Richard Ocejo, professor at John Jay College CUNY and author of Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City, will give a talk entitled “Old Problems in New Places: Gentrification and Race in Small City America.” This lecture event is sponsored by the Urban Studies Program, the Sociology Department, and the Department of Earth Science and Geography. Open to the public.

Based on Sixty Miles Upriver, this talk will discuss two increasingly important topics at a time when many small and rural municipalities are facing influxes of new residents and investment. It will specifically focus on how these topics look and unfold differently in smaller contexts compared to large cities. First, the talk will look at small city gentrification and how the process and its actors are distinct from those in metropolises. And second, it will look at race relations in small cities that have diverse populations and are undergoing the twin processes of international migration settlement and gentrification. The aim will be to make sense of recent shifts in the spatial landscape of social difference and inequality in the contexts of small cities.

Richard Ocejo is a Professor of Sociology at John Jay College and CUNY Graduate Center, where he is director of the M.A. Program in International Migration Studies. Editor of City and Community (an official journal of the American Sociological Association), he is the author of Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City (Princeton University Press, 2024), Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2019), Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), and Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (ed., Routledge, 2013).