Staying Within the Ts: Racialized Boundary and Language Production Processes among Temple University Students and the White Supremacist Geographies of Urban University Place-Making

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.