Rising tides: an ethnographic case study of resident-activists in an environmental justice community

Environmental justice communities in the US are located at a nexus of social justice, political and corporate interest, and public health. This paper explores how resident activists, primarily those who identify as Latinx and female, simultaneously inhabit roles of resident and activist. In doing so, they create a space of equitable knowledge exchange, and support community members in realizing their own agency. Additionally, their efforts include, but are not limited to, collaboration with researchers in a way that promotes emancipatory education and culture-centered research models. The author spent over a year as a staff member of an urban EJ organization in Massachusetts, participating in and observing community meetings, fundraising efforts, municipal and state level environmental impact hearings, and organized protests. These community activists wrestle with the tension of simultaneously depending on and disrupting systems that have historically burdened their community

The Implementation and Education of Geographic Information Systems in a Local Government for Municipal Planning: A Case Study of Dangriga, Belize

Implementing Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in a developing country can improve spatial planning and decision-making. Utilizing a Participatory GIS framework of maximizing community empowerment and limiting marginalization, this thesis research explores the barriers associated with implementing GIS in Dangriga, Belize and how to overcome those barriers. The research included the identification of local needs that could benefit from the use of GIS, the collection of local data through group and individual data collections, and the utilization of locally collected data to conduct GIS training sessions. It was learned that Dangriga faces many barriers found in other developing countries: institutional inertia, resource and technical availabilities, and a lack of trained personnel. Through the collection of local data and training sessions utilizing the data, the barriers of implementing GIS in Dangriga can be minimized

Designing Inclusive Playscapes Across Sensorial + Socio-Spatial Boundaries

Our emotional experience in public environments is considered to be superficial, although their configurations impact how well we can see, hear, move around, and interact in them daily. ‘Lonely, but not alone’ describes many of today’s urban dwellers. For some people, participation in civic life can be challenging, especially since the barriers (physical, psychological, etc.) faced by some are not always apparent to others, even to designers. This Major Research Project explores the relationship between the level of playfulness expressed in an urban space and user experience. Along with case study investigations and the Delphi method, 42 citizens (estimated to be 21 years of age or older) participated via interviews in Toronto, Canada. An urban design framework of 64 playful design features called The Multi-Playscape Toolkit, which can be used by urban designers and architects, has been developed and now contributes to the knowledge base. Using the Toronto context, recommendations are provided to promote more urban playfulness, more lenient policymaking, and more inclusive design practices in our public spaces

Building Capacity for ESL, Legal Services, and Citizenship

Provides a funders' guide to opportunities, strategies, and resources for promoting immigrants' civic integration by investing in a local infrastructure of services, including English instruction, legal services, and assistance with naturalization

Investigation of mobile devices usage and mobile augmented reality applications among older people

Mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones have allow users to communicate, entertainment, access information and perform productivity. However, older people are having issues to utilise mobile devices that may affect their quality of life and wellbeing. There are some potentials of mobile Augmented Reality (AR) applications to increase older users mobile usage by enhancing their experience and learning. The study aims to investigate mobile devices potential barriers and influence factors in using mobile devices. It also seeks to understand older people issues in using AR applications

All Culture is Local

This book is an outcome from a five year Australian Research Council funded research project, CAMRA cultural asset mapping in regional Australia project (LP0882238). Over this time four universities, four local governments, and peak regional, state and federal agencies sought to develop knowledge that would enable better informed planning for arts and cultural development in rural and regional communities. Over the course of the project, it became evident that rural-regional local government staff and cultural decision makers need better place-specific data and are keen to learn from the experiences of other local governments to inform their own planning. This book is CAMRA’s response to that need and includes 17 case studies on good practice in (1) Cultural Mapping and Data Collection and (2) Cultural Planning. The case studies have been written with the aim of making ideas and processes transferrable for any regional local authority - with the resource implications made clear – and are ordered using Australian Standard Geographical Classification-Remoteness Areas for local government area

Spartan Daily March 1, 2010

Volume 134, Issue 16https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/1232/thumbnail.jp

Spartan Daily March 1, 2010

Volume 134, Issue 16https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/1232/thumbnail.jp

How the classroom schools: A focused ethnography exploring the built classroom environment and its inhabitants in one kindergarten

This study is a focused ethnography around the sociology of a classroom’s built environment and its young inhabitants. I spent three months immersed in a kindergarten classroom where I used child-centered research methods (ie. the kids created collaborative and individual classroom maps and conducted child-led video tours) alongside participant observation to gather data related to how young children perceive and experience the materiality and spatiality of their classroom. As a result of grounded visual and multi-modal analysis, I centered the young children’s voices and perspectives and discovered how the kids picked up on certain physical and symbolic markers bounding zones of interaction in their built environment: territories for learning↔ work and privacy ↔ play. Patterns of mobility through these territories revealed how children in the classroom had uneven access to the profits afforded by the classroom’s space. My work reveals a strong intersection between smartness, agency, and access to resources through mobility (ie. physical action and vocal action) in the classroom tied to perceptions of kids’ conformity to norms and cultural alignment with the teacher’s expectations. The findings from this study are relevant to both teacher preparation programs and veteran teachers because they take into consideration how young children make sense of the learning opportunities afforded by different materials and places in the classroom as well as the impact of the spatial organization on classroom interactions. The results of this study point to the need to pay close attention to the perceptions of young children in school, for they are observant and pick up on the subtleties of their environment in ways that reproduce social norms. Educators should pay attention to how the classroom’s built and material environment is implicated in kids’ perceptions of what matters in school and their access to learning opportunities there. In this study, I consider equity of opportunity through the lens of the relational built environment, distribution of resources, and access in the classroom. Teachers and the professionals who prepare teachers can consider how the environments they design and use socialize kids into certain ways of being and belonging in the classroo

Left out until they drop out: how young people negotiate social value in school

ABSTRACT This research aimed to examine how young people negotiate positive social value within an institution which continually stratifies them, and to consider the impact that category memberships such as social class and gender may have on the negotiation of value. Social value is negotiated by pupils in two key ways; amongst their peers and from the institution. The research took place within a Scottish comprehensive high school with a randomly assigned cohort of pupils. This setting was a particularly suitable one, because while the goal of modern secondary education in the UK is for all children to have an equal opportunity to learn (UK Government, 2018), 12.2% of pupils in the UK nevertheless leave school with no qualifications (OECD, 2018), and many others leave school feeling worthless (Whittaker 2008; 2010). Using a longitudinal, ethnographic method, the school careers of the pupils were closely observed for four years. A hybrid deductive and inductive data coding process was employed and the resulting analyses focussed upon four organising themes: institutional practices, socio-economic status, gender, and peer-on-peer recognition. The analysis within each theme integrates three levels of influence: the institution, the classroom, and individual pupil educational career trajectories. This range of analysis allows for the consideration of multi-layered perspectives, ranging from broad, institutionally-defined factors such as academic streaming, through classroom-level practices such as discipline, to fine-grained analyses of pupil experiences through detailed vignettes of observed behaviour. The research extends and informs current social psychological theories by analysing dynamic pupil responses in a naturalistic setting over an extended time period, in a manner that complements existing research traditionally using more static methods such as experiments and surveys. Taken together, the analyses demonstrate the pivotal role of the institution in determining social value systems of recognition and, critically, the educational outcomes of some of the most vulnerable pupils. Keywords: value, institution, socio-economic, gender, ostracism, recognition