Type: Symposium

← Global Fellowship in Urban Practice Student Research

Global Fellowship in Urban Practice Symposium 2023

WHEN:
Thursday, October 26, 5:00pm — 8:00pm
 

Each year the Urban Democracy Lab at NYU Gallatin selects students to participate in the Global Fellowship in Urban Practice (GFUP). The GFUP provides funding and support for advanced undergraduate and Master’s students to pursue extended, community-engaged, practice-based research projects in partnership with urban social justice organizations. Join us at the Global Fellowship in Urban Practice Symposium to hear from each of our eight fellows about the work they completed in summer 2023. Presenting Fellows: Ama Akoto; Manal Bawazir; Nathan Cheng; Sophia George; Soph Moore; Mychal Pagan; Dee Perry; Anthony Phillips.

New York University and Gallatin provide reasonable accommodations to people living with disabilities who wish to attend events at the School. For every event, Gallatin staff will be on hand to assist guests. Please note that the entrance at 715 Broadway is wheelchair accessible. To request accommodations, such as a sign language interpreter, assistive listening devices, or large print programs, or should you have questions regarding accessibility for an event, please contact Gallatin’s Office of Special Events by emailing events.gallatin@nyu.edu or by calling 212-992-6328. Should you need an accommodation, we ask that you send your request as early as possible so that we have time to fulfill your request.
 
← New Urban Politics and the Right To The City

POSTPONED: Discard Studies Collaborative Conference 2020

WHERE:
1 Washington Place
New York NY, USA
 

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED. 

Exploring Disposal’s Past, Present, and Future

April 23-25, 2020

Keynote address by
BRENDA CHALFIN
University of Florida 

Plenary address by
SAMANTHA MACBRIDE
The City University of New York

And a special Albert Gallatin Lecture and exhibition of the work of

MIERLE LADERMAN UKELES
Artist-in-Residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation
Lecturer, Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem

Conference Description:

Over the past decade, there has been an explosion of research that focuses on waste and the larger social, political, and economic processes that render certain objects, practices, and populations disposable. Research in this field has questioned the hegemony of recycling (MacBride 2011), traced the colonial effects of pollution (Liboiron 2017), and examined the often-neglected work of waste laborers (Fredericks 2018; Nagle 2013). This emergent scholarship is coalescing under the interdisciplinary field of Discard Studies which is driven by the question how, why, and to whom do waste, discards, and disposal matter? (Moore 2012). Discard Studies has inspired new avenues of inquiry in diverse areas of scholarship including the history of capitalism, aesthetics and design, urbanization, colonialism, language and power, environmental justice, and social movements and social change.

Greater academic attention to discards has, in large part, been driven by waste’s increasing importance in everyday politics and life. From environmental justice struggles against transnational toxic dumping regimes (Lepawsky 2018) and campaigns to reduce single use plastics, to social movements mobilizing human waste to interrupt state repression (McFarlane and Silver 2016), waste and its management are problems that are at the heart of contemporary debates about how to deal with rapid and unprecedented environmental change and further projects of social justice.

Building on this important moment in which waste and disposability have garnered increased attention, the Discard Studies Collaborative at New York University will host a conference to both take stock of work done under the broad label of Discard Studies and discuss the future of the readily emerging field. This conference will take place around themes familiar to discardians including labor, urban and environmental governance, and protest while also asking how Discard Studies might incorporate new and urgent issues such as anthropogenic environmental change in a world structured by colonial, racialized, gendered and classed violence.

The conference will take place over three days commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Earth Day, from April 23-25, 2020 at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. It will bring together new and established scholars working on discards and related themes to evaluate the state of this emergent field and identify new directions for future research.

For details on schedule, speakers, and registration, please go to: https://wp.nyu.edu/thediscardstudiescollaborative/discard-studies-conference/

 

RSVP

New York University and Gallatin provide reasonable accommodations to people living with disabilities who wish to attend events at the School. For every event, Gallatin staff will be on hand to assist guests. Please note that the entrance at 715 Broadway is wheelchair accessible. To request accommodations, such as a sign language interpreter, assistive listening devices, or large print programs, or should you have questions regarding accessibility for an event, please contact Gallatin’s Office of Special Events by emailing events.gallatin@nyu.edu or by calling 212-992-6328. Should you need an accommodation, we ask that you send your request as early as possible so that we have time to fulfill your request.

