Refusing Gentrification: Community Arts & Practice(s)

In partnership with The 519 and as part of Intimate Encounters ~ Animate Histories, this event features activist-scholar-artist Yusra Khogali in conversation with local artists and residents of Regent Park, the community in which she also lives, to consider the relationships between its massive re-gentrification and creative cultural practices. Khogali will begin the session by offering up a particular theoretical lens in which to understand gentrification as something that is ‘atomospheric,’ drawing on the notion put forward by scholar Christina Sharpe’s in her book In the Wake (2016). Engaging with broader discussions of community-based and Black radical trans*national approaches, the panel will explore individual perspectives on the re-gentrification of Regent Park and more broadly across the city.

Select shorts from Animazing!, a free stop-motion animation art camp for LGBTQ2S Teens and Youth presented by The 519 and the Toronto Animated Image Society, will be screened during the panel’s intermission, and later taken up in conversation.