The theme of the 2014 Conference of the American Educational Research Association is The Power of Education Research for Innovation in Practice and Policy. Check out the many excellent sessions, including several facilitated by URBAN’s Philadelphia Node. Read more here Image by the American Educational Research Association
In 2011, neighborhood mothers in the Morris Avenue section of the South Bronx who were outraged by the NYPD’s treatment of their sons, connected with researchers from the Public Science Project, John Jay College, and Pace University Law Center who were interested in studying and challenging unjust policing. The mothers and researchers got together and recruited additional community members to join a collaborative research team, now known as the Morris Justice Project, to document experiences with police. (more…)
The Mel King Institute is hosting an Innovation Forum to highlight a new report on CDCs and Academic Partnerships Massachusetts. They invite you to come hear the results of the report and engage with panelists who will share their stories of CDCs and institutions working together. The Innovation Forum will be held on November 21 from 9am-12pm at the Amilcar Cabral Center ( African American Institute, at Northeastern University, 40 Leon Street, Boston). (more…)
The Public Science Project’s 4th Annual Summer Institutes on Critical Participatory Action Research are designed to introduce the theory, methods, and ethics of critical PAR to graduate students, faculty, and members of community-based organizations AND provide an environment of collective learning and development. Participants are strongly encouraged to bring their Read more…
On Tuesday, November 26th, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY GC) will host an event in honor of the life and work of Marilyn Jacobs Gittell, a Political Scientist from New York City whose work, grounded in participatory action research (PAR), focused on cities, urban politics, public policy, and social justice. The event will bring together Professor Gittell’s colleagues and partners in this work, students she trained, as well as students currently studying the “Ocean-Hill Brownsville controversy” – a Brooklyn-based social movement, one of the most controversial of its time, that moved governance of neighborhood schools to the African American communities whom the schools purported to serve. This evening of celebration will also serve as the official unveiling of the Marilyn Jacobs Gittell Archive and the launch of a new hub at CUNY GC. (more…)
URBAN.Boston is pleased to announce the availability of seed funding to incubate collaborative research projects during the 2013-2014 academic year. Made possible by the generous support of the Edward W. Hazen Foundation, these seed grants may be used for (1) the development of a new collaborative research proposal or (2) Read more…
MIT@Lawrence is a sustained, multi-faceted partnership between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the City of Lawrence, MA, a small, ethnically diverse city 30 miles northwest of Boston. Over the partnership’s 10-year history, faculty and students from many MIT programs have worked together with Lawrence residents, civic institutions and community-based organizations to address problems facing the city. Projects have addressed abandoned and foreclosed property management, neighborhood revitalization, and “cleaning and transforming” polluted canals and alleyways. (more…)
The MIT@Lawrence Story Project was a culminating product of nearly ten years of collaboration that examined the partnership through dozens of interviews with participants. The project was motivated in part by a need to report the outcomes of a multi-year HUD Community Outreach Partnership Center grant. But Lawrence residents were interested in the project as a way to develop new narrative about their city, to tell a story that celebrated diversity, resilience and collective action. A small group of MIT students worked closely with Dr. Hoyt to conduct interviews, which were video-recorded, and edit them into a 15-minute film. (more…)
A major focus of LA-URBAN is to help build social movements. This meeting featured presentations by Alma Castrejon and Sofia Campos about the Dream Act student movement, Dream University, and Dream Summer. Sofia shared her story as an immigrant from Lima, Peru. She attended the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and became part of student groups fighting for undocumented student rights and mobilizing efforts for the California DREAM Act. Sofia presented a history (and the strategies used) of efforts to pass the California DREAM Act and the Deferred Action Policy. She described the “intersectional work” that led to the development of the CIRCLE project, the Dream Resource Center, the Dream Summer Program, and the publication of “Undocumented and Unafraid.” With a recent conference that drew 47 affiliated organizations, the organizing efforts are continuing to advance a national movement for immigration reform. (more…)
My survival in higher education has its roots in the connections between my lived experience as the immigrant son of farm worker parents and the lessons learned in overcoming systemic obstacles as a community organizer and intellectual activist. Whenever the road in academia got rough I had to face another hurdle, I always remembered the difficulties that my immigrant farm worker family had to face. In this way, the problems I encountered in academia appeared smaller and more manageable. My struggles with learning English and growing up in a poor immigrant farm worker family became the foundations of language, labor, and immigration issues that I passionately took up in my organizing, teaching, and research as an activist intellectual in academia. (more…)