Digital Commons Network^™

“A Change Is Gonna Come”: Examining Environmental Hazard Distribution And Gentrification In Atlanta, Ga, 2005-2015, Brittany A. Keller

Sociology Theses

Past research has found that minority and low socioeconomic status families are more likely to reside in neighborhoods with a disproportionate number of environmental burdens than white and high socioeconomic status families. It has also been posited that low-income minorities are replaced by higher-income whites when gentrification takes place in urban neighborhoods. It is the goal of this study to identify patterns between official environmental hazard recognition and gentrification as defined by racial turnover in the city of Atlanta by using census data and information from the Georgia brownfield records and the Toxic Release Inventory. I found that as the …

The House By The Side Of The Road: A History Of The Andrew P. Stewart Center, Megan W. Mcdonald

History Theses

The Andrew P. Stewart Center was founded by a group of Southern Baptist women in 1916 as the “Andrew Stewart Day Nursery.” Members of the Baptist Women’s Missionary Union, these women sought to alleviate the impoverished conditions facing children and families living in the English Avenue community of Atlanta. The organization survived ten decades of dramatic social change, and currently operates in the Pittsburgh neighborhood. This thesis chronicles the Stewart Center’s evolution over the course of the past century, reflecting on larger patterns of Atlanta’s history while also highlighting the unique responses of an organization largely led by female, Southern …

Sustainable For Whom? Green Urban Development, Environmental Gentrification, And The Atlanta Beltline, Daniel Immergluck, Tharunaya Balan

USI Publications

Large-scale, sustainable urban development projects can transform surrounding neighborhoods. Without precautionary policies, environmental amenities produced by these projects, such as parks, trails, walkability, and higher-density development, tend to result in higher land and housing costs. This will make it harder for a low- and moderate-income households to live near the projects, and neighborhoods are likely to become increasingly affluent. The Atlanta Beltline will ultimately connect 45 Atlanta neighborhoods via a 22-mile loop of trails, parks, and eventually a streetcar, all of which follow abandoned railroad tracks. This paper examines the effect of the Beltline on housing values within one half …

Spiritual Blues: A Blues Methodological Investigation Of A Black Community's Culturally Indigenous Ways Of Knowing And Citizenship Praxis, Melissa Vaughn

Educational Policy Studies Dissertations

This interdisciplinary study devised a Blues Methodology to investigate how a historically marginalized Black community conceives, practices and theorizes about citizenship in community-based pedagogical spaces (Douglas & Peck, 2013). Guiding questions were 1) How does a historically marginalized Black community conceive and practice citizenship? 2) How does the community’s conception and citizenship praxis compare to the dominant society’s conception? And 3) How can both conceptions inform citizenship education and citizenship research?

To conduct this qualitative cultural study, I extended Clyde Woods’ Blues Epistemology and Sylvia Wynter’s theoretical construct of alterity into a methodology capable of illuminating the community’s culturally indigenous …

Paying For The Gift Of Education: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of The Intown Academy Of Atlanta, Scott Nesbit

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

In my critical discourse analysis of The Intown Academy's (TIA) various documents and media—including the school's charter petition, charter, Parent-Student Handbook, and website—I articulate the school's subjectifying narratives and analyze how these narratives function to (re)produce particular subjects according to tropes of threat/crisis, opportunity, corporate/non-profit benevolence, and personal responsibility. Identifying these subjects, I analyze how they are effected/affected by the practice of education at TIA. To this end, I examine the various practices of school discipline codified in the Parent and Student Contracts in TIA's 2012-2013 Parent Student Handbook, including mandates for the wearing of school uniforms, volunteer labor, and …

It Makes Atlanta Feel Like A Real City: Biopolitical Urbanism And Public Art On The Atlanta Beltline, Sherah Faulkner

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

Functioning as both a light rail transit project and comprehensive redevelopment program, the Atlanta BeltLine is widely expected to impact the city of Atlanta as profoundly did 1996 Olympic Games. In this paper, the Atlanta BeltLine is examined as a biopolitical project and the manners in which its public arts program, Art on Art on the Atlanta BeltLine, works to secure local consent redevelopment are explored.

