Home > Rapid Response Call - Assessing impacts of, and resistance to, urban gentrification

Rapid Response Call - Assessing impacts of, and resistance to, urban gentrification

A recent newspaper article highlighted that gentrification has become so ubiquitous that it can even be seen on the US children's television programme Sesame Street, and that its apparent absence from the London-based soap opera Eastenders raises questions about the latter's credibility. The growing ubiquity of gentrification seems also to signal its increasing acceptability, which is perhaps a reflection of the extent to which notions of self-improvement and reinvention have become embedded into a popular culture driven by neoliberal imperatives.

At the same time, however, the lived reality of urban gentrification remains a highly divisive one, particularly for those populations seemingly driven out of the areas they once called home. This divisiveness was highlighted in September 2015 when the real drama in East London was provided by a group of anti-gentrification protesters attacking a small business in Shoreditch selling breakfast cereal for a price that no local could realistically afford.

This rapid response call invites sociological consideration of these processes, exploring the impacts of, and forms of resistance to, urban gentrification taking place anywhere in the world.

Rapid response articles should be up to 3000 words in length.

Authors are encouraged to submit articles as soon as possible after the call and papers are reviewed and published (if accepted) as they come in.

Articles should be submitted via this link. The final deadline is Friday 1 April 2016. Articles are subject the journal's peer review process and will be processed as soon as they are received. Please label your article 'rapid response'.

Charlie Walker and Steve Roberts
Editors, Sociological Research Online