At Home in the City, Refugee Lives in New York: A Case Study of the Park Hill Liberians

As the world’s displaced continue to step through the doors of its cities in numbers not seen in recorded history, planners have an obligation to consider refugees as we reimagine the neighborhoods and paradigms in which we work. While the few refugees who resettle in the United States may be considered on a global level to be fortunate, resettlement systems which have been put in place in the twentieth century have left much of the work of integration to chance. This study aims to identify neighborhood factors which may contribute to a welcoming community for refugees and therefore create greater community integration. An evaluation of physical and social factors on the ground in the Liberian community in Staten Island, combined with personal experiences of resettlement informs the recommendations at the conclusion of this study

Place, Race, and the Politics of Identity in the Geography of Garinagu Baündada

The Garinagu, who are commonly referred to by the name of their language, Garifuna, emerged out of the historical geographical processes of colonialism and capitalism on Saint Vincent Island in the Lesser Antilles. Exiled by the British to New Spain’s Captaincy General of Guatemala in 1797, the Garinagu formed communities and cultural bonds to the land, namely, but not exclusively, along the north coast of the territory that would become part of the Honduran nation-state in 1821. Today, the Garinagu are rapidly becoming a landless population. Since the mid-1970s, the Honduran government has pursued the expansion of tourism on the north coast against the Garinagu’s opposition. By the early 1990s, the Honduran government and oligarchs expanded cattle ranching and palm oil monoculture plantations into the area. Using critical ethnography, I chart the contradictions created under capitalism by the state and elite-led socio-economic reproduction of Honduras’ north coast. I apply geographical concepts of place, race, and the politics of identity to show that place is a repository of tensions, conflicts, and practices since it is in place that human form social relations (e.g. class, gender, race, identities). These concepts help to explain the fragmentation of the Garinagu from a self-sustaining and closely bonded communal society into a fragmented and landless society. I refer to the Garinagu in this manner because the new state and elite-shaped social relations on Honduras’ north coast and the cultural values assimilated from the Garinagu migration to the United States have undoubtedly transformed the Garifuna society’s relationship with place. My central research question asks: how has the Honduran government’s ideology of economic development and the global economic forces fragmented the Garifuna society? I investigate the economic policies implemented by the Honduran government which are connected to global economic forces and political economy to illustrate how the Garinagu’s historical land struggle and the construction of race have shaped their experience, identity, and relationship with place. Moreover, I analyze how the Garifuna leaders and the Garinagu in general have responded to these economic and political forces. In sum, my analysis adds to the examination of the Garinagu’s cultural politics and state-sponsored violence that has historically accompanied economic development in Honduras

Against Criminalization and Pathology: The Making of a Black Achievement Praxis

Utilizing 29 in-depth semi-structured interviews, the life-course narratives of Black male scholars who, as victims of varying manifestations of structural violence, have “beat the odds” academically. Findings suggest that Black men and boys benefit from positive, racially-informed socialization that assists in the development of an internalized identity that (a) acts as a protective and resistant barrier against some of the impediments of institutional racism, (b) operates as a counter-criminogenic influence, and (c) facilitates educational resilience. Criminogenic Resistance Theory (C.RT) is presented as an alternative conceptualization of the process by which Black boys resist the criminogenic influences of structuralized violence

We Are the Revolutionaries : Visibility, Protest, and Racial Formation in 1970s Prison Radicalism

This dissertation analyzes black and Puerto Rican prison protest in the 1970s. I argue that prisoners elucidated a nationalist philosophy of racial formation that saw racism as a site of confinement but racial identity as a vehicle for emancipation. Trying to force the country to see its sites of punishment as discriminatory locations of repression, prisoners used spectacular confrontation to dramatize their conditions of confinement as epitomizing American inequality. I investigate this radicalism as an effort to secure visibility, understood here as a metric of collective consciousness. In documenting the ways prisoners were symbols and spokespeople of 1970s racial protest, this dissertation argues that the prison served as metaphor and metonym in the process of racial formation. A concept and an institution, the prison was embodied in protest, hidden in punishment, represented in media, and known in ideas. This dissertation examines the multifaceted mechanisms by which social movements attempt to effect change through creating new ways of knowing. I examine prison visibility through two extended case studies. First, I study a coterie of radical black prisoners centered in California and revolving around militant prisoner author George Jackson. Through appeals to revolutionary action as racial authenticity, this grouping—which included Angela Davis, Ruchell Magee, and the San Quentin 6, as well as the Black Panther Party and others—described black prisoners as slaves rebelling against the confinement of American society writ large. The second case study addresses the successful decade-long campaign to free five Puerto Rican Nationalists imprisoned for spectacular attacks on U.S. authority in the 1950s. Understanding colonialism as a prison, U.S.-based Puerto Rican nationalists in the 1970s (including the Young Lords, the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional, the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional and others) defined the freedom of these prisoners as a necessary step toward national independence. Through strategies of visibility, black and Puerto Rican prison radicals used collective memory to overcome the spatial barriers of confinement. Such memories were recalled through a wide range of tactics, from bombs to bombast, from alternative media to community organizing, as prison radicals fought to control the terms of their visibility

