When the gentrified talk back: Resisting symbolic violence and beyond in a contested city

• In Event: Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2: Displacement and Eviction

Abstract

Studies have demonstrated how gentrifiers enforce norms of behavior in public space while stigmatizing local old-time residents. While much attention has been paid to the cultural tools and logics used by gentrifies to advance and justify their position, little is known about the cultural tools old-timers use to resist this symbolic violence. Furthermore, our knowledge of symbolic conflicts in gentrifying neighbourhoods rests mainly on studying gentrifiers and the gentrified separately -we know much about how each group perceives and talks about the other, but little about how they talk with each other. This further limits our ability to recognize how old-timers react to symbolic violence in real-time.
Bridging these gaps, we explore a unique site of inter-class dialogue, which emerged in two local Facebook groups, popular among all residents, in the contested and gentrifying city of Jaffa. Drawing on four years of online ethnography, we analyse 140 complaints about conduct in public space posted by newcomers between 2016 and 2022, and the 10,948 responses they generated.
We show how old-timers delegitimized gentrifier complaints by framing them not as expressions of sincere concern or as upholding universal norms of behavior, but as serving ulterior social motivations—claiming socio-moral superiority over old-timers. Complaining itself was reframed as a claim to distinction, marking complainants as outsiders. Thus, tracing old-timers’ arguments, we find strong affinities between their logic and the “critical logic” used by sociologists.
While effective in fending off symbolic violence and gaining some control over the discourse, old-timers sometimes avoided this framing, as it also hindered discussions and cross-class collaborations in solving problems of concern to residents of both groups. Hence, we show that, in the wild, critical logic is a double-edged sword: at times empowering old-timers against gentrifiers’ symbolic violence, at times having a paralyzing effect, limiting dialogue and joint problem-solving.

Authors

• Guy Shani, College of Management Academic Studies

• Ori Schwarz, Bar-Ilan University