The Need for Inter/Subdisciplinary Thinking in Critical Conceptualizations of Displacement

Abstract

Displacement occupies an ambiguous position in contemporary geographical thought. Displacement through gentrification and regeneration has gained prominence in critical urban geography, even as critical migration, border, and citizenship studies have simultaneously produced a robust literature on transnational displacement and internally displaced persons. In response to emerging crises of global and urban order, this article adds to a consideration of displacement—as concept and methodology—through an urging of attention to three drivers common to urban, subnational, and transnational scales of displacement. Our key argument is to suggest an urgent research agenda addressing the different scales and roles of value, choice, and infrastructure, both as drivers in processes of displacement and as points of learning between subdisciplines. Collectively, our work on migration and urban restructuring shows that large-scale development and resettlement projects, labor markets, and extraordinary measures of crisis management generate new ways in which value is extracted from displaced bodies and depeopled places. Against a tendency to index displacement (in both policy and research methodology) as either voluntary or nonvoluntary, we advance a critique of the choice structure of displacement. We further call attention to the infrastructures and technologies through which displacement is moved from a temporary state of exception to an ongoing state of normality. In doing so, we call for the need to rethink the epistemology of displacement and identify the significance of cross-subdisciplinary conversations for this project.