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Center for Community Studies
Center for Community Studies
- What we do
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- Colloquia Speakers Schedule - Fall 2009
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Events
Colloquia Speakers Schedule - Fall 2009
The Center for Community Studies organizes and hosts speakers, round-table discussions and other informal events that provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of cutting-edge scholarship, national and local policy initiatives, and community issues and programs. Community-partner representatives often participate in these events as both presenters and attendees.
For more information about these events, please contact Jill Robinson.
Join us for the final colloquium of the fall series on December 4 at 2:30 p.m.
Friday, August 28
9:30 a.m.-11 a.m.
Home Economics 102
Professor Emeritus Bob Newbrough discusses the history of the Center for Community Studies. Newbrough was the director of the original Center, from its inception in 1966 until it ceased operation in 1981.
Title: The Center for Community Studies: Thriving in Context, Past and Present
This colloquium will explore the history of the Center for Community Studies, emphasizing parallels and contrasts between its previous and present context. Beyond a history of research work and structure, the purpose of this colloquium is to celebrate current successes of the CCS and determine if institutional knowledge from the past contains relevant lessons for our current context. Participation, discussion and questions are highly encouraged.
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Friday, October 2
10 a.m.-11:30 a.m.
Mayborn 204
Michelle Fine and Maria Torre, The Graduate Center of The City University of New York, discuss the process of Participatory Action Research.
Title: Participatory Action Research in Prisons, Schools and Communities
Michelle Fine is a distinguished professor of Social Psychology, Women’s Studies and Urban Education at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York, where she is a founding member of the Participatory Action Research and Design Collective. Her research has been organized through participatory action research and focuses on how youth think about and contest injustice in schools, communities and prisons. Among other awards, Fine received the 2008 Social Justice award from the Cross Cultural Winter Roundtable.
Maria Elena Torre is the director of the Institute for Participatory Action Research and Design at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York. Committed to participatory approaches that feature spaces of radical inclusion in communities such as schools and prisons, she is a co-author of Echoes of Brown: Youth Documenting and Performing the Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education and Changing Minds: The Impact of College on a Maximum Security Prison.
Read more about the CUNY PAR Collective
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Friday, October 16
3:30 p.m.-5 p.m.
Mayborn 204
Sociology Assistant Professor Richard Lloyd discusses civic design and urban culture in the context of Nashville's gentrifying East Side.
Title: East Nashville Skyline: The Great Tomato Toss and the Remaking of a Local Landscape.
This presentation examines familiar intersections of urban ideology and neighborhood change in a less familiar setting – Nashville. Nashville’s unevenly gentrifying East Side is used as a vehicle for critically engaging prevailing discourses of civic design and urban culture: the New Urbanism and the Creative City.
Focusing on the juxtaposition of a low-density district targeted for redevelopment in East Nashville with the obdurate presence of neighboring public housing projects, this talk exposes the practical contradictions and conflicts that accompany the implementation of one-size-fits-all material and cultural models within distinct – and largely uncongenial – urban environments. A dramatic encounter between old and new styles of urban development in East Nashville’s recent history – the Great Tomato Toss of 2006 – is contextualized within an analysis of broader political processes and intellectual currents.
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Friday, October 30
8:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m.
Mayborn and Home Economics buildings
Center for Community Studies annual Fall Conference
The 2009 Fall Conference featured 20 presentations from faculty members, graduate students and research teams on a wide range of topics related to health, education, neighborhoods and other community issues. In addition, the students working with community partners through the Center's new Community Matching Program presented summaries of the projects they will be doing with their agencies in the coming weeks and months.
Read the 2009 Fall Conference agenda
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Friday, December 4
2:30 p.m.-4 p.m.
Mayborn 204
Sociology Ph.D. candidate Damian Williams with discussant Beth Shinn, professor of Human and Organizational Development
Title: The Drama of Contingent Work: Homeless Day Laborers' Negotiation of the Job Queue
Drawing on ethnographic observation in four-day labor agencies located in Nashville’s Lafayette district, this talk examines how interactions between homeless workers and day-labor dispatchers create an informal system of workplace control in a seemingly chaotic employment arrangement. Specifically, the speaker will examine how homeless day laborers comprehend and negotiate dispatchers’ allocation of jobs (i.e., the “job queue”) and show how this interactive process creates workers’ loyalty to one particular agency by turning them against one another. The speaker suggests that this divide-and-rule dynamic creates a provisional structure that enables dispatchers to retain a “reliably contingent,” transient workforce. This exploitative workplace structure is reinforced by the “spatial mismatch” between the Lafayette district and low-skilled jobs located on the urban periphery, as well as by homeless men’s labor market limitations.