undertake an MA in our program. Many of these students are clearly well-educated in a different system, and I always feel bad turning down the ones who clearly seek what we offer but are not prepared for it.

But this year, something different happened. We are starting to get applications from branches of American universities that have been constructed in the middle east. These are effectively hybrid institutions, designed to give a U.S.-style education, often by American faculty (NYU colleagues tell me there is a very sweet deal on offer to go teach in Abu Dhabi), to middle eastern students. While the emphasis is clearly on sciences, engineering and medicine, some of the humanities are also starting to appear at these schools. Applications from students who have graduated from these schools look more or less like applications from students who graduated from the main campus of the university. Given the lavish funding and resources and funding available to these schools, I can’t help but wonder if among them is the next Stanford or Duke, schools endowed with private money that have, over time, become elite schools in their own right. Clearly, it’s a different model, since it is, for example, still the “NYU brand.” But this strikes me as a very different approach to globalizing higher education, and to preparing students in one’s home country for advanced study abroad. Perhaps as satellite campuses, these schools will never actually compete for reputation with the home campuses. But their students will very likely soon find themselves in western graduate programs to which they previously would not have had access. While new universities in North America seem to be more interested in cheapening higher education (ie, the University of Phoenix), it strikes me that perhaps the next wave of elite English-language universities could be located in the middle east.

Two Position Papers

Instead of blogging on the road, I did some light editing on my book (oh yeah, that) and wrote two position papers for the upcoming conference at the University of Virginia: “Connections: Media Studies and the New Interdisciplinarity.” They’re both pretty fast and loose, though, so they’re perfect for a blog.

As I sometimes say before delivering my talks, “this is work in progress, but please comment upon it as if I fervently believe every word.”

Plenary paper: The Work of Communication Studies (or, It’s Good Work If You Can Get It)
History panel paper: The Times of Communication History

Happy reading!

Two New Blogs on Books + One on Speech

This is overdue, but I am pleased to announce two new blogs on the future of books by friends who are also publishing books on books this summer, Andrew Piper and Ted Striphas.

See:

The Book Report

and

The Late Age of Print

and on a not-totally-unrelated topic:

Money/Speech

Okay, I’m off to California for two weeks. Tour dates are on sterneworks as always. I might blog, but I might also just do the status update thing on Facebook.

New Configurations of Academic Privilege?

So recently in my travels I encountered a colleague who has ascended to a high level administrative post at his school. We know each other as scholars and are academic friends. He’s the kind of person who I’m happy to see at a conference and with whom I’m happy to share a drink when the opportunity presents itself. Anyway, like lots of places, his school took a massive hit on the endowment. Since they’re private, it hurts even more. He’d ascended to administration hoping to make things better. Now, he’s overseeing some awfully ugly cuts. At one point, he used some euphemistic language that I can’t reconstruct here. I replied, “so you’re going to have to fire professors?” He didn’t visibly cringe but he might as well have as he said something to the effect of “I’d rather you didn’t put it that way. We’re starting with non-renewal of some non-permanent faculty and then we will see.”

We live in scary times. I wonder whether this isn’t going to lead to new kinds of academic shakeups in terms of institutional privilege. Those institutions hit less hard by the current crisis for whatever reason are like investors with extra cash — they can build while everyone else burns. On the flip side, being at a posh private school is apparently no longer insurance that you’ll have good working conditions and job security. According to McGill’s provost, no tenured or tenure track professor in Canada has ever been dismissed for financial distress, so I’m grateful for my own job security, but I worry for the state of the profession and for people in vulnerable positions on either side of the border. And for all the paranoid talk of administrators taking advantage of this opportunity to introduce some new draconian measures, my sense is that they hate it too.

At least I am also running into recent PhDs (like within the last year) who scored some good jobs on the market this year, so all hope is not lost.