Topics

Sponsors

 
← New Urban Politics and the Right To The City Events

Debating U.S. National Security Whistleblowing: Secrets, the State, and Democracy, A Discussion with Whistleblowers, Advocates, and Historians

WHERE:
Jerry H. Labowitz Theatre for the Performing Arts
1 Washington Place
New York, NY , USA
WHEN:
Thursday, October 18, 4:00pm — 7:00pm
 

Are Edward Snowden, Reality Winner, and James Comey whistleblowers or leakers, heroes or traitors? Is WikiLeaks a media organization or a foreign agent? Is it ever appropriate to disclose official secrets to the public? Join us for a series of roundtable discussions featuring whistleblowers, advocates, and historians to debate the past, present, and future of national security whistleblowing. This event is organized by Hannah Gurman (NYU Gallatin) and Kaeten Mistry (University of East Anglia, UK) and is sponsored by the Urban Democracy Lab at NYU Gallatin, The Tamiment Institute Library at NYU, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK).

Schedule

Introductions from Hannah Gurman (NYU Gallatin) and Kaeten Mistry (University of East Anglia, UK)

Historical Perspectives: The Origins, Evolution, and Legacy of National Security Whistleblowing

4:15-5:30 pm

Sam Lebovic (George Mason University); Chase Madar (NYU Gallatin); Jeremy Varon (The New School), and Julia Rose Kraut (The Historical Society of the New York Courts)

Break

5:30-5:45 pm

Whistleblowing Today: A Conversation with Whistleblowers and Advocates

5:45-7 pm

Thomas Drake (NSA Whistleblower); John Kiriakou (CIA Whistleblower); Brian Fleming (Miller & Chevalier); Barry Pollack (Robbins, Russell, Englert, Untereiner & Sauber)

For more information, go to: https://wp.nyu.edu/whistleblowing. This event is free and open to the public but an RSVP is requested.

Topics

Sponsors

 
← Initiatives

Humanizing Data: Data, Humanities, and the City

WHEN:
Saturday, April 8, 9:00am — 7:00pm
 

Co-sponsored by the Urban Democracy Lab, NYU Gallatin, NYU Shanghai Center for Data Science and Analytics, Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, and the Institute for Public Knowledge

This day-long symposium examines how we can use data and digital strategies to enhance and disrupt the kinds of research questions, methods, and narratives that define the humanities. It also complicates the role of the urban university in a global “city-state” such as New York, where the boundaries between university and city are quite blurred. This symposium is an opportunity to rethink our alliances, forge stronger and more equal relationships between university-affiliated researchers and community-based organizations, and amplify opportunities to share both resources and authorship with one another.

(View full speaker information here)

Schedule:

9-9:30am: Coffee and pastries

9:30-9:45am: Brief Welcome, Rebecca Amato, Urban Democracy Lab/NYU Gallatin

9:45-11:15am Panel One: Queering the Web
How are history, social change and stasis, and the actions of people over time simply and creatively represented on a website? How do the computational structures, design paradigms, and visual histories of the digital medium reify social norms? Do gender and sexuality play a significant role in the performative experience of the computer interface? This panel will discuss how the course “Queering the Web: A Practical, Digital Inquiry into the History of Gender and Sexuality” addresses these complex questions, through the study and redesign of the public history site OutHistory.org. Site founder and independent scholar Jonathan Ned Katz, along with professors Kimon Keramidas and Elizabeth Heard and their students will discuss the development of the class and progress made towards answering these questions.

Kimon Keramidas, Draper Program, NYU
Jonathan Ned Katz, Outhistory.org
Elizabeth Heard, Performance Studies, NYU
Cindy Li, MA candidate, Social Cultural Analysis, NYU

11:30-1pm Panel Two: Decolonizing Data
The power dynamics inherent in data collection, interpretation, and dissemination reproduce inequities, bolster systems of oppression, and reduce human experience to a numbers game.  As our cities turn to informatics for policymaking, budgeting, policing, and resource distribution, this panel seeks to critique the use of data in a world more complicated, messy, and creative than the numbers would have us believe.

Jack Tchen, NYU
Noah Fuller, NYU
Heather Lee, NYU Shanghai
Jane Choe, B.A. Gallatin 2018
Molly Elizabeth Smith, MLK Jr. Scholar, B.A. Gallatin 2018

1-2:30pm LUNCH BREAK (recommendations to be provided)

2:30-4pm Panel Three: Activist Geographies
Mapping and geographical analysis have transformed humanities scholarship by anchoring narratives of all kinds in space and place.  Where an incident happens, whether it be historical, political, or even literary, changes the way we understand it.  Yet maps themselves can also be deterministic, forcing us to lose sight of the ways in which, as Mark Monmonier writes, “maps lie.”  This panel looks at mapping as a powerful tool for activism and analysis, while also demonstrating the need to include other perspectives, such as interactivity, oral history, and historical narrative, to deepen its utility.

