Facilitators: Anita Cheng, Aurash Khawarzad, and Jaime Jover.
Participants: Elizabeth Cooper, Bianca Mona, Silvia Rivera Alfaro, Anushay Said, and Joseph Torres-González.
Our second iteration of the Just Research Workshop—following last year’s generative and provocative first series of workshops—brought together nine research-activists across CUNY campuses working on a wide range of community-based topics from the Arts, Anthropology, Environmental Psychology, Indigenous Studies, Geography, and Women Studies. During the four sessions over the spring 2022 semester, we worked to create a safe, horizontal environment where participants felt confident to share their views, grappling with tensions and contradictions in community-based research, grounded in specific research, creative, and pedagogical projects that we are not usually paid to tend to. We highlight here our takeaways on key, grounding concepts from our experiences together.
Word cloud.
Community and power: we work with and for community development and justice. In many ways, our commitment to “communities” can be taken for granted. Indeed, we discussed how community-based research, social practice art, etc. appear to be “hot” in academic and art worlds, but how we still lack understanding of how implement and actually realize this in substantive ways. For instance, we need to define the community we work with, so how and where do we set the boundaries? Sometimes it is clear-cut because of sociological or geographic reasons, but it also happens that it is difficult to define who belongs to a community and who does not. How does the process of self-identification work? Who commands it? This kind of conversation relates to power relations: as in every group, there are always people who hold power. As engaged scholars, especially with disadvantaged or people in need, we must distinguish who is who. As important as fighting for a community is to be aware of potential inequalities within the community.
Justice and democracy: activist-informed research is about justice in one way or another, but it is not simple to explain. We examined different conceptualizations of justice, especially as linked to honesty and equality, and also to community and democracy. But, who defines these conceptualizations? When does democratic validity lead to justice? One problem comes back to the previous point, i.e., who holds power within a community, a society? Suppose those claiming justice are not represented in the system. In that case, if they are not successful, they could rarely identify themselves with that system, and it should not surprise us if they position themselves outside of it, as non-belonging. Or in other words, if democracy does not comprise its full extension, meaning power does not reside on the people, and those on top are not accountable, it is only logical to think that some people on the bottom, the oppressed and side-lined, disassociate. In those cases, justice does not serve honesty and equality; instead, it becomes a tool against part of the community, fostering non-democratic practices like segregation and alienation. A key takeaway was the necessity to reframe justice as a crucial concept in any social formation vis-à-vis democracy, especially concerning the process by which the latter unfolds.
Reform and academia: reframing justice calls for a reformist agenda. We thought about the process, strengths, and challenges of reframing justice within current political institutions, and how most are interwoven with or embedded in notions of the Western nation-state. Reforms can be implemented at other scales of politic-economic power and outside the West, as decolonial and postcolonial theory and practice shows, in Bolivia or Chile as recent examples. Nevertheless, we wondered: do we believe in reform? Going back to the act of research, questions about positionality arose here because, as academics, we are part of institutions and within the system. Is it possible to work within a system that we do not entirely agree with and that is often unjust and unequal (to us, and especially to the communities we work with)? Are we legitimizing the system by doing so? We did not reach any consensus beyond the importance of self-awareness, uneven relations of power, and the necessity to implement community-based research methodologies that give voice to the communities in setting their agendas and goals.
Resistance: to achieve more just and equal societies we need plans that encompass both direct actions and softer reforms. How does that translate into daily practices? What does resistance look like? The communities we work with keep reframing their strategies and tactics, adjusting to their (also evolving) goals. In our discussions, it seemed helpful to distinguish the everyday emancipatory strategies we have observed as being used by BIPOC communities in the US, from the long-term, repertoires of resistance and alternative institution-building, for example, by the Zapatistas in Chiapas. Again, we could not reach a general conclusion beyond the diversities and richness of every struggle, our necessity as researchers to plug into them by active listening, putting their interest in front instead of ours.