Phenomenal Bodies: The Metaphysical Possibilities of Post-Black Film and Visual Culture

In recent years, film, art, new media, and music video works created by black makers have demonstrated an increasingly “post-black” impulse. The term “post-black” was originally coined in response to innovative practices and works created by a generation of black artists who were shaped by hip-hop culture and Afro-modernist thinking. I use the term as a theoretical tool to discuss what lies beyond the racial character of a work, image, or body. Using a post-black theoretical methodology I examine a range of works by black filmmakers Kathleen Collins Prettyman and Lee Daniels, visual artists Wangechi Mutu and Jean-Michel Basquiat, new media artist Nettrice Gaskins, and music video works of hip-hop artists and performer Erykah Badu. I discuss how black artists and filmmakers have moved through Darby English’s notion of “black representational space” as a sphere where bodies and works are beholden to specific historical and aesthetic expectations and limitations. I posit that black representational space has been challenged by what I describe as “metaphysical space” where bodies produce a new set of possibilities as procreative, fluid, liberated, and otherworldly forces. These bodies are neither positive nor negative; instead they occupy the in-between spaces between life and death, time and space, digital and analog, interiority and exteriority, vulnerability and empowerment. Post-black visual culture displays the capacities of black bodies as creative forces that shape how we see and experience visual culture. My methodology employs textual analysis of visual objects that articulate a post-black impulse, paying close attention to how these works compel viewers to see other dimensions of experience. In three chapters I draw from theoretical work in race and visuality, affect theory, phenomenology, and interiority from the likes of Charles Johnson, Frantz Fanon, Elena del Río, Sara Ahmed, Saidiya Hartman, and Elizabeth Alexander. This study aims to create an interdisciplinary analysis that charts new directions for exploring and re-imaging black bodies as subjects and objects of endless knowledge and creative potential

Performing and sounding disruption : coded pleasure in Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “Otis”

textFrom minstrelsy to hip-hop, the black performer has always been entangled in a complex network of branding, packaging, and promotion. The black body is cultural capital and in hip-hop, the black thug and his dangerous body are the fetishized objects of desire. Despite these exploitative constraints, artists find spaces to enact what little resistance is possible. In the following report, I perform a close reading and close listening of Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “Otis.” Paying particular attention to the intersections of the visual and the aural, I find that Jay-Z and West encode desire, pleasure, and imagination beneath boastful rhymes and material opulence. Jay-Z and West adopt American symbols of prosperity and freedom and, in disruptive fashion, resignify black masculinity in the cultural imagination. Soul sound, as intoned through Otis Redding and James Brown, lends a politics of brotherhood and radicalism to Jay-Z and West’s articulation of affective black masculinity. I employ a collage-like network of theoretical frames that span performance, sound, and literary theory to trace how race and gender performance codes a discourse of disruption. I find that “Otis” is a type a blueprint—an instruction manual for youth of color to deconstruct, innovate, and feel deeply. Through linguistic and performative codes, Jay-Z and West create a safe space, a cipher for men of color to desire and, in turn, experience pleasure. I trace how Jay-Z and West move closer to a practice of hip-hop feminism and, in a field notorious for rampant homophobia, misogyny, and violence—that’s remarkable.Englis

Education in a Hip-Hop Nation: Our Identity, Politics & Pedagogy

Contemporary Hip-Hop scholarship has revealed that Hip-Hop is a racially diverse, youth-driven culture, and is intimately connected to prior and on-going social justice movements (Chang, 2004; Kitwana, 2002). This study explores its Afro-Diasporic and activist origins, as well as the theoretical impact of Hip-Hop culture on the identity and pedagogy of educators belonging to the Hip-Hop generation(s). This qualitative study also examines how Hip-Hop culture impacts educators’ identity, politics and personal pedagogy, while seeking to create a new model of Social Justice Hip-Hop Pedagogy. This study was produced through twenty-three in-depth interviews with influential Hip-Hop educators (Aberbach & Rockman, 2002) from diverse backgrounds and geographic locations. There are currently limited theoretical and conceptual frameworks in the literature supporting the use of Hip-Hop as Social Justice Pedagogy, yet is currently being used in K- 16 educational contexts throughout the United States and abroad (Akom, 2009; Duncan- Andrade & Morrell, 2008). The results of this study reveal the foundational basis consisting of four primary core functions and seven practical tenets, necessary to negotiate and implement a new and innovative model for Social Justice Hip-Hop Pedagogy

I Hope I Don\u27t See You Tomorrow: A Phenomenological Ethnography Of The Passages Academy School Program

