Kayla Merriweather

I really enjoyed the way this week’s readings all had interrelated themes and concepts but were also unique in the message they shared. In Allison Carruth’s “Urban Ecologies and Social Practice Art,” my main takeaway was that different artist collectives utilize the “capacity of storytelling [through art] to reveal the connections but also the fault lines between different urban terrains” (5). Thinking about how my community partner has central programming related to art in different capacities, I think they exemplify the “fluid boundaries between art, writing, media, design and activism within contemporary environmental culture” (2) that Carruth references, while also employing participatory projects to “create spaces and experiences where the logic of a situation disappears” (4). Something I found intriguing were the opposing viewpoints to social practice art that Carruth identifies, writing how critics “voice concern that social practice overemphasizes political activism and social engagement at the expense of aesthetic technique and artistic innovation” (2). Although I can understand why this would be a concern, I don’t think there necessarily has to be a dichotomy between the two. I would also venture to say that this dynamic is more harmful to those embedded in the art world who are more familiar with the specific nuances of aesthetic technique and artistic innovation. I think it’s more important that the community that the artist or artist collective seeks to impact can understand the political activism and social engagement that is being communicated through art in a way that makes sense to them. 

Sonya Childress’ “Beyond Empathy” article was very insightful, and I feel like it touched upon a number of dynamics that I’ve discussed in my classes that center on social and cultural analysis, race, etc. I appreciated her identification of the prevalence of lenses of whiteness in documentaries that aim to humanize issues that affect marginalized communities. I liked her conclusion that beyond empathy lies solidarity, but I would’ve liked to see a deeper interrogation of the intent of filmmakers besides putting a face on (insert social issue or marginalized group here). Thinking back to Eve Tuck’s article on damage-centered research, I feel like in documentary filmmaking there is sometimes an exploitative nature to the desire to document. Although she mentioned Ava DuVernay, I also would’ve appreciated an acknowledgement or direct address of the difficulty that marginalized people face in not only creating and controlling their own narratives, but having the physical, economic, etc. means to do so. 

I thought Nyssa Chow’s “The Story of Her Skin” was a fascinating and wonderfully executed method of storytelling. The different mediums she used, from photographs to videos to interviews, did an amazing job of immersing the reader into the story of her family while weaving in a necessary and useful context. I particularly liked the work she did at the beginning, setting the stage by including videos of what an average night in Poole might sound like and including the voice of Sassa. I thought it was interesting how the different generations of her family grappled with their Blackness in different ways, and how they simultaneously bonded by blood and divided by their different physical appearances.

Chapter 2 of Amy Starecheski’s Ours to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City, “Who Deserves Housing?: The Battle for East Thirteenth Street,” the author tells the story of the practice of squatting as homesteading on East 13th St from 1984-1994 and the subsequent desire to make a claim to the property through adverse possession following the implementation of the 50/50 Cross Subsidy Plan. The author identifies the challenges squatters experienced when making adverse possession claims and uses archival records that documented the squatters’ process of creating their legal case and oral histories in order to examine how they crafted a narrative of continuous possession, how they used oral histories to compare articulation of property claims in court with stories of its practice in everyday life, and how the kinds of relatedness portrayed in the narrative exacerbated and created social conflicts in the squatter communities living on East 13th St (99). Prior to this reading, I only had a vague understanding of what squatting and homesteading were, and I think the author did a good job of not only defining the terms but also contextualizing them in the terrain of New York City. I like how Starecheski referred to homesteading using frameworks, implying their subjectivity and flexibility. I also thought the different configurations of squatting she identified were interesting, which are political squatting (squats as a base from which to foment conflict with the government), entrepreneurial squatting (depends for legitimacy on the value of the establishment to the community), conservational squatting (protest against gentrification rather than a defense against abandonment), deprivation-based squatting (targets low-income housing that is left empty without reason, legitimacy is achieved relatively easily) and squatting as an alternative housing strategy (legitimacy is more difficult, must add to the overall pool of affordable housing stock rather than taking a portion of it for use by individuals from middle-class backgrounds and alternative cultural or political tastes who aren’t considered to have a right to low-income housing). 