When combined, our most fundamental learning is that our definitions of justice, democracy, and community are linked, and that many global, institutional, and personal transitions can be re-defined, re-contextualized, and understood in endless ways. These definitions are constantly changing. Thus, we must be aware of these ongoing processes and understand that the ways to research them are not fixed, but evolve together with the struggles. Through our academic activity, we are not only helping the community but also transforming their reality, for example, the ways in which they see themselves. That is to say: we need to be mindful of our impacts as academics, striving to reduce these while co-producing knowledge (theoretical and empirical) that helps the goals of the people we serve. Because it is ultimately them and the public good more broadly, and not our institutions, the reasons why we carry out research in the first place. Overall, the workshop was a helpful opportunity to share personal and professional experiences as engaged scholars, reflect on the principles that drive our activity as scholars and activists, engage in conversations about research methods, ethics, and practices, and exchange information to keep our ambitions alive for social change.
“Just Research: Study, Struggle, Solidarity” is a short workshop series on conducting public scholarship and democratizing the production of knowledge.
Building on the first Just Research series in the spring of 2021, this workshop takes place over 4 weeks, provides $500 as an honorarium upon completion, and is specifically tailored for adjunct instructors in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
This workshop series aims to help CUNY Adjuncts to advance research projects (including but not limited to dissertations) that draw upon some aspect of Community-Based Research and related methodologies, such as Participatory Action Research, Collaborative Inquiry, and Practice-Based Research. Such research tackles community problems, with the aim of combining knowledge and action for policy or social change.
The workshop series will focus on
1. skills and strategies for participating effectively in such research,
2. navigating issues of rigor and validity in such work,
3. developing appropriate research strategies and outlines of presentations/ articles/ chapters for dissemination, and
4. building structures of support and room for reflexive work along the way.
Throughout the series, we will also prioritize our meetings as opportunities to broach typically overlooked or sensitive topics, to share concerns or reservations as well as aspirations related to our work, to support one another and make real progress on our respective projects, and to collectively share insights on negotiating academic milestones, disciplinary boundaries, and austerity in collaborative research.
This course aims to facilitate multi-disciplinary dialogues on theories and principles of community-based research (with special attention to race, gender, and class dimensions), the strengths and limitations of such approaches, and guiding practices and case studies/ models for successful research projects. We have designed this series to support and strengthen the significant scholarly, creative, and pedagogical work of adjuncts teaching in the humanities and humanistic social sciences across CUNY.
Eligibility:
CUNY Adjuncts: This workshop is designed for CUNY-affiliated adjuncts/ researchers, who have already formulated at least an idea for a research project. We aim to think through and reflect upon research projects that center on the complexity of real-life sociopolitical contexts and struggles, and implications and impact upon people on the ground (alongside theoretical models and debates in academic literatures). We particularly encourage previous applicants to the CUNY Adjunct Incubator program to apply to participate in this workshop series, regardless of whether their applications were successful and received funding.
For CUNY Students: Before applying, please contact the office of financial aid at your campus to ensure that you are eligible to receive this funding without it adversely impacting your existing financial aid package. In your email to them, please include the fellowship amount, the semester you would receive it, and your EMPL ID, which you can find in CUNYFirst under Student Center.
At this time, we are able to provide a $500 honorarium for each participant upon completion of the workshop series.
Time commitment:
This workshop series is designed to require 4 hours of participation each week, comprising of roughly 2-3 hours of preparatory work and a 1.5-hour meeting each week.
Schedule: Fridays, 10:30 am -12:00 pm (Dates: 3/11, 3/18, 3/25, and 4/1)
How and why did we develop this workshop series?
This workshop series builds upon last year’s Just Research workshop series, which in turn followed the success of the CUNY Adjunct Incubator, a collaborative effort between the Gittell Collective and Center for the Humanities Mellon Foundation-funded Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research. The Adjunct Incubator project advocates to improve the material conditions of university life and make them more equitable for adjuncts, by supporting the significant scholarly, creative, and pedagogical work of adjuncts teaching in the humanities and humanistic social sciences across CUNY. Providing social, logistical, financial, and professional support for the creation and circulation of knowledge by CUNY adjuncts, this platform promotes the crucial work of part-time faculty across the CUNY community and senior college campuses.
We were struck by the immense interest in urgent, action-oriented public scholarship among adjunct instructors throughout the CUNY campuses. We developed this workshop series after noting the dearth of courses that emphasize (or even mention) participatory methods and methodologies in social research and the public humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center. Of particular importance is the centrality of ethics and the obligations of public university in anti-racist solidarities and public scholarship.
