This week, I spent time opening readings and writing quick reactions to their abstracts. I found that some of the readings I thought would be relevant are not as relevant. I spent my time on this because I have not yet fully established a clear thesis/ direction for my research project. I have been hesitant to choose a focused topic because I’m uncertain that I’ll find sufficient sources for any given topic. It’s also difficult because although I have my research interests, I do not even have general knowledge about San Francisco. In other words, I do not know what I do not know and I am learning more about San Francisco as I learn more about my own research on San Francisco.
Despite my limited knowledge, my main interest, as I have stated elsewhere, is the privatization of resources/ space in San Francisco. In studying privatization, I want to know more about the forces driving privatization and the effects on people that depend on those resources.
Many of the articles that I’ve found are not necessarily connected to my larger research goals. For example, in the article I focused on last week, I learned about the policing of houseless populations. However, that article was written in 2016 and references data based between 2014-2016. It does not necessarily track larger historical or structural forces that have led to houselessness. In other words, that article established my interest in housing issues and policing but is insufficient in itself.
The phenomena I want to study are different across neighborhoods and time. My interest in structural and historical forces is so expansive but many sources are place and time specific. One article I read this week was about gentrification in the Latinx majority Mission District during the internet boom between 1998-2001. While this article is expansive in the voices it takes into account, it is specific to the Mission District and I’m interested in studying San Francisco more broadly. This article places the various issues faced by Mission District residents as part of a larger process of gentrification.
After this week’s research, I have re-examined my intentions with my research project. In all honesty, my interest for San Francisco is personal and I want to study San Francisco’s issues in order to combat them. Influenced by my experience organizing, I have found that academia is overly complicated and inaccessible, oftentimes unproductive in any radical way. I want to link various issues surrounding housing, policing, and lack of/ privatization of resources to structural/ historical processes. It would be impossible for me to make any generalizations that take all structural/ historical processes into account. Deciding the relevance of issues, events, actors in my narrative will be linked to the concepts/ processes of gentrification and privatization. Finding a balance in which my information and analysis is straightforward and simple but also nuanced is the end goal.
I will define relevant concepts like “gentrification” in my project as a broader process that is inextricably linked to capitalism and white supremacy. Each issue will be tied back to gentrification (and capitalism) while hoping to take into account the lived experiences of people found in my sources.
I picture my final project as a sort of extensive pamphlet about issues and gentrification in the city. I won’t explore possible solutions because radical and effective solutions are difficult to asses without first hand knowledge of collective/ organizational power in SF.