Introduction to the Themed Issue "Narratives of Displacements"

This is a themed issue about displacements. Or more precisely, about research grounded in narratives of people suffering displacement in its various forms, and their all too visible and yet oftentimes made-invisible demographics. ‘All too visible’ as those individuals or groups stand out either as scapegoats on which to lay blame for urban problems, or as the human fallout of ongoing processes of class struggles and racialised conflicts under neoliberal, neocolonial and neonationalist regimes of spatial encroachment. Yet, their subjectivity, agency and voice are invisibilised in public and political discourse, as well as in academic research, or they are altogether erased through the poor selection of methodologies that fail to capture the discrete statistical categories that can register displacement. Therefore, those afflicted by it become un-researchable. The papers within this themed issue collectively seek to re-center displacement, through investigations and narratives of displaced populations