The first workshop series was led by Professor Celina Su (Environmental Psychology and Urban Education, director of the Gittell Collective) and Kendra Sullivan (Associate Director, Center for the Humanities). This year will be led by Jaime Jover (Gittell Postdoctoral Fellow in Urban Studies, Environmental Psychology Program at the Graduate Center), Anita Cheng (Film and Media Department at Hunter College & Art Department at Brooklyn College) and Aurash Khawarzad (Earth and Environmental Sciences at the Graduate Center), who participated last year.
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Syllabus
1st session. March 11, 2022. Unpacking the roots and uses of participation in research
Overview: the session will cover why is worth using participatory methods, discuss different approaches and how to select and adjust them depending on our research proposal, and how to navigate questions of positionality and ethical dilemmas that may come up. Readings:
Cornwall, Andrea. 2008. Unpacking ‘Participation’: Models, Meanings, and Practice. Community Development Journal, 43:3, pp. 269–283.
Appadurai, A. 2006. The Right to Research. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 4:2, pp. 167-177.
Pulido, L. FAQs: Frequently (Un)Asked Questions about Being a Scholar Activist, pp. 341-365, in Hale, Charles, ed., Engaging Contradictions.
2nd session. March 18, 2022. Articulating Methodologies: Positionality statements, framework decision making and how identity informs
Overview: How do we go about this? How do we select specific methods that help us to connect relevant theories and research questions to communities on the ground, and what we are ultimately interested in learning about? How do we articulate our positionalities using these methods?
Stoecker, R. 1999. Are academics irrelevant? Approaches and roles for scholars in Community-Based Participatory Research. American Behavioral Scientist, pp. 840-854.
Hale, Charles, ed., Engaging Contradictions. [See pp. 370-394 of Hale PDF.]
Cairns, K. 2011. Ethnographic locations, Chapter 3 of dissertation.
3rd session. March 25, 2022. Revolutionary democratic people’s planning – escape routes from the capitalist endgame.
Overview: This session will explore concepts of justice, sustainability, fulfillment, and more, as they relate to the ability of communities to appropriate, construct, and protect their own real-world environments. Additionally, we will explore methods for grassroots research, planning, and design, and models for partnership between academia and local action-research projects.
Brown, Wendy. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (Pages 24 – 39). July 16, 2019.
Meek, David. “Cracks in the Wall of Capitalism: The Zapatistas and the Struggle to Decolonize Science”. February 26, 2018.
4th session. April 1, 2022. Participants project’s presentation & final discussion
This workshop series is organized and co-sponsored by the Gittell Collective and Center for the Humanities Mellon Foundation-funded Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research.
Join the Center for the Humanities for a showcase of creative and innovative community-based projects and research developed from several different public humanities initiatives by students and scholars at CUNY.
Over two lunchtime sessions, Fellows from Humanities New York, the Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research, and recipients of the CUNY Adjunct Incubator will present their unique projects that combine digital and community engagement with artistic and academic methodologies. Join us Thu, Dec 9th at 12:30 for the second showcase focusing on community education and public learning projects.
Read about each student fellow or scholar, their public humanities projects, and the initiatives they stem from in detail below:
Tania Avilés Vergara (CUNY Adjunct Incubator recipient, is a PhD candidate in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures, Hispanic Sociolinguistics track, at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and adjunct professor at Lehman College)
Project: Teaching and Learning Spanish at CUNY: Public Language Education Through Archival Resources advocates for the use of archives as open educational resources in the Spanish language class, in order to ground second language learning within the historical, social and linguistic experiences of CUNY students, and partners with CUNY archival institutions such as the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, the Dominican Studies Institute and the Mexican Studies, promoting their collections and educational programs in the classroom.
Image courtesy of the Collection The Bodega: A Cornerstone of Puerto Rican Barrios at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies Library & Archives. Hunter College, City University of New York.
Mariposa Fernandez (CUNY Adjunct Incubator recipient, teaches at the Herbert H. Lehman College in the Women and Gender Studies Program and the Africana Studies Department, as well as the Black Studies Program at The City College of New York)
Project: The Be A Buddy (BaB) Multimedia Project: Stories of Strength from the South Bronx aims to document community and neighborhood resilience by gathering stories of strength in the South Bronx (using photography and digital technology to document oral interviews, and offering free creative writing workshops) and explore the impact and effectiveness of THE POINT CDC’s mutual aid projects and the community building efforts of neighbors taking care of each other from 2018 to the present pandemic.
