SoiferI VtP Collaboration Biography

I intend on focusing on the knowledge economy as a place, particularly as it is manifested in two (maybe three) “global” cities: Houston, New York City, and potentially Los Angeles. I am particularly interested in looking at universities as sites of both knowledge production and toxicity, and the effects that they have on the city neighborhoods surrounding them. In light of this, I seek to contest toxic narratives surrounding “gentrification” that discount the multi-faceted impacts of a politico-legal system that privileges those deemed to be the harbingers of the “greater good,” the institutions enabled to utilize eminent domain for supposedly public purposes even as they operate akin to corporations. For example, one such impact is the increased securitization in West Harlem: purportedly to increase safety of residents in the neighborhood, many young people living in Grant and Manhattanville Houses were arrested based on “suspicion” and sent to the prison at Rikers. I’m interested in the duality of “toxicity” and “safety,” and how toxicity is shifted across different populations and at different scales. Finally, I am interested in the role of race, and how the knowledge economy fits within what George Lipsitz deems the “white spatial imaginary,” the “unfair gains and unjust enrichments primarily available to whites [that] have created undeserved impediments to upward mobility for communities of color.” I am curious how this might be visualized for the purposes of this project and beyond.