Digital Commons Network^™

'I Can’T Vote If I Don’T Leave My Apartment’: The Problem Of Residential Violence And Its Impact On The Politics Of Black American Women Living Below The Poverty Line, Alex J. Moffett-Bateau

Publications and Research

Prior research examining political behavior outside of the United States, has shown that violence can have a mixed impact on political engagement. Building on that work, this research examines whether violence shapes the political lives of poor Black women within the United States. I argue, neighborhood violence in the United States can and often does, shape the political behavior of Black women living below the poverty line in public housing. I use ethnographic data to parse out a conceptual framework which articulates connections between residential violence experienced by Black women living in poverty and their politics. Ultimately, my analysis shows …

Book Review: A Field Guide To White Supremacy, Jessie Daniels

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

George Floyd In Papua: Image-Events And The Art Of Resonance, Karen Strassler

Publications and Research

This article offers an introduction to the “image-event” as both concept and method through a focus on the circulation of images around the killing of George Floyd. It examines how these images reverberated and resonated in West Papua, a restive region of Indonesia that has been the site of a long-standing separatist movement. It critically examines a celebratory media discourse that sees the US-based Black Lives Matter movement as expanding outward to spark similar movements elsewhere, a logic that reiterates long-standing colonialist narratives that figure places like Papua as backwaters belatedly receiving and imitatively taking up ideas that flow from …

Who’S Afraid Of Bob Jones?: 'Fundamental National Public Policy' And Critical Race Theory In A Delicate Democracy, Lynn D. Lu

Publications and Research

In Summer of 2021, Republican legislators across the United States introduced a host of bills to prohibit government funding for schools or agencies that teach critical race theory (“CRT”), described by the American Association of Law Schools not as a single doctrine but a set of “frameworks” to “explain and illustrate how structural racism produces racial inequity within our social, economic, political, legal, and educational systems[,] even absent individual racist intent.” Characterizing such an explicitly race-conscious analysis of legal and social institutions as “divisive,” opponents of CRT, such as former Vice President Mike Pence, labeled it “nothing short of state-sponsored …

What Faith Teaches Us: An Essay On Faith Adiele, Rochelle Spencer

Publications and Research

Essay on the writer Faith Adiele and women's bodies.

Black Feminist Citational Praxis And Disciplinary Belonging, Bianca C. Williams

Publications and Research

What does a Black feminist citational practice look and feel like? This contribution to the #CiteBlackWomen colloquy focuses on two arguments: First, that Black feminist citational praxis is one of the major interventions Black women scholars contribute to the academy; and second, that anthropology’s neglect and erasure of Black feminist anthropologists relates to disciplinary (un)belonging. I explore how citation and “disciplinary belonging” influence hiring practices, doctoral training, intellectual genealogies, and what is valued as anthropological knowledge.

Dreaming Of Home: Youth Researchers Of Color Address Nyc’S Housing Crisis, Samuel Finesurrey, Waleska Cabrera, Meldis Jimenez, Brittiny Ando, Alanna Garcia, Alexander Garcia, Jayden Johnstone, Abdul Mohammed, Sheylany Paulino, Edwin Reed, Emelyn Saavedra, Gisselle Saavedra, Rajendra Singh, Aysia Smith, Marlena Syriaque

Publications and Research

New Yorkers are facing a housing crisis. Long-standing disparities of race and class in New York City have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Coronavirus and the looming eviction crisis threaten working-class communities, immigrant families and youth searching for housing stability throughout the city. This report is a call to action demanding that city and state elected officials, along with civic leaders, address the housing crisis that youth are inheriting. A team of youth housing fellows, housing organizers from the Broadway Housing Communities, and CUNY academics shaped this project around the ethos, “No research about us, without us.” The work …

Testimonio And Counterstorytelling By Immigrant-Origin Children And Youth: Insights That Amplify Immigrant Subjectivities, Ariana Mangual Figueroa, Wendy Barrales

Publications and Research

This article seeks to amplify our scholarly view of immigrant identity by centering the first-person narratives of immigrant-origin children and youth. Our theoretical and methodological framework centers on testimonio—a narrative practice popularized in Latin American social movements in which an individual recounts a lived experience that is intended to be representative of a collective struggle. Our goal is to foreground first-person narratives of childhood as told by immigrant-origin children and youth in order to gain insight into what they believe we should know about them. We argue for the power of testimonio to communicate both extraordinary hardship and everyday experiences …