THE POINT CDC’s mutual aid projects and the community building efforts
Kendra Krueger (CUNY Adjunct Incubator recipient, Advanced Science Research Center, The Graduate Center, CUNY)
Project: The Community Sensor Lab is a space for DIY community science and advocacy which seeks to equip youth and community members with research tools and STEAM skills to better advocate for local policy change on public health and environmental justice.
Kendra Krueger (left) and Ricardo Toledo-Crow (right), co-founders of The Community Sensor Lab, work with CUNY students Samaiyah Morgan (Laguardia Community College) and Peter Christakos (City College of New York) as part of the ASRC’s Community Sensor Lab.
Luke Elliott-Negri (Humanities NY Fellow and a PhD student in the Sociology Program at The Graduate Center, CUNY)
Project: Human Politics seeks to humanize and demystify politics, politicians, and political decision-making through short interviews (typically just 10 minutes) with individuals who are, broadly defined, politically active.
Michelle Gaspari (CUNY Adjunct Incubator recipient, PhD student in Cultural Anthropology at The Graduate Center, CUNY, an Adjunct Lecturer in Sociology, Anthropology, and Women and Gender Studies at Baruch College, and a Co-Organizer at The CUNY Adjunct Project)
Project: The Adjunctification of Higher Education: A Guided Syllabus is a multimedia digital pedagogical toolkit for faculty to teach about adjunct welfare and precarity at CUNY.
Nga Than (Digital Publics Fellow for the Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research and doctoral candidate in the Sociology Program at The Graduate Center, CUNY) Project: Voices of the Gig Economy is a podcast created and curated by students of the Sociology of the Gig Economy course at Hunter College, Fall 2020. Students interviewed gig economy workers and asked them about their lived experience during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Through the lens of the workers, students were able to explore complex relationships between work, technology, and society.
About These Initiatives:
Cuny Adjunct Incubator: is a framework for supporting the significant scholarly, creative, and pedagogical work of adjuncts teaching in the humanities and humanistic social sciences across CUNY. Providing social, logistical, financial, and professional support for the creation and circulation of knowledge by CUNY adjuncts, this platform promotes the crucial work of part-time faculty across the CUNY community and senior college campuses. Sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Gittell Urban Studies Collective at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research: is an interdisciplinary platform for creative, activist, and scholarly collaboration that supports humanistic research, teaching, and activities with social justice aims. Working with a cohort of faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, and community partners, the project opens up and democratizes knowledge production, supports civic and community engagement, and connects classrooms, CUNY campuses, and the city of New York.
Public Humanities Fellowship with Humanities New York: offers advanced humanities graduate students a chance to explore the public application of their scholarly interests, including training in the methods of the public humanities, networking, and professional development. Each Fellow in the cohort of 18 designs and implements a public humanities project in collaboration with a community-based partner.
This event is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Gittell Urban Studies Collective at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and Humanities NY.
Interested in virtual reality games on environmental social justice, seed books as mutual aid, community gardens and archives, transforming an estuary into an open-air classroom, exploring climate change through a history of Freon and air conditioning?
Join the Center for the Humanities for a showcase of creative and innovative community-based projects and research developed from several different public humanities initiatives by students and scholars at CUNY.
Over two lunchtime sessions, Fellows from Humanities New York, the Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research, and recipients of the CUNY Adjunct Incubator will present their unique projects that combine digital and community engagement with artistic and academic methodologies. Join us Thu, Nov 18th at 12:30 for the first showcase focusing on environmental justice projects and research.
Alicia Grullon (CUNY Adjunct Incubator recipient, teaches at at Queens College, CUNY and the School of Visual Arts)
Project: Seed Books is an interdisciplinary art project focused on creating a community seed bank, based on seeds grown in working class IBPOC communities and what that might look like in non-traditional format.
Eric Dean Wilson (Teaching Fellow for the Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research and doctoral student in the English Department at The Graduate Center, CUNY)
Project: Narrating Ecological Crises will be a series of recorded conversations with writers, scholars, and artists about the challenges and strategies of telling the story of global warming to a public audience. The edited conversations on lyrical description, journalistic ethics, and translating scientific concepts can then be used both in writing classrooms and as seminars for the public. The project follows from Wilson’s own attempt to communicate climate science and impact for a general audience, his book After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming and the Terrible Cost of Comfort, which explores climate change through the history and impact of Freon, air conditioning and artificial cooling on the environment.
