We call ourselves by many names: Storytelling and inter-minority coalition-building

Scholars debate whether new immigrants will join minority native-born groups, especially African-Americans, in battling racial disparities, income inequalities, and discrimination in the United States. Although scholars have investigated inter-minority coalition-building in the context of electoral politics, a substantial share of newer immigrant social and political action has not been formalized. Social change organizations play an integral role in less formalized politics. The article draws upon ethnographic data on two case study organizations to investigate how they built coalitions between immigrants and non-immigrants. It pinpoints the ways in which they engaged in storytelling to emphasize multiple identity – namely, how any single individual might concurrently have many identifiers based on race, class, gender, and other factors – and elicit complex life narratives that help groups to find overlapping interests and form cross-cutting alliances. The strengths and weaknesses of these organizations’ efforts have implications for coalition-building efforts in other multi-racial settings as well, especially those with large immigrant populations

Beyond Inclusion: Critical Race Theory and Participatory Budgeting

Critical Race Theory (CRT) researchers maintain that mainstream liberal discourses of neutrality and colorblindness inherently reify existing patterns of inequality, and that privileging the voices of people of color and the marginalized is essential to addressing issues of equity and equality. Participatory budgeting (PB) aims, too, to include the voices of the marginalized in substantive policy-making. Through a CRT lens, I examine the ways in which the New York City PB process has thus far worked to simultaneously disrupt and maintain racial hierarchies. I pay particular attention to how social constructions of the “good project” shape the discourses around community priorities and winning projects—especially in the areas of security/policing and education. While the New York PB process has successfully reached out to and effectively enfranchised traditionally marginalized constituents, including communities of color, its current focus on districts and the voting phase, alongside limited work on critical praxis, limit the extent to which these newly enfranchised constituents can problematize larger funding formulas and criteria in public budgets

Accounting for Accountability

Review of the book Open Budgets: The Political Economy of Transparency, Participation, and Accountability, edited by Sanjeev Khagram, Archon Fung, and Paolo de Renzio

Whose Budget? Our Budget? Broadening Political Stakeholdership via Participatory Budgeting

In this thought piece, I attempt to contextualize New York City’s inaugural participatory budgeting (PB) process in the larger landscape of American political participation. I discuss how the bottom-up way in which stakeholders wrote the process’s rules in the first place, alongside the core role played by the two lead organizations, helped to broaden notions of stakeholdership among constituents. Ultimately, the first year’s primary achievement regarding political participation was not a specific set of outcomes, but a debut as an unfinished form of governance—one that began to engage traditionally marginalized constituents, to trigger their political imagination, and to prompt them to demand more

The Politics of Social Entrepreneurs in Access to Education: A Case Study of Shan Burmese Refugees in Northwestern Thailand

This paper examines social entrepreneurship in a Burmese refugee community as it strives to provide primary education to its children. Despite facing discrimination and fearing Thai authorities, our project leaders exemplified social entrepreneurship, most notably building social capital and agency within the refugee community, and surprisingly resolving intractable problems. Key processes included helping parents claim ownership of the program, depoliticizing the children's access to education, and encouraging high expectations of school performance. Social relationships built an internally sustainable project at virtually no cost and established bridges across antipathetic parties. We argue that the social entrepreneurship model is useful in contexts where poor communities cannot access non-governmental organizations or government agencies

From Porto Alegre to New York City: Participatory Budgeting and Democracy

Because of its popularity, there is now a large literature examining how participatory budgeting (PB) deepens participation by the poor and redistributes resources. Closer examinations of recent cases of PB can help us to better understand the political configurations in which these new participatory democratic spaces are embedded, and articulate the conditions that might lead to more meaningful outcomes. Who participates? For whose benefit? The articles in this symposium, on participatory budgeting in New York City (PBNYC), highlight both strengths and challenges of the largest American PB process. They focus less on redistribution, more on the dimensions of the process itself and of PBNYC’s successful social inclusion, new dynamics between participants and local politicians, and the subtleties of institutionalization. The symposium also reminds us, however, that contestations over meaningful participation are on-going, and that of all of PBNYC’s multiple goals, equity has proven to be the most elusive