How/Can Gestalt Therapy Promote Liberation From Anti-Black Racism?, Michelle Billies

Publications and Research

Anti-Black racism is an interruption of contact that often takes place out of awareness, and is continuously enacted through innumerable fixed gestalts at every level of human experience. Gestalt therapy as a movement does not leverage its great potential for undoing fixed gestalts of anti-Black racism, or supporting fluid gestalts of racial liberation; this article explores GT theories and practices that do so. I first discuss how concepts of the field, ground, awareness, consciousness, and contact can be informed by ideas such as intersectionality and double consciousness from Black liberation history as well as theorists such as Crenshaw, DuBois, Fanon, …

Nonsovereign Racecraft: How Colonialism, Debt, And Disaster Are Transforming Puerto Rican Racial Subjectivities, Isar Godreau, Yarimar Bonilla

Publications and Research

Using the concept of “racecraft” to describe the state production of racial subjectivities, we argue that this process has been increasingly compromised in Puerto Rico by a lack of sovereignty and by the current socioeconomic crisis. We argue that the state-sponsored idea that Puerto Rican white and mixed-race identities operate separately from the US racial framework is receding. Based on the unconventional use of an open-ended question for racial identification in a survey administered to over one thousand Puerto Ricans, we found: a reluctance to identify racially, an awareness of a normative “whiteness” that excludes Puerto Ricans, and a tendency …

When It Comes To Racial Justice, Why Is It Wrong To Demand The "Impossible"?, Kristopher B. Burrell

Publications and Research

Asking “is what is being demanded politically realistic?” or “politically possible?” is a persistent problem with the ways many liberals who imagine themselves as progressive still think about ending systemic racial discrimination, and about protests against racism. Such questions ask us to measure “the realistic” and “the possible” prior to making political demands, and presume that the efficacy of social protest movements correlates with a tacit agreement between activists and those in power about what politics should look like. The demand for realism also betrays a particular racial and class privilege on the part of the person asking the question: …

Making Racial Difference: A Foucauldian Analysis Of School Memories Told By Undergraduates Of Color In The United States, Debbie Sonu

Publications and Research

This paper draws from the writings of Michel Foucault and his recently reconsidered provocations on race and racialization. Using Foucault’s de!nition of ‘internal racism,’ race is understood as a complex set of correlations that are employed for the purpose of establishing (ab)normality and exercising various forms of expul- sion. Racialization is then seen as the circulation of knowledge that makes racial categorization evident as scienti!c truth, linked to themes of science, developmentality, and the governing of popula- tion. To illustrate its subjective materialization, I analyze childhood memories of school told by undergraduates of color at one large public university in …

Fascist Aesthetics From 1940 To Contemporary Times, Anna M. Gellerman

Publications and Research

Movies and literature all over the world share some common aesthetics: militarization, romanticization of death, beauty of perfection, and even purity. What most don't think about is how these tropes rose to popularity due to Nazi Germany's propaganda films. This work describes these fascist aesthetics, and uses famous publications from the 1940s until now to paint just how common these themes are.

From Diversity To Inclusion: Challenges And Opportunities At An Urban Community College, Vanessa Marie Bing, Jason Hendrickson, Wendy Nicholson

Publications and Research

Diversity is and has been heralded as a cornerstone among high-impact practices within adult education in the United States. It embodies a larger ethos and culture within a campus, including the demography of the student body, staff, and faculty, as well as institutional memory. Yet, diversity is not enough. Inclusion is undervalued, which goes beyond taking solace in bringing together diverse bodies within the room; rather, inclusion requires an institutional response that ensures that these high-impact practices are fully realized. This paper examines the efforts undertaken at an urban community college where the student body reflects racial and cultural diversity …

If It Looks Like Scholarship..., Aaron Barlow

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Tale Of Two Community Gardens: Green Aesthetics Versus Food Justice In The Big Apple, Sofya Aptekar, Justin S. Myers

Publications and Research

There has been a vibrant community gardening movement in New York City since the 1970s. The movement is predominantly located in working class communities of color and has fought for decades to turn vacant land into beneficial community spaces. However, many of these communities are struggling with gentrification, which has the potential to transform access to and use of community gardens in the city and the politics around them. Drawing on separate multi-year ethnographic projects, this article compares two community gardens in food insecure communities in Queens and Brooklyn: one that is undergoing gentrification and one that is not. We …