Image from an except of Eric Dean Wilson’s book “After Cooling” featured in Esquire
PedroCabello del Moral (Digital Fellow for the Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research and doctoral student in the Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures Department at The Graduate Center, CUNY)
Project: Archives in Common: Migrant Practices/Knowledges/Memory brings together community organizers, members of immigrant communities, and members of the university community to 1) assist in the support and expansion of undocu-immigrant-led initiatives (cooperatives, workshops, and gardens) devised in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and 2) think collectively about how to build an archive of the commons during a crisis. The archive’s form, structure, and contents will emerge out of the collaborative process of thinking, working, creating, and sustaining life together.
Cuny Adjunct Incubator: is a framework for supporting the significant scholarly, creative, and pedagogical work of adjuncts teaching in the humanities and humanistic social sciences across CUNY. Providing social, logistical, financial, and professional support for the creation and circulation of knowledge by CUNY adjuncts, this platform promotes the crucial work of part-time faculty across the CUNY community and senior college campuses. Sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Gittell Urban Studies Collective at The Graduate Center, CUNY.
Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research: is an interdisciplinary platform for creative, activist, and scholarly collaboration that supports humanistic research, teaching, and activities with social justice aims. Working with a cohort of faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, and community partners, the project opens up and democratizes knowledge production, supports civic and community engagement, and connects classrooms, CUNY campuses, and the city of New York.
Public Humanities Fellowship with Humanities New York: offers advanced humanities graduate students a chance to explore the public application of their scholarly interests, including training in the methods of the public humanities, networking, and professional development. Each Fellow in the cohort of 18 designs and implements a public humanities project in collaboration with a community-based partner.
What is the importance of housing financialization in contemporary capitalism? What differences can we grasp between the Global North and the Global South? Which is the role of public institutions in housing financialization before and during COVID-19? How have social movements responded to financialization? We asked ourselves these questions during the workshop Housing Financialization and the Need for a Global Renters’ Movement hosted by the Gittell Collective. Our goal was to explore the connections between the financialization of the economy, with a focus on housing, and the struggle to assert the latter as a human right. Housing financialization refers to the growth of real estate investment through financial institutions and markets. It requires understanding land and the built environment as assets, therefore housing exchange value surpasses its social value. Housing has thus become a profitable field for investment. Instead of acquiring enterprises’ stakes or investing in manufacturing companies, wealthy people and private institutions have the option to become shareholders in transnational firms that purchase foreclosed homes or blocks of social housing, where vulnerable tenants live. These companies would then speculate with those homes or force evictions by means of rising rents. At the heart of the issue is treating housing as a commodity, which has informed many housing struggles across cities around the globe.
The event was divided into two sessions on February 17 and 24, 2021. The first workshop addressed current trends in housing financialization, the role of public policies such as rent regulations, and ways to raise awareness on evictions and how they are linked with financialization. We invited Professors Raquel Rolnik (University of São Paulo, Brazil), Desiree Fields (University of California at Berkeley, United States) and Tom Slater (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom), and Dr. Erin McElroy (New York University, United States), who is also involved in the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. The second workshop revolved around different urban housing struggles in Africa, Europe, North and South America. We listened to social movements’ mobilization strategies and actions against gentrification and evictions, most of them overlapping with housing financialization dynamics. Participants included Rob Robinson (Right to the City Alliance, New York City, United States), Talita Gonsales (Zero Evictions, São Paulo, Brazil), Mandisa Shandu (Ndifuna Ukwazi, Cape Town, South Africa), Rita Silva (Habita, Lisbon, Portugal), Ricardo Apaolaza (Frente de Organizaciones en Lucha, Buenos Aires, Argentina) and Isaac Rose (Greater Manchester Housing Action, United Kingdom). The Gittell Collective is thankful for their contributions, a summary of which you can find in our YouTube channel, and this text published in Metropolitics. We hope our insights stimulate housing activists and academics to build a larger and stronger right-to-housing and to-the-city movement.
The Center for the Humanities’ and the Gittell Urban Studies Collective’ CUNY Adjunct Incubator supports the critical and community-engaged scholarship of adjuncts teaching across CUNY.
