What does gentrification entail? Who are the players? What are the driving forces? What are the lasting outcomes? Who is displaced? To answer these questions, students will directly engage and use a range of audiovisual media to examine how cultural institutions, places of consumption, recreational spaces, and public infrastructure affect a neighborhood’s culture, identity, economy, politics, and cycles of spatial and social change. Throughout the semester, we will develop and apply theoretical and practical frameworks in order to analyze the complexity of factors that the shape neighborhoods in New York and beyond. We will investigate how cycles of neighborhood change manifest differently based on the interwoven elements of race, ethnicity, history, politics, economics, and space. We pay particular attention to the short, long-term, and lasting effects of displacement of people and local institutions. The first part of the course will focus on New York; we’ll use our local lives and experiences to identify markers and create our own definition of the term gentrification, drawing on definitions proposed in the extant literature. Students will make site visits, delve into detailed archival research, and learn skills needed to collect meaningful quantitative and qualitative data that captures ecosystems of changing places and the impacts of displacement. At the culmination of the course, students will have cultivated and activated a robust toolkit to effectively study gentrification in neighborhoods, and will create multimedia projects that articulate new findings in this arena.