Medfarm Play

Hanna 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.

Kontaktperson för denna film
Mattias Vesterlund, Teknisk- och administrativ personal

Kanalinformation

Gentrification 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.