Something that bothered me a little at the beginning of the chapter was the brusque way that Boyle and DeDominicis spoke about residents in the community, like how Boyle mentions ejecting a security guard from the coalition because he wasn’t provided heat and refused to pay his dues and how DeDominicis said that Angel Delgado represented “the Puerto Rican community that [they] wanted” (75). Starecheski writes later in the chapter about how “in the context of a neoliberalizing regime of urban governance, where the cultivation of valuable and valued subjectivities is a core part of the project of marketizing in inner-city spaces, the divide between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor can become heavily policed,” (83) which eloquently encapsulates my thoughts after reading the quotes at the beginning. As the chapter goes on and discusses the different rifts and tensions between the squatters’ movement, first with other mainstream housing activists and later between the squatters themselves, it wasn’t particularly surprising to me. There’s a moment earlier on page 86 that describes the squatters’ inability to utilize community networks to recruit and vet new members, and other actions that demonstrate how squatters “[denied] agency to some people of color living in the squats by failing to portray them as full active partners in the project of homesteading” (86). I think this in combination with the majority of organizers’ identities being white and working or middle-class made conflict inevitable. However, even if the movement wasn’t able to accomplish its goal of claiming adverse possession of the buildings on East 13th St, I agree with Starecheski that by “pushing the city to negotiate to transfer the remaining illegal squats on the Lower East Side to their residents” and “destabilizing the city’s property claims” (117), the legacy of the case is significant.

In Kristin Luker’s Salsa Dancing into the Social Sciences: Research in An Age of Info-Glut, the author invites us to reconsider how we conceptualize research methods and theories using the metaphor of salsa dancing. She invites the reader to ponder how salsa dancing as a practice that reduces the prevalence of our Internal Censor and encourages the “making of connections across boundaries and even across disciplines” (2). Ultimately, she desires to convince the reader of conducting “research that draws on the kinds of bold and interdisciplinary insights you can get when you salsa-dance” (2). In Chapter 1, she outlines three different enterprises she plans to undertake in order to concretize this desire, which are confronting the different contexts that resulted in commonly held notions of what research methods are, establishing foundational guidelines for how to go about doing “rigorous, compelling, and intellectually honest research,” (3) and offering advice on seeing a research project through all its phases. She foregrounds three important factors, the impact of Foucault’s theorizations, an age of information saturation, and the decline of linearity, as reasons why historical traditions of teaching research skills have been undermined, resulting in the alteration of the social location of research. One thing I really appreciated about Luker’s writing was the way it was simultaneously able to achieve a conversational yet didactic tone, which is achieved by the clear definition of terms and processes in conjunction with examples and personal anecdotes from her own experience as a researcher. Even if she did refer to me as a “precocious undergraduate,” (16) I found her explanation of the salsa dancing metaphor to be compelling and persuasive. 

In Chapter 8 of Salsa Dancing into the Social Sciences, Luker dives into definitions and examples of participant observation (ethnography), interviews, focus groups and content analysis as different methods of conducting research. She dedicates a majority of the chapter to ethnography and interviews, detailing specific steps she suggests readers take in order to collect and analyze data in a way that is not only effective but is also rooted in theory and the question(s) that researchers are concerned with. I appreciated how Luker explained the point/purpose of conducting each particular method. For example, she writes that “the point of doing observational methods is to document ‘practices,’ those moments when belief and action come together” (158). I also found it persuasive that she paired each methodological approach with an example, whether it be a study, article, etc. of a researcher who had implemented it.

In Pierre Bourdieu’s Understanding, the author is primarily preoccupied with the nature of the research interview relationship and its propensity to be distorted. He identifies the nature of an interview as a specific “social relation” (18) that is unique in its “objective of pure knowledge” (18). He elaborates and mediates on the “various kinds of distortion[s] that are embedded in the very structure of the relationship,” identifying scientific questioning as a method of mastering and understanding these distortions. He outlines the different things that should be considered when evaluating an interview relationship, like how to “reduce as much as possible the symbolic violence…exerted through [interviews],” (19) the social asymmetry that exists when the interviewer and interviewee occupy different places in “the social hierarchy of different types of capital,” (19) seeing how an interview relationship can be a spiritual exercise, “aiming to obtain, through forgetfulness of self, a true transformation of the view we take of others in the ordinary circumstances of life,” (24) and more. This in-depth look at how to mitigate the intended and unintended effects of interview by analyzing its structure provided a lot of insight into the implications that the process of interviewing has, and reading it in conjunction with Luker’s chapters increased its persuasiveness and effectiveness.