Caleb Elfenbein, “Is this activism? Mapping Islamophobia as Public Humanities,” Mapping Islamophobia, Grinnell College
Erin McElroy, “Collectively Mediating Displacement and Resistance: On the Work of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, “Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, San Francisco Tenants Union
Julian Chambliss, “Recovering Black Community Space: Hannibal Square and Black Social World in Central Florida,” Rollins College
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, Visiting Scholar, NYU, Co-editor with Rebecca Solnit of Nonstop Metropolis

4:15-6pm: Simultaneous Workshops and Break-Out Discussions

Practical Data Workshops

Part I: Collecting and Protecting Your Data, Nick Wolf and Vicky Steeves, NYU Libraries, Data Services: 45 minutes 

In this workshop we’ll talk about recommended practices at different times in the research life cycle, from the gathering of data and research materials to personal archiving and sharing project data. We’ll focus on helpful workflow tools for managing data such as the Open Science Framework, options for short-term storage, and ways to approach long term preservation, sharing, and distribution.

Part II: Free and Open Source Digital Tools, Nick Wolf and Vicky Steeves, NYU Libraries, Data Services: 45 minutes

Recent years have seen an explosion of higher-quality, community-supported researcher tools for working on digital projects. In this workshop we’ll engage collectively in a conversation about what tools have been effective, what we need to know about community development, and preview a few select tools that are useful to current researchers working in web publishing, project management, data cleaning and preparing, and spatial analysis.

Walking Tour: Below the Grid: An Interactive Guide to Walking Practice, Noah Fuller
How does each of us move through the city? How can we reflect on and engage with our walking practice? Join artist and curator Noah Fuller for a multi-sensory walking tour that digs into the intermingled historical layers below the New York City grid. [Meet outside 20 Cooper Square. Traveling from the Bowery to Astor Pl to Washington Square Park. Bring a smartphone and comfortable shoes.]

Project Development Mentorship, Jenny Kijowski, Educational Technologist, NYU Gallatin (20 Cooper Square, Room 222)
Do you have a digital humanities or data-driven project that you would like to talk through?  NYU Educational Technologist Jenny Kijowski will facilitate a practical discussion with symposium participants interested in developing project ideas and creating a toolkit of resources that can transform those ideas into actionable plans.

7-8:30pm: Data in Context: Lessons from Urban Space, Keynote with Gergely Baics and Leah Meisterlin

With the growth of data pertinent to humanities scholarship, we have seen the development of new tools and techniques of analysis. In this talk, Baics and Meisterlin will present lessons from their recent work on urban spatial research. Still, despite the changing technological landscape, primary among these lessons is a simple return to first principles: the answers we find depend on the questions we ask and the context in which we ask them.

** Please RSVP here for individual panels and workshops **

Free and open to the public

20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor Conference Room
Saturday, April 8, 9am to 8:30pm

Topics

 
← Democratizing the Green City

Symposium

 

Summary: The quality of discussion at the symposium was extremely high. The geographic focus was North and South America, with occasional forays into other locales (like Julie Sze’s presentation on metro Shanghai). Much of the debate focused on the need to refine and expand our understanding of green gentrification and the mechanisms of displacement. There was also attention to the rhetorics of urban climate politics and their connection to new methods of carbon accounting, in the Americas and in China. A great deal of discussion focused on the different strategies and distinct dilemmas (political and cultural) raised by cities’ ecological imperatives in a neoliberal and warming world.

It must be noted, also, that thanks to the tireless work of symposium organizers and, especially, NYU Gallatin staffers, the symposium was a wonderful organizational success despite extremely adverse conditions: a winter storm during the conference’s main day, whose 25+ plus inches of accumulation ranked as the second or third single snowiest day in New York City’s history. Nevertheless, most New York and out-of-town speakers attended, and with some rescheduling of late Saturdayevents, we were able to conclude on Sunday morning with a final panel and wrap-up sessions.

For an additional report on the event, see the review on the UDL blog, written by NYU Gallatin student Rachel Stern.

From the event program:

Our symposium examines the link between environmental improvement and social displacement and asks how it is possible to break it. This dilemma has been addressed in a variety of disconnected literatures in urban studies, ranging from from neighborhood studies of urban gardens and gentrification, critical approaches to urban climate governance, to the global relationship between environmental urban planning and informal settlements, to anthropological critiques of development. We propose to unite these approaches within one analytical frame, examining them as cases of the same phenomenon in order to better specify the mechanisms by which environmental improvement leads to social displacement, thus identifying potential points of leverage at different scales that political actors can deploy. We focus on large cities from the Global North and South where we find strikingly similar dynamics, despite distinctive socio-economic contexts.

