A feminist ethics of care for gentrification-induced displacement research

Critical urban scholarship increasingly argues that care and social reproduction must be central to how cities are understood. Yet, research on gentrification and displacement rarely treats care as a primary analytical lens. This paper develops a feminist ethics of care framework for studying gentrification-induced displacement and shows how such a framework reshapes the field. A feminist ethics of care reconceptualizes gentrification-induced displacement not simply as the loss of housing or place, but as a process that reorganizes and undermines the relations, infrastructures, and capacities of care through which human and more-than-human life is sustained. Epistemologically, it recognizes emotions, embodied experiences, and situated community knowledge as sources of political knowledge while questioning dominant anthropocentric and universalizing frameworks of urban change. It foregrounds new thematic concerns with the politics of social reproduction, collective care, resistance, healing, and intersectional dispossession. It reorients methodology towards collaborative, non-extractive, and reparative research practices grounded in accountability, solidarity, and responsibility toward communities experiencing displacement. Building on feminist theories of care and social reproduction, the paper proposes a caring gentrification agenda that not only understands housing and urban space as infrastructures of care but also reframes how displacement is defined, measured and studied. In doing so, it recasts displacement research itself as a practice of care that is relational, accountable, and oriented toward justice and collective healing.