Atlanta Public Schools (Aps) Case Study: A Tale Of Two Schools, Karen J. Cook

Anthropology Theses

This study concerns the effects of public school redistricting on communities in Atlanta. It is based upon interviews with people in two neighborhoods which are part of the Atlanta Public Schools (APS) system directly affected by redistricting. All schools slated to close are located in low-income, minority areas and serve similar populations. Of the ten schools selected for closing, three were saved during the final APS board meeting in April 2012, and will remain open. I spoke with people who reside in a neighborhood where a local school is slated to close, as well as those in an area where …

Halting White Flight: Atlanta's Second Civil Rights Movement, Elizabeth E. Henry

History Dissertations

Focusing on the city of Atlanta from 1972 to 2012, Halting White Flight explores the neighborhood-based movement to halt white flight from the city’s public schools. While the current historiography traces the origins of modern conservatism to white families’ abandonment of the public schools and the city following court-ordered desegregation, this dissertation presents a different narrative of white flight. As thousands of white families fled the city for the suburbs and private schools, a small, core group of white mothers, who were southerners returning from college or more often migrants to the South, founded three organizations in the late seventies: …

Glory Be Revival Of Neighborly Love, Calvin Burgamy

Art and Design Theses

This project is a video installation that includes filming the worship services of three small African American churches that exist within an area of rapid gentrification. Perhaps because of their tiny congregations, or racial makeup, these particular little churches seem hidden by a cloak of invisibility.

Gentrification And School Choice: Where Goes The Neighborhood?, Amy Childers Roberts

Educational Policy Studies Dissertations

This dissertation explores parent-gentrifiers’ lived experiences of the school-selection process, including the social networking and the influence of those social networks in their selection of schools. School choice and parent involvement are forms of social capital, and such social capital represents the results of social networking and parental agency. The unknown is how this scenario manifests itself in gentrifying parents’ school-selection process in Atlanta’s Kirkwood and Grant Park neighborhoods. Gentrifying children’s absence in urban public schools is of interest as residential areas integrate, while schools (re)segregate. The research paradigm is interpretivist as it investigates the qualitatively different ways in which …

Stakeholders' Perceptions Of Risk For Gentrification In Atlanta's Pittsburgh Neighborhood, David C. Holmes

Geosciences Theses

The 2008-2010 foreclosure crisis and the Beltline project present two significant forces shaping neighborhoods throughout Atlanta. Both the high foreclosure rates and the promise of public and private investment create conditions for the displacement of existing residents and for the gentrification of the southwest Atlanta neighborhood of Pittsburgh in particular. Through qualitative analysis, including interviews with residents, community leaders, and government officials, the development of overlay analysis maps of Pittsburgh, as well as studying the various stakeholders' perception of risk for gentrification in Pittsburgh, this research examines how and why these stakeholders' perception of the risk of gentrification in Pittsburgh …

The Ties That Bind: The Role Of Place In Racial Identity Formation, Social Cohesion, Accord, And Discord In Two Historic, Black Gentrifying Atlanta Neighborhoods, Barbara Harris Combs

Sociology Dissertations

Recent research has uncovered a new phenomenon in some distressed areas, black gentrification. Black gentrification follows the same pattern as mainstream gentrification with one notable exception: In black gentrifying neighborhoods both the poor and working class residents who resided in the neighborhood prior to its “gentrification” and the new residents of greater economic means are black. An additional hallmark of black gentrification that distinguishes it from traditional gentrification is that black gentrifiers in black gentrifying neighborhoods often feel a responsibility or obligation to their lower income black neighbors. Prior to the economic downturn in the United States, some in-town Atlanta …

New Scenarios For Racial And Social Segregation In The Politics Of Public Space And Social Fear, Angela Klepach

Anthropology Theses

This study investigates the politics of public space and social fear that work to create new scenarios for social and racial segregation in the processes of gentrification, such as privatization, fortification, and symbolism in public art in a major southern metropolitan city. The Public Art Program of Atlanta, Georgia is implementing public art projects at various sites, chosen based on being in depressed neighborhoods in the hope that it will bring new life to blighted urban areas and change the current use of space. Through an applied anthropological and multi-perspective approach, this study explores how middle and upper class residents …

Bulldozed: Innovative Strategies For Addressing The Mental Health Consequences Of Gentrification, Vanessa Jackson, Lionel Scott

Social Work Community Forum 2008

A stick on its own is easily broken but if you put sticks in a bundle that bundle becomes very strong, so strong that you cannot break it. A spirit on its own can be easilybroken. But bundled together we will not break. That is our power and our strength. Malawian Proverb