#FoodforThought: Examining Instagram as a Mechanism of Gentrification

This major research paper argues that Instagram is an emerging mechanism of displacement as it reinforces urban and social inequality to facilitate cycles of racialized displacement and dispossession. Particularly through the circulation of user-generated food/hotspots on Instagram, contribute to the longstanding historical practices of segregation and function as a form of spatial control. This project is divided into three Chapters; the first Chapter consists of a literature review, theoretical framework, and methodology. Here, I critique the work of urban scholars who have failed to integrate the racialized genealogies into their analysis of gentrification. In Chapter 2, entitled Gentrification & The Digital Black Spatial Imaginary, I argue there are three main ways social media, particularly Instagram, has facilitated gentrification; Instagram-ability as an extension of white supremacy and spatial control, historical practices of segregation emerging digitally, and Black suppression across various platforms. In this section, I expand on Lipsitz's (2011) concept of the Black spatial imaginary as the digital Black spatial imaginary. The final Chapter, entitled Parkdale Case Study: Pathologized Parkdale to #Vegandale, explores the defining moments in the history of Parkdale and how it has always been a target for urban renewal. This project is a Black Studies project that draws from fundamental Black Studies scholars (Lipsitz, 2007; Walcott, 2003), Black feminist geographers (McKittrick, 2013), surveillance studies (Browne, 2017; Noble, 2018), digital studies (Benjamin, 2019), and Black food geographies (Reese, 2019), which is crucial to address how Instagram is an emerging mechanism of gentrification.