In 2020-2021, the CUNY Adjunct Incubator awarded grants to 10 CUNY adjuncts from 8 CUNY colleges to develop a wide range of public and applied projects in the arts, humanities and humanistic social sciences. Read more about their vital work below:
Alicia Grullon (Art Department, Social Practice Queens, Queens College, CUNY and The School of Visual Arts)
“Ballot 2020”, 2020 courtesy of artist Alicia Grullon
“Seed Books” an interdisciplinary art project focused on creating a community seed bank, based on seeds grown in working class IBPOC communities and what that might look like in non-traditional formats. “Seed Books’ will culminate into an archive based on re-enacted oral-histories from interviews with gardeners, activists, and residents. Programming will support critical work on the connections between the body, land rights, migration, food sovereignty, gentrification and environmental justice. The incubator grant is funding initial research, interviews and filming focused on the response to COVID19 through mutual aid groups and community gardens. Click here for more information about this project.
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Tania Avilés Vergara (Spanish for Heritage Students and Hispanic Linguistics, Lehman College, CUNY)
Image courtesy of the Collection The Bodega: A Cornerstone of Puerto Rican Barrios at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies Library & Archives. Hunter College, City University of New York.
The “Teaching and Learning Spanish at CUNY: Public Language Education Through Archival Resources” project promotes the use of archives as open educational resources (OER) in the Spanish language class.
The project seeks to center the histories, experiences and voices of Latinx communities in the Spanish class through the use of archives.
The project partners with the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, the Dominican Studies Institute and the Mexican Studies Institute, and supports these institutions by making their research and collections accessible in the classroom. Click here for more information about this project.
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Chloe Smolarski (American Social History Project/New Media Lab, CUNY Digital History Archive, and The Center for Teaching and Learning at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and Adjunct Instructor, Entertainment Technology/Emerging Media, New York City College of Technology, CUNY)
As NYC continues to battle the COVID-19 pandemic, the CUNY community has pivoted to on-line teaching while experiencing massive budget cuts and adjunct layoffs, The CUNY Digital History Archive (cdha.cuny.edu) hosted a one-day oral history workshop Inviting Authorship: Oral History as Spontaneous Literature on April 16th, 2021 with oral historian, writer, and interdisciplinary artist Nyssa Chow and is continuing to offer free training, guidance, and a platform to those who wish to conduct and archive oral histories that address the experiences of adjuncts at CUNY during the COVID-19 pandemic with an emphasis on labor and education. Click here for more information about this project.
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Kendra Krueger (Advanced Science Research Center, The Graduate Center, CUNY)
Kendra Krueger (left) and Ricardo Toledo-Crow (right), co-founders of The Community Sensor Lab, work with CUNY students Samaiyah Morgan (Laguardia Community College) and Peter Christakos (City College of New York) as part of the ASRC’s Community Sensor Lab
The Community Sensor Lab seeks to equip youth and community members with research tools and STEAM skills to better advocate for local policy change on public health and environmental justice. The project mobilizes CUNY undergraduate and NYC high school students as public educators on the versatility of D-I-Y (Do-It-Yourself) electronics and sensors. The lab also consists of a transdisciplinary working group, led by CUNY adjuncts across disciplines of art, science and the humanities, tasked with developing best practices for participatory, intersectional and decolonial research. As part of the Community Sensor Lab, Krueger made this short video explaining how to build a D.I.Y. carbon dioxide sensor.
Click here for more information about this project.
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Mariposa Fernandez (Faculty member in the Women and Gender Studies Program and Africana Studies Department at Lehman College and the Black Studies Program at City College of New York. )
The “Be a Buddy (BaB) Multimedia Project: Stories of Strength from the South Bronx” will gather stories of strength in the South Bronx to document community and neighborhood resilience, sustainability work, mutual aid projects and the community building efforts of neighbors taking care of each other in the Hunts Point/Longwood community in the South Bronx. An additional aim of the BaB Multimedia Project is to engage CUNY students and recent CUNY graduates who are involved in community work in Hunts Point and Longwood, in order to find the CUNY stories inside of the larger story of community work and members who are fighting back and fighting forward! Click here for more information about this project.