Conveners:
Gianpaolo Baiocchi, New York University
Daniel Aldana Cohen, New York University
Hillary Angelo, University of California, Santa Cruz
Miriam Greenberg, University of California, Santa Cruz

PANELS

** Due to a historic snowstorm that hit New York during the symposium, panels were reorganized and the keynote address was canceled. The program as it was originally scheduled is below.

HOUSING AND GREEN CITY POLITICS
Presenters:
Daniel Aldana Cohen (Sociology, NYU) “Saving the Sustainable City from Itself: Carbon, Collective Consumption, and 21st Century Urbanization”
Ken Gould and Tammy Lewis (Sociology, Brooklyn College), “Green Gentrification and Environmental Injustice”
Melissa Checker (Urban Studies, Queens College, Anthropology and Environmental Psychology, CUNY Grad Center), “Industrial Gentrification in the Big, Green Apple”
Claudia Lopez (Sociology, UC-Santa Cruz), “Contesting ‘Double Displacement’: Rural Displaced Persons, Informal Settlements, and the ‘Medellin Miracle’”
Moderator: Andrew Ross (Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU)

EDGES, EXTENSIONS, AND NETWORKS
Presenters:
Roger Keil (Environmental Studies, York University), “Greenbelt politics: Creating a space for democracy in the soft space of suburbanization”
Paula Santoro (Urban Planning, Universidade de Sao Paolo), “Policies ‘for environmentalists’ and ‘for the capital’ in São Paulo, Brazil: recent policies versus historical urban sprawl processes and social coalitions focused on economic development policies”
Sergio Montero (Urban and Regional Development, Universidad de los Andes), “Leveraging Bogotá:Sustainable Development, Global Philanthropy and the Increased Speed of Urban Policy Circulation”
Oscar Sosa Lopez (City and Regional Planning, UC-Berkeley), “Democracy and the green city: infrastructure, livability and the politics of immediacy in Mexico City”
Kristin Miller (Sociology, UC-Santa Cruz), “The Transit Network Society: transportation, technology, sustainability, and gentrification in the San Francisco Bay”
Moderator: Joan Byron, Neighborhoods First Fund for Community-Based Planning

FINANCE AND GOVERNANCE
Presenters:
Sarah Knuth (Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan), “Climate Retrofits in an Era of Urban Austerity: Green Financialization?”
Gabriela Merlinsky (Social Sciences, Universidad de Buenos Aires), “Environmental recovery and population displacement in Buenos Aires. Controversies over a towpath along the Matanza-Riachuelo River”
Karen Chapple (City and Regional Planning, UC-Berkeley), “Just transitioning: The fine line between neighborhood change and displacement”
Melanie Dupuis (Environmental Studies and Science, Pace University), “Democratizing the Green Suburb: Westchester as ‘Nature’s Metropolis’”
Miriam Greenberg (Sociology, UC-Santa Cruz), “Beyond Ecotopia: Displacement and Uneven Sustainable Development in the Green City”
Moderator: Gordon Douglas (Inst. for Public Knowledge, NYU)

UTOPIAS AND DYSTOPIAS
Presenters:
Julie Sze (American Studies, UC-Davis), “Urban Eco-desire across time and space”
Juliet Schor (Sociology, Boston College), “Inequality, Eco-Habitus and the Emergence of the Platform Economy”
Hillary Angelo (Sociology, UC-Santa Cruz), “The ‘Green Screen:’ Urban Greening as Social Improvement and the Normative Power of Nature”
Gianpaolo Baiocchi (Sociology, Gallatin, Urban Democracy Lab, NYU), “Democratizing the Green City: The Politics of Expertise and its alternatives”
Antwi Akom (Africana Studies, San Francisco State University) and Aekta Shah (Harvard Graduate School of Education), “People Powered Placemaking 2.0: Smart Cities, Democratizing Data, and Re-Imagining the Green City for the Urban Poor”
Moderator: Carl Zimring (Social Science and Cultural Studies, Pratt Institute)

KEYNOTE ADDRESS: “Greening cities outside the central city: green urbanism in the global suburb”
A conversation with Roger Keil and Julie Sze
Introduction by Global Design NYU (Louise Harpman and Mitchell Joachim)
Co-sponsored by Global Design NYU

Democratizing the Green City is presented by the Urban Democracy Lab with funding from NYU’s Global Initiative for Advanced Studies and generous support from NYU Gallatin Dean Susanne Wofford.

Topics