This study examines Passages Academy, a school program that offers educational services for court-involved youth in New York City. Looking specifically at the Department of Education teachers who work in facilities run by the Department of Juvenile Justice, this research focuses on the beliefs and behaviors that inform the teaching experience within these facilities. The critical question of how these educators negotiate the learning spaces within this school community is also examined. The question that informs much of this study is: how are the philosophies of the various stake-holding agencies enacted daily in real classroom settings? This leads to a discussion concerning the specific agenda of each agency and a focus on how the competing philosophies are realized within such a small and limited physical space. In addition, this study considers the ways in which classroom protocols and teachers\u27 pedagogies--including curriculum, instruction, classroom management and assessment--are shaped by their students\u27 status as incarcerated youth. Such are the social, political and pedagogical forces that determine how court-involved youths are educated

MultipliCities : the infrastructure of African American literature, 1899-1996

textMultipliCities: The Infrastructure of African American Literature, 1899-1996 explores intersections between black fiction and canonical sociology through two extended case studies focusing on the authors Richard Wright and Paul Beatty. The formation of disciplinary sociology in the early twentieth century had a profound influence on the production and reception of African American literature. Sociologists at the University of Chicago were among the first to teach black fiction and poetry in the academy, and institutionalized a social scientific framework for comprehending black culture. This framework, which assumes that black writing produces racial knowledge about black experience, continues to pressure contemporary African American authors through the demands of the publishing industry today. At the same time, though, African American authors throughout the twentieth century have resisted sociological expectations for their work and responded critically to the social scientific study of the black community more broadly. MultipliCities studies black writers whose fiction is specifically critical of sociological conceptions of black personhood and place. While Richard Wright's best-selling Native Son (1940) has been canonized as a type of sociological fiction, I read against this critical tradition for the ways in which his juvenile delinquent protagonist, Bigger Thomas, evades his production as a social scientific object. I locate further evidence for Wright's revision of sociological knowledge production in his final, posthumously published novel, A Father's Law (1960; 2008), in which the main character is a sociologist and a serial killer who violently deforms the mastery of the social scientific expert. In my second case study, I turn to contemporary novelist Paul Beatty's post-civil rights era novel The White Boy Shuffle (1996), which I read as a mock ethnography in its description of a postindustrial ghetto that exceeds the sociological imagination of the so-called "culture of poverty." Though rap music is often interpreted as evidence of the alleged impoverishment of inner-city black community, in my final chapter I read Beatty's "hip hop novel" as challenging the social scientific expectations for black popular culture that are part of the ongoing legacy of the canonical sociology of race.Englis

Art Therapy for Enhancing Academic Experience of Male High School Freshmen

The aim of this study was to assess the efficacy of group art therapy interventions in improving social and emotional issues for male high school freshmen. The Behavioral Assessment System for Children Second Edition (BASC-2) was used to measure academically tracked high school freshman (n = 80) receiving the 12 week intervention in a group setting in comparison to an academically matched control group (n=76). Independent sample t-tests compared participants in the Honor, Average and At Risk Tracks who received art therapy versus participants who did not. The findings indicate that for participants in the honors track, those receiving art therapy improved on Inattention/Hyperactivity (t (51) = 1.854, p\u3c.035) more than those in the control group. For participants in the Average Track, Personal Adjustment (t (50) = 2.086, p\u3c.021) and Self-Esteem scores (t (50) = 2.762, p\u3c.004) improved more for art therapy participants than for those in the control group. No statistically significant differences were found for participants in the At-Risk track. Participant responses collected through five prompts aimed to assess participant’s perceptions regarding elements of their art therapy intervention experience. Qualitative findings were analyzed within academic track and suggested the efficacy of art therapy for ventilating frustrations, processing daily challenges and mediating emotions. Overall, eight themes emerged; sense of ownership, cathartic release, introspection, ventilation of negative feelings, expression of positive affect, fantasy or future projection, concrete descriptors and change in affect. Eighty-six percent of participants in the Honors Track art therapy group expressed positive affect when describing their emotions post art creation. Responses from the Honors Track participants were classified into four themes; ventilation of negative emotions, expression of positive affect, concrete descriptors and use of symbolic language. For participants in the Average Track, 80% of responses indicated positive feelings after creating the art work. Four themes emerged from Average Track participant responses; sense of ownership, ventilation of negative feelings, expression of positive affect and concrete descriptors. Although 42% of At-Risk Track participants reported a sense of ownership directly after creating the art piece, only 17% continued to express such ownership when reflecting about the artwork after several weeks. After participating in art therapy groups, participants reported feeling “more relaxed,” “successful and confident.” Author Keywords: Art Therapy; Education; Secondary Education; High School Males; Inner City; Poverty; BASC-2; Academically Tracked; Delinquency; At-Risk Students; Honors Students; Enhancing Academic Experiences; Freshmen; Quasi-Experimental; Emotional Regulation; Trends in Education; Disappearance of Art; Anxiety; Depression; Self-Esteem; Inattention; Hyperactivity; Personal Adjustment; Internalizing Problems; School Problem