As a sociologist, my research interests broadly sit at the intersection of urban sociology and race and ethnicity. I am particularly interested in issues surrounding gentrification and urban change, communities and inequality, racial segregation and integration, and race and space. My dissertation and current ongoing research examines these issues from a variety of vantage points.
My dissertation, “Storefront: Local Businesses Acting Locally in Two Chicago Neighborhoods,” examines the roles and experiences of locally owned businesses in Pilsen and Logan Square, neighborhoods experiencing gentrification with increasing white populations displacing long-term Latino residents. Using ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews with business owners, workers, patrons, and other community members, I explore how local businesses contribute to communities and neighborhood change, racial segregation and integration, and other facets of local social life. A key finding of this research is how business owners may actively or passively produce racially segregated or diverse spaces and that this can shape their relationships with different facets of local communities. In other words, businesses and business-owners have some agency in producing inclusive or exclusive spaces. This finding adds nuance to the literature’s binary orientation of businesses or other neighborhood institutions as a part of the “growth machine” or symbol and driver of gentrification on one hand, and as pillars of communities on the other. I draw upon this research in my article, “Producing Diverse and Segregated Spaces: Local Businesses and Commercial Gentrification in Two Chicago Neighborhoods.” (City & Community).
A second line of inquiry, overlapping with the first, surrounds issues of race and place. My article, “Towards a Theory of the Racialization of Space,” presents an original theoretical framework integrating the works of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and urban theorist, Henri Lefebvre (a version of this paper was presented at the Junior Theorists Symposium in 2018 and is forthcoming in American Behavioral Scientist). Answering recent calls for the further conceptualization of the racialization of space by race scholars, I present a framework locating Lefebvre’s tri-part “production of space” theory within Bonilla-Silva’s structural “racialized social systems.” I argue that a variety of phenomena studied by urban and race researchers, such as residential segregation, neighborhood preferences, and the experiences of many students of color on predominantly white college campuses can be understood with a single racialization of space framework and that these and related issues are interrelated and potential sites of resistance. This theory further serves to consolidate and reorient otherwise fragmented findings from the race and urban literatures.
A third line of inquiry concerns the role of the media in the production of urban space and framing of urban issues. I have two works-in-progress that examine these topics. In one project, with J. Talmadge Wright, I analyze local news treatment of homeless people and issues. A recent working paper highlights the selective inclusion of quotes from homeless people in news stories which serve to further individualize poverty and reproduce dominant neoliberal ideologies. A second project, with Peter Rosenblatt, explores national newspaper reporting on four gentrifying neighborhoods in Chicago. Coding twenty years of stories, we examine shifting urban imaginaries which discourage, and later encourage, visitors as gentrification processes continue over time.
My future research will weave together and extend these threads. Ongoing and future projects include a book based on my dissertation research, an article on what I call “alienation from place,” ethnographic studies of “safe spaces” and the political economic context of urban mutual aid groups, and the social construction and racialization of urban social problems.
Steven Tuttle, PhD 