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Jasmina Sinanović (Anthropology, Gender Studies and International Studies Department, The City College of New York, CUNY; Director of Development and Finance at the Center for LGBTQ Studies, CLAGS, The Graduate Center, CUNY)
The “Transgender and Non Binary Contingent Faculty Experience at CUNY” project will focus on the experience of Transgender and Non Binary contingent faculty at CUNY. The project consists of three elements:
a survey of CUNY adjuncts that identify as transgender and/or non binary
open forum discussions about experiences and needs of transgender and/or non binary adjunct faculty
small group art exploration of CUNY adjunct experiences
Click here for more information about this project.
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Van Anh Tran (Department of Curriculum & Teaching, the Hunter School of Education, CUNY; and a PhD Candidate in Social Studies Education at Teachers College, Columbia)
Art created by: Sam Lê Shave, Asian American Resource Workshop (Boston, MA).
This project seeks to create a curricular toolkit for individuals, families, advocates, community organizers, educators, and more within and beyond the Southeast Asian (SEA) community who want to serve, educate, advocate, and organize against detentions and deportations. Over the past two decades, SEA community groups and networks have been mobilizing to defend communities from mass deportations. This project aims to create a living record and resource to pool this collective knowledge and learning to share what SEA community organizations have learned with those who are engaging and/or wanting to engage in anti-deportation work.
In seeing the ways our government has and continues to dehumanize the lives of Black and Brown people, and immigrants and refugees, we call for the abolition of carceral systems that have enacted violence against our communities and present this project and toolkit as a resource to build the capacity of our communities as we continue to fight for justice. Click here for more information about this project.
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Michelle Gaspari (Sociology, Anthropology, and Women and Gender Studies, Baruch College, CUNY, and a Co-Organizer at The CUNY Adjunct Project)
“The Adjunctification of Higher Education: A Guided Syllabus” is a multimedia digital pedagogical toolkit for faculty to teach about adjunct welfare and precarity at CUNY. The guided syllabus will consist of content and lessons to teach students about the undervalued adjunct labor that keeps New York City’s public higher education afloat, the broader sociological backdrop of higher education’s “adjunctification” in this country, and the ways that students and educators can pressure CUNY and the state to intervene and advocate for their right to fairly compensated professors. Part of the toolkit is an original short documentary on CUNY’s relationship with its adjunct workers. It features several adjuncts presenting their experiences. This can be streamed in the classroom and mobilized in adjunct activism at CUNY. There will be a panel discussion featuring the documentary and the broader syllabus project hosted by The CUNY Adjunct Project in Fall 2021.Click here for more information about this project.
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Dominika Ksel (New Media Arts, New York City College of Technology, CUNY, and Baruch College, CUNY)
The “Virtual Reality and Environmental Social Justice” class at New York City College of Technology, CUNY, looks at the intersections of social justice, gameplay, immersive storytelling and world-building through VR video and gaming to highlight the interdependent nature, necessity and future of Jamaica Bay Wildlife Preserve, the Rockaways and NYC at large. Led by Dominika Ksel, the students in the class created a multi-media project that centers on Environmental Social Justice (Urban Climate Justice and Intersectionality) in NYC (with a particular focus on the Rockaways and Jamaica Bay), including an interactive website with a 360 VR Video and Urban Climate Justice VR gameTrashTalk. Click here or below to see how the 360 video works:
Click here for more information about this class and project.
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Apeksha Mewani (Health and Human Performance at York College, CUNY)
“The Public Health Informatics Careers Dashboard” project aims to support the creation of an innovative dashboard that offers career services and support for CUNY undergraduate and graduate students of public health disciplines. The pandemic has caused a major global recession as millions are being displaced and rendered unemployed. Amid all of this, the health education economy can be strengthened through a virtual platform for public health professionals to engage and have their urgent demands carefully assessed, voiced, conveyed, and eventually met. Click here for more information about this project.
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The CUNY Adjunct Incubator is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanitiesand the Gittell Urban Studies Collective at The Graduate Center, CUNY.
“Just Research: Study, Struggle, Solidarity” is a short workshop series on conducting public scholarship and democratizing the production of knowledge. The workshop will take place over 5 weeks, provides $500 as an honorarium upon completion, and is specifically tailored for adjunct instructors in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
This workshop series aims to help CUNY Adjuncts to advance research projects (including but not limited to dissertations) that draw upon some aspect of Community-Based Research and related methodologies, such as Participatory Action Research, Appreciative or Asset-Based Inquiry, Collaborative Inquiry, and Practice-Based Research. Such research tackles community problems, with the aim of combining knowledge and action for policy or social change.
