Waverly Duck: There were Black people in the past. Gentrification, Displacement and the Making of A Food Oasis (Lunch Talk)

In contrast with “food deserts”, neighborhoods without access to food, the conception of a food oasis has received little scholarly attention, despite being a critical aspect of uneven development. Through an analysis grounded in a conjunction between the political economy and the dynamics of the local neighborhood Interaction Order, Duck argues that the food oasis in East Liberty is not only the result of gentrification, rather than a genuine response to neighborhood needs, but that its orientation toward the preferences of customers drawn primarily from more affluent surrounding communities is contributing to further gentrification at the expense of the original neighborhood residents whom it has displaced. Rather than giving poor Black residents better access to food, the new upscale supermarkets actually exclude them and attempts to make the middle-class outsiders who shop there feel safe actually place longtime residents in danger.

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Prof. Waverly Duck is an urban ethnographer and the North Hall Chair Endowed Professor of Sociology at the University of California Santa Barbara (US). He is the author of No Way Out: Precarious Living in the Shadow of Poverty and Drug Dealing (University of Chicago Press, 2015), co-authored with Anne Rawls, Tacit Racism (University of Chicago Press, 2020), and co-authored and curated with Anne Rawls and Kevin Whitehead, Black Lives Matter: Ethnomethodological and Conversation Analytic Studies of Race and Systemic Racism in Everyday Interaction (Taylor and Francis, 2020). His research investigates the challenges faced by socially marginal groups and is directly concerned with the interaction order of marginalized communities and how participants identify problems and what they think are viable solutions.

Organized by the project-team of the InRa-Study “Institutions & Racism”, subproject ”Bureaucratic practices and difference marking” in cooperation with the Binational Center of Qualitative Methods (BZQM) and the Chair of General and Cultural Sociology (University of Konstanz).