Marginalized stakeholders and performative politics: dueling discourses in education policymaking

American urban education policy debates pivot around dueling lines of discourse on what ails inner-city youth; such students are portrayed as emblems of a largely African-American and Latino ‘culture of failure’, even as their voices remain largely absent from debates about them. In response, youth-led organizations attempt to forward youth as political stakeholders. I draw upon ethnographic data from two such organizations to examine the performative aspects of their campaign work. I focus on how they engaged in (1) counter-scripting, to imagine themselves as political stakeholders and substantively prepare themselves for their new roles, and in (2) counter-staging, to gain greater access to existing public stages and construct new, alternative spaces, for more deliberative interactions with policymakers. The strengths and weaknesses of these organizations\u27 efforts have implications for other groups of marginalized stakeholders campaigning for policy reform, especially in their attempts to demonstrate local knowledge and expertise

Streetwise for book smarts : culture, community organizing, and education reform in the Bronx

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2005.Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, leaves 279-292).Education organizing groups that have similar goals frequently employ divergent political strategies in their campaigns. In the literature on social movement organizations, such differences are usually attributed to variations in political context, or variations in resources. This dissertation builds on currently dominant social movement theories by investigating how cultural norms inside organizations also contribute to distinct types of political strategies. Specifically, it utilizes archival, direct observation, and interview data on five education organizing groups in the Bronx to explore the role of cultural norms, usually manifest in the form of rules of membership, activities, and protocols. All of the case study organizations have been engaging in grassroots political campaigns for similar goals in local school reform and funding increases in the South Bronx. The analysis contrasts the categories of Alinsky- and of Freire-derived norms inside these organizations, which, when applied, are more akin to cumulatively developed cultural tool kits than coherently formed, whole "cultures." The dissertation carefully delineates the key characteristics of the two categories. For example, the Freirian category is marked by leadership development that emphasizes the organizer as a partner rather than as a traditional teacher, rituals that focus on the individual member rather than the organization as a whole, and activities that tend to be unrelated to political campaigns at least at first glance. The two categories' respective cultural tool kits, in turn, are associated with differing capacities and preferences that emphasize certain political strategies over others.(cont.) Through their cultural tool kits, the case study organizations attempt to mitigate three crucial tensions in their political strategies: the balance between pursuing collaborative strategies versus pursuing confrontational ones, the balance between focusing on strategies that aim for policy adoption versus ones that aim for policy formulation, and the balance between explicitly addressing issues of race in political campaigns versus building broad-based constituencies, sometimes at the expense of ignoring race-delineated issues.by Celina Su.Ph.D

Between “Voluntary Migrants” and War Refugees: The Health of the Shan Burmese Migrant Workers in Northern Thailand

The Shan are a large migrant group from Burma (Myanmar) found within Thailand. While some Shan migrate to escape the civil war within Burma, others migrate for economic opportunity. Despite the size of this population, little is known about their health. Our study highlights the need for expanded access to primary care among this Shan population. Despite the arduous and trying journeys of these Shan migrants, they do not display the level of health sometimes attributed to health selection among immigrant groups

From Toxic Tours to Growing the Grassroots: Tensions in Critical Pedagogy and Community Development

Structural inequalities in American public education are inextricably tied to deep-seated patterns of racial and economic segregation. Children in poor neighborhoods are less likely to have the household resources, neighborhood institutions, or school amenities necessary for a good, challenging education. In response, a growing number of organizations have launched initiatives to simultaneously revitalize neighborhoods and improve public education, emphasizing youth participation as an essential component in their efforts. We draw upon ethnographic data from two such organizations to examine their practice of place-based critical pedagogy in community development. We focus on how they engage marginalized, “hard-to-reach” youth via (1) experiential learning, to counter high-stakes testing models and cultivate a sense of ownership in the local community, and (2) empowered deliberative action, in contextualized ways. The tensions embedded in these organizations’ complex efforts have implications for other groups of marginalized youth engaged in community development, especially in their attempts to help students gain concrete outcomes in community development and achieve long-term sustainability