In Eve Tuck’s “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” the author pens an open letter to two distinct groups: 1) educational researchers and practitioners concerned with fostering and maintaining ethical relationships with disenfranchised and dispossessed communities (409), as well as 2) Native communities, urban communities, and other populations that have “troubled relations with research and researchers” (411). Her main argument is that the use of damage-centered research reinforces conceptions that oppressed communities are defined by their struggles, and that researchers, educators, etc should consider adopting a desire-based research framework, a theory of change that is “concerned with understanding complexity, contradiction, and the self-determination of lived lives” (416). I find Tuck’s analysis of the implications of damage-centered research to be particularly compelling, especially when she asserts that it is “a pathologizing approach in which the oppression singularly defines a community” (413). I also think Tuck’s decision to use a letter format is a wise one since it enables her to simultaneously share her personal perspective with readers, impart useful information and examples of the phenomena she describes, and encourage the reader to enact change without the sterility and rigidity that can sometimes attach itself to intensely academic articles. I think this piece is incredibly relevant today, especially as allyship continues to be a popular topic of discussion in social justice circles. In addition, I think Tuck makes important points about how we visualize marginalized communities in our imagination, describing how incomplete characterizations of oppressed groups lead to community spaces becoming “saturated in the fantasies of outsiders” (412). 

“Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side” by Eve Ewing exemplifies the “dynamic and evolving nature of research endeavors” (173) as it pertains to Ewing’s investigation of the relationship between school closures on the South Side, local conceptions of race and racism, and education policy decisions. In the appendix, she explains her methodology, which ranges from discussions on her own subject position to critical discourse analysis. Although it can be argued that there are multiple arguments within this section, I would say the overarching one is that during the process of undertaking a study like Ewing’s, which involved conducting interviews, attending public events, etc., it is important to be flexible and adjust one’s methodology/perspective in response to interaction with research subjects. She writes that her goal was to “tell a story, rather than the story” (174) with the book, which is an attitude I like and seek to employ myself. Since Ewing provides a lot of background information and context in the appendix, telling the reader directly who and what influenced her to pursue this research in particular as well as being transparent about her experience as the leader of this study, I found it to be very persuasive. There are various observations and concepts that Ewing references in this section that I find relevant to the present, like voice as witness, institutional mourning, and social death. I also appreciate in her critical discourse analysis how she poses the question “What is this person doing by saying this?” instead of “What does this person really mean by saying this?” (180), another approach that I plan to incorporate in my research plan.

The New Urban Agenda presented by the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) aims to “end poverty and hunger in all its forms and dimensions, reduce inequalities, promoted sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, achieve gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls in order to fully harness their vital contribution to sustainable development, improve human health and well-being, foster resilience, and protect the environment” (5). The methods for achieving these lofty goals are outlined like one would expect a document informed by United Nations seminal texts to be. It begins with a declaration, contains principles and commitments, a call to action, a plan for implementation and how to ensure its effectiveness, and concludes with a plan for follow-up and review. I think this structure enhances the argument’s effectiveness since it begins with broader topics before narrowing them down with the addition and consideration of nuance (particularities of a particular country, addressing different populations, etc), all while maintaining some type of linear progress. 

 

Having read some other documents that emerged out of United Nations Conferences, I was prepared for some of the circularity present in the various arguments that are made in the Agenda. With the Principles and Commitments section and the Call to Action section, in particular, the discussion of leaving no one behind and ways to address environmental sustainability seem to use the same language with different sentence structure. In any case, there is a clear focus on the human, sustainability, and accessibility. I found the various uses of the word human to be interesting. In Article 27, it says that the countries in accordance with the agenda pledge that “no one will be left behind” and commit to “promoting equally the shared opportunities and benefits that urbanization can offer and that enable all inhabitants…to lead decent, dignified and rewarding lives and to achieve their full human potential” (page 11). There are other times when the term human is meant to collectivize actions, like when it says in Article 63 that “cities and human settlements face unprecedented threats from unsustainable consumption and production patterns, loss of biodiversity, pressure on ecosystems, pollution, natural and human-made disasters, and climate change and its related risks” (page 18). I think the purpose of using the term ‘human’ in this case is to remove direct responsibility from corporations, governments, and other groups that contribute significantly to the aforementioned threats. 

 

I thought this document established pretty clear links to the other readings we’ve been doing in class. There’s a direct reference to the ‘right to the city’ in the discussion of vision of cities for all in Article 11 on page 5. I also thought it was interesting that the perceived advantage of gender equality is that it facilitates women and girls being able to contribute to sustainable development more effectively. This sentiment is echoed later in the document when it says in Article 35 that the “security of land tenure for women [is] key to their empowerment” (page 13). For me, this reminds me of our previous discussions in class about how capitalism and liberalism are ever-present in discussions of urbanism and urbanization, even if the focus is on social inequality.