Date of Award

Fall 2024

Document Type

Restricted Thesis

Terms of Use

© 2024 Jared S. Saef. All rights reserved. Access to this work is restricted to users within the Swarthmore College network and may only be used for non-commercial, educational, and research purposes. Sharing with users outside of the Swarthmore College network is expressly prohibited. For all other uses, including reproduction and distribution, please contact the copyright holder.

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Linguistics Department

First Advisor

Noah Elkins

Second Advisor

Lauren Restrepo

Abstract

This combined ethnographic study and discourse analysis investigates the use of racialized boundary production language among a sample of 21 Temple University students in reference to the Black community adjacent to their campus that not only reflects structures of racialized surveillance, dispossession, and capital extraction that actively uproot North Philadelphia’s Black communities but perpetuates them as well via the reification of borders predicated on university policing and displacement. Through an analytical framework based in Katherine McKittrick’s (2006) plantation analytic and Margaret Ramirez’s (2019) borderlands analytic along with additional literature of Black Geographies and Lee and Ahn’s (2023) theorizations of “postracial” discursive mechanisms, this research demonstrates how these boundary productions enact active violences against Black North Philadelphians enabled by the university. At the intersection of linguistic anthropology, university gentrification, Black Geographic thought, and carceral geographies, this project provides insight into the role of boundary language among those with access to power in reconstructing white supremacist systems of power at an interpersonal, discursive level within shared spatial imaginaries often circulated among university students.

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