https://media.medfarm.uu.se/play/kanal/697Gentrification is one of the most controversial and visible urban phenomena of the post-1945 era. With the acceleration of urbanisation and globalisation, urban renewal has taken new forms and grown increasingly complex. The classical account of gentrification, coined by Ruth Glass in her studies of London (1964), was predicated on cities in the West, but today gentrification and displacement can equally be observed worldwide in metropolitan regions as well as in smaller cities, in new-build areas and countryside regions. This calls for new and interdisciplinary approaches to urban change. In this one-day symposium, we call for more systematic attention to artistic representations of urban change in literature and other media, and for investigation of how these relate to other accounts of the phenomenon, including sociological, economic and political ones. While organized by researchers in literary studies and geography, the symposium welcomes discussion of textual or narrative aspects of many sorts of text, including novels and films but also memoirs, journalism, architectural writing, ethnographies, and academic discourse. Here you can watch presentations of the participants of the workshop.svCopyright (C) 2026 Uppsala universitet, MedfarmDoITDr Martin Dines is senior lecturer in English Literature at Kingston University London where he teaches British and American twentieth-century and contemporary writing. His most recent book, The Literature of Suburban Change: Narrating Spatial Complexity in Metropolitan America (published with Edinburgh University Press, 2020) examines how writers, from 1960 to the present, have innovated across a range of literary and cultural forms in order to articulate the temporal dimensions and emergent, contested histories of the US suburbs – places which are so often presumed to be timeless. Other recent publications focus on urban and domestic space in queer post-war British fiction. He is a member – and for the last three years has been President – of the Literary London Society.https://media.medfarm.uu.se/play/video/12664Mon, 28 Sep 2020 15:19:01 +0000Ismael Abder-rahman Gil is currently a Ph.D. student at Ca' Foscari University of Venice and Philipps-Universität Marburg. His main research interest is literary geographies, sociology of literature, and urban sociology. His research is aiming to study the Image and Imaginary of Amman through Jordanian contemporary novels. Ismael holds a Bachelor’s degree in Arabic Philology by the University of Granada, a master’s degree in Cultural heritage management by the University of Valencia, and a master’s degree in teaching specialized in foreign languages by the University of Granada. Before starting his Ph.D. he worked in cultural institutions, Arabic and Spanish language teaching, and humanitarian organizations in Jordan, Spain, and Italy.https://media.medfarm.uu.se/play/video/12665Mon, 28 Sep 2020 15:22:57 +0000Maria Sulimma is the Postdoctoral Researcher in the research group “Scripts for Postindustrial Urban Futures: American Models, Transatlantic Interventions” at the University of Duisburg-Essen. She has a PhD in American Studies from the Freie Universität Berlin where she was based from 2013 to 2018. Her research spans literary and cultural studies, urban studies, ecocriticism, and feminist media studies. Her current book projects are on gender, seriality, and television narration (Gender and Seriality will be out with Edinburgh University Press later this year), as well as on literary urban pastimes of the 19th and 21st century.https://media.medfarm.uu.se/play/video/12920Tue, 13 Oct 2020 15:13:21 +0000Jason Finch is Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at Åbo Akademi University in Finland. A co-founder and currently President of the Association for Literary Urban Studies (ALUS), he works on urban literatures, chiefly of the UK and USA in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the London ‘slum’ and representations of the rise and decline of ports and industrial boomtowns. He is the author of Deep Locational Criticism: Imaginative Place in Literary Research and Teaching (John Benjamins 2016) and co-editor of six books, most recently The Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban History (Routledge 2020). Jason’s current book project, under contract with Routledge, is an introduction to literary urban studies aimed at undergraduates.https://media.medfarm.uu.se/play/video/12666Mon, 28 Sep 2020 15:23:53 +0000Elias le Grand holds a PhD in sociology and works as a senior lecturer at the Department of Child and Youth Studies at Stockholm University. His research interests lie in the areas of identity formation, socio-spatial divisions, consumer culture, youth and generation.https://media.medfarm.uu.se/play/video/12667Mon, 28 Sep 2020 15:26:58 +0000Davy Knittle is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests are situated at the intersection of queer and trans theory, the urban and environmental humanities, and critical race studies. His dissertation project focuses on literature by queer and trans writers that negotiates competing approaches to the future of New York in city planning, social movements, and environmental advocacy from 1950 to the present. Davy’s critical work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, Modern Language Studies, and Planning Perspectives. He lives in Philadelphia in the United States where he is a reviews editor for the poetics journal Jacket2 and curates the City Planning Poetics series at the University of Pennsylvania's Kelly Writers House.https://media.medfarm.uu.se/play/video/12668Mon, 28 Sep 2020 15:28:17 +0000Eric Larsson holds a PhD in education from Stockholm University. His research interest combines the fields of Sociology of Education and Geography of Education. Eric has previously studied themes such as upper secondary elite schools, the use of geographical markers among upper secondary schools in Stockholm and contemporary educational markets. Today, Eric works as a lecturer at Stockholm University.https://media.medfarm.uu.se/play/video/12669Mon, 28 Sep 2020 15:31:51 +0000Hanna Henryson is a final-year PhD student in German literature at the Department of Modern Languages at Uppsala University, Sweden, where she also teaches and holds positions in research groups. In her dissertation project, she investigates literary representations of social inequality and resistance related to gentrification processes in 21st century Berlin. Her research interests also include other aspects of urban literature, such as representations of housing and physical living conditions in cities, the role and function of literary discourses in social processes, and narrative structures connected to the representation of urban life.https://media.medfarm.uu.se/play/video/12670Mon, 28 Sep 2020 15:33:18 +0000Antonio Paniagua Guzmán was born and raised in Mexico City. He is currently a doctoral candidate in sociology and lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His research focuses on the connection between urban environment and cultural production, with special emphasis on literary representations of urban geographies and historical periods, both in the American and Latin American contexts. His previous research examines the role of printed media in the production, distribution, and consumption of poetry in the Midwest during the 1960s and 1970s, as well as poetic representations of post-industrial cities’ physical and institutional change. Antonio’s ongoing research looks at how residential segregation shapes Milwaukee’s poetry scene and the literary retail landscape.https://media.medfarm.uu.se/play/video/12671Mon, 28 Sep 2020 15:36:04 +0000Federico Picerni is a PhD candidate at the Department of Asian and North African Studies of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, in a joint degree programme with the Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies of Heidelberg University. His research project investigates the literary production by rural-urban migrant workers in contemporary China, with a special interest in the Beijing-based Picun literature group. He obtained a master’s degree in History and East Asian Studies from the University of Bologna and has spent extensive periods in China for research fieldwork and language training, specifically at Peking University and Xi’an Jiaotong University. He is also engaged in the translation of contemporary Chinese poetry into Italian.https://media.medfarm.uu.se/play/video/12672Mon, 28 Sep 2020 15:39:17 +0000Åse Richard is a PhD student at the Institute for Housing and Urban Research at Uppsala University. As a tenant, activist and researcher, she focuses on current occurrences of displacement in the Swedish context. For ten years, together with her neighbors, she has been engaged in resisting displacement in Gränby/Uppsala, the neighborhood where she lives. In her research, she focuses on how tenants’ different experiences of displacement can contribute to our understanding of social sustainability and urban renewal.https://media.medfarm.uu.se/play/video/12673Mon, 28 Sep 2020 15:40:34 +0000