The Conceptualization Of Costs And Barriers Of A Teaching Career Among Latino Preservice Teachers, Bradley W. Bergey, John Ranellucci, Avi Kaplan

Publications and Research

We investigated the perceived costs and barriers of a teaching career among Latino preservice

teachers and how these men conceptualized costs relative to their race-ethnic identity, gender identity, and planned persistence in the profession from an expectancy-value perspective. We used a mixed-method approach that included a content analysis of open-ended survey responses to identify salient costs and barriers and non-metric multidimensional scaling (MDS) of participants’ responses to quantitative scales to capture phenomenological meaning of perceived costs, collective identity constructs, and planned persistence in the profession. Participants identified a range of drawbacks and barriers of a teaching career including concerns about …

Muddling The Middle: Cynical Representations Of Ethnic Relations In V.S. And Shiva Naipaul, Kevin Frank

Publications and Research

In this essay from the collection, Seepersad and Sons: Naipaulian Synergies, Kevin Frank argues that coming from a creolized society, unlike their father, Seepersad, V.S. and Shiva Naipaul's representations of "race" and ethnicity in their works is cynical, favoring one side in the Indo- and Afro-Caribbean racial antagonism, mainly because of their anxiety about "Black Power."

The Unbearable Lightness Of The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Accomplishment Of Diversity At An Urban Farmers Market, Sofya Aptekar

Publications and Research

This article provides a critique of work on urban public space that touts its potential as a haven from racial and class conflicts and inequalities. I argue that social structures and hierarchies embedded in the capitalist system and the state’s social control over the racialized poor are not suspended even in places that appear governed by civility and tolerance, such as those under Anderson’s “cosmopolitan canopy”. Durable inequality, residential segregation, nativism, and racism inevitably shape what happens in diverse public spaces. Using an ethnographic study of an urban farmers’ market in New York City, I show that appearances of everyday …

Poor Queer Studies: Class, Race, And The Field, Matt Brim

Publications and Research

This study asks, What are the material conditions under which queer studies is done in the academy? It finds a longstanding association of queer studies with the well-resourced, selective colleges and flagship campuses that are the drivers of class and race stratification in higher education in the U.S. That is, the field of queer studies, as a recognizable academic formation, has been structured by the material and intellectual resources of precisely those institutions that most steadfastly refuse to adequately serve poor and minority students, including poor and minority queer students. In response, “poor queer studies” calls for a critical reorientation …

"Martin Luther King, Jr.'S Greater Vision: Manually Bending The Arc Of Time Towards Justice", Kristopher B. Burrell

Publications and Research

This speech was given by Dr. Kristopher Burrell on January 16, 2017at St. Paul’s Church — National Historic Site, Mount Vernon, NY.

"How Mature Are We? The Enduring Legacy Of Martin Luther King, Jr.'S 'Beyond Vietnam' Speech", Kristopher B. Burrell

Publications and Research

This speech was given by Dr. Kristopher Burrell on January 15, 2018 at St. Paul’s Church — National Historic Site, Mount Vernon, NY.

Numbers Are Just Not Enough: A Critical Analysis Of Race, Gender, And Sexuality In Elementary And Middle School Health Textbooks, Sherry L. Deckman, Ellie Fitts Fulmer, Keely Kirby, Katharine Hoover, Abena S. Mackall

Publications and Research

Textbooks are a multimillion dollar publishing business in the United States. Even as 21st-century classrooms become more multimodal, digital and hardcopy textbooks remain a key feature of American education. Consequently, classroom textbooks have been shown to control knowledge dissemination across the content areas. In particular, health texts have been uniquely shown to communicate values that validate or marginalize students and encourage healthy or harmful activity. Thus,what textbook makers choose to include as worthy of study, and how they portray various groups of people with regard to race, gender, and sexuality has societal implications. Employing quantitative and qualitative content analysis methods, …

Jenyffer Nascimento’S Epic Poetry Of Black Female Empowerment Jenyffer Nascimento: A Poesia Épica De Empoderamento Da Mulher Negra, Sarah S. Ohmer

Publications and Research

This article presents results of auto-ethnography, literary analysis, and fieldwork research to answer an underlying, perhaps unresolved, concern, relevant to this dossier: how can we produce an ethical dialogue as transnational Black Feminists, among Black Brazilian women, and North American Black women, in an ethical manner, while realizing that one may (not ever) be a part of the “carnival without you in it.” Fertile Earth/ Terra Fertil tells a long overdue epic story to an audience within the poetry: Black women, family members, other times a Black man, Brazil, white women, or “you,” undefined. Joy to pain to chaos, sensuality, …

A Conversation Rewound: Queer And Racialized Temporalities In Hamilton, Shereen Inayatulla, Andie Silva

Publications and Research

The authors of this article, two educators and immigrants situated in the United States, consider the exigencies of listening to Hamilton: An American Musical. Shaped as dialogue, this article follows a previous piece where the authors processed their experience seeing Hamilton performed live. The current conversation shifts to the act of listening; it examines the ways in which the soundtrack embeds the audience into Lin-Manuel Miranda’s narrative, reinscribing the racialized immigrant body onto both Alexander Hamilton’s story, and Hamilton, the musical. Additionally, this article asks how the fictional Hamilton’s message to rise up and take a shot grants audience members …

Doula Services Within A Healthy Start Program: Increasing Access For An Underserved Population, Mary-Powel Thomas, Gabriela Ammann, Ellen Brazier, Philip Noyes, Aletha Maybank

Publications and Research

Purpose: Women of color in the United States, particularly in high-poverty neighborhoods, experience high rates of poor birth outcomes, including cesarean section, preterm birth, low birthweight, and infant mortality. Doula care has been linked to improvements in many perinatal outcomes, but women of color and low-income women often face barriers in accessing doula support.

Description: To address this issue, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s Healthy Start Brooklyn introduced the By My Side Birth Support Program in 2010. The goal was to complement other maternal home-visiting programs by providing doula support during labor and birth, along …

A Lesson On Hatred From The Annals Of Logan County History, Aaron Barlow

Publications and Research

Stories of lynchings, events of the American past, remain alive in all of us whose ancestors were involved, be it as victims, perpetrators, or even law officers who, for one reason or another, stood aside. We can’t push aside or ignore that history any more than we can bury the other terrible legacies of slavery.

Who Tells Our Story: Intersectional Temporalities In Hamilton, An American Musical, Andie Silva, Shereen Inayatulla

Publications and Research

This article examines the ways in which Hamilton: An American Musical can be read less as a historical account and more as a prediction of a future immigrant, who is called upon to (re)define US nationhood. Keeping with the tempo of the musical as well as the broader issues of time, space, and identity it attempts to address, this article is presented as a dialogical rap. The co-authors’ discussion frames Hamilton as an example of the power of unplottable, time-arresting immigrant bodies, to whom the colonial imposition of linear history does not apply. From this framework, the authors’ conversation shifts …

Remotivating The Black Vote: The Effect Of Low-Quality Information On Black Voters In The 2016 Presidential Election And How Librarians Can Intervene, Andrew P. Jackson, Denyvetta Davis, James Kelly Alston

Publications and Research

In a phenomenon that was surprising to many, given the racially charged nature of the 2016 presidential election, black voter turnout was significantly lower than the previous two elections. Donald Trump’s victory is attributable to many factors, one of which was the lower participation of black voters in several swing states. To a lesser extent, black support for third-party candidates also aided Trump’s victory. The lower black turnout itself is attributable to several factors, but one factor specifically in the LIS realm was the prevalence of low-quality information and rhetoric and a susceptibility that some black voters had to this …

‘Speaking Truth’ Protects Underrepresented Minorities’ Intellectual Performance And Safety In Stem, Avi Ben-Zeev, Yula Paluy, Katlyn L. Milless, Emily J. Goldstein, Lyndsey Wallace, Leticia Márquez-Magaña, Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, Mica Estrada

Publications and Research

We offer and test a brief psychosocial intervention, Speaking Truth to EmPower (STEP), designed to protect underrepresented minorities’ (URMs) intellectual performance and safety in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). STEP takes a ‘knowledge as power’ approach by: (a) providing a tutorial on stereotype threat (i.e., a social contextual phenomenon, implicated in underperformance and early exit) and (b) encouraging URMs to use lived experiences for generating be-prepared coping strategies. Participants were 670 STEM undergraduates [URMs (Black/African American and Latina/o) and non-URMs (White/European American and Asian/Asian American)]. STEP protected URMs’ abstract reasoning and class grades (adjusted for grade point average [GPA]) …