The workshop series will focus on:
1) skills and strategies for participating effectively in such research,
2) navigating issues of rigor and validity in such work,
3) developing appropriate research strategies and outlines of presentations/ articles/ chapters for dissemination, andbuilding structures of support and room for reflexive work along the way.
4) building structures of support and room for reflexive work along the way.
Throughout the series, we will also prioritize our meetings as opportunities to broach typically overlooked or sensitive topics, to share concerns or reservations as well as aspirations related to our work, to support one another and make real progress on our respective projects, and to collectively share insights on negotiating academic milestones, disciplinary boundaries, and austerity in collaborative research.
This course aims to facilitate multi-disciplinary dialogues on theories and principles of community-based research (with special attention to race, gender, and class dimensions), the strengths and limitations of such approaches, and guiding practices and case studies/ models for successful research projects. We have designed this series to support and strengthen the significant scholarly, creative, and pedagogical work of adjuncts teaching in the humanities and humanistic social sciences across CUNY.
Eligibility:
This workshop is designed for CUNY-affiliated adjuncts/ researchers, who have already formulated at least an idea for a research project. We aim to think through and reflect upon research projects that center on the complexity of real-life sociopolitical contexts and struggles, and implications and impact upon people on the ground (alongside theoretical models and debates in academic literatures).
This semester, we are only inviting previous applicants to the CUNY Adjunct Incubator program to apply to participate in this workshop series.Adjuncts who applied to the CUNY Adjunct Incubator program are encouraged to apply, regardless of whether their applications were successful and received funding. We plan on limiting the number of spots available, so that we will have sufficient time during our meetings to discuss each workshop participant’s project. We hope to expand upon this series to develop further opportunities in the future.
At this time, we are able to provide a $500 honorarium for each participant upon completion of the workshop series.
*For CUNY Students: Before applying, please contact the office of financial aid at your campus to ensure that you are eligible to receive this funding without it adversely impacting your existing financial aid package. In your email to them, please include the fellowship amount, the semester you would receive it, and your EMPL ID, which you can find in CUNYFirst under Student Center.
Time commitment:
This workshop series is designed to require 4-5 hours of participation each week, comprising of roughly 2-3 hours of preparatory work and a 1.5-hour meeting each week.
Tentative schedule:
Fridays, 3:00-4:30 pm Dates: 2/26, 3/5, 3/12, 3/19, and 3/26
How and why did we develop this workshop series?
This workshop series builds upon the success of the CUNY Adjunct Incubator, a collaborative effort between the Gittell Collective and Center for the Humanities Mellon Foundation-funded Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research. The Adjunct Incubator project advocates to improve the material conditions of university life and make them more equitable for adjuncts, by supporting the significant scholarly, creative, and pedagogical work of adjuncts teaching in the humanities and humanistic social sciences across CUNY. Providing social, logistical, financial, and professional support for the creation and circulation of knowledge by CUNY adjuncts, this platform promotes the crucial work of part-time faculty across the CUNY community and senior college campuses.
We were struck by the immense interest in urgent, action-oriented public scholarship among adjunct instructors throughout the CUNY campuses– including and especially among researchers formally housed in the humanities, alongside those in the social sciences. We developed this workshop series after noting the dearth of courses that emphasize (or even mention) participatory methods and methodologies in social research and the public humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center. Of particular importance is the centrality of ethics and the obligations of public university in anti-racist solidarities and public scholarship.
The workshop series title is inspired in part by Michelle Fine’s book, Just Research in Contentious Times (Teachers College Press, 2017). It will be led by Professor Celina Su (Environmental Psychology and Urban Education, director of the Gittell Collective, CUNY) and Kendra Sullivan (Associate Director, Center for the Humanities, CUNY Graduate Center). It was also conceived to potentially become part of a modular seminar series led by Dr. Su, Dr. Michelle Fine (Environmental Psychology, Co-Director of the Public Science Project, CUNY), and Dr. María Torre (Co-Director of the Public Science Project).
What will the workshop series tackle and cover?
Over the past few decades, the involvement of community members in research has emerged as both an explicit goal and a practice in a range of disciplines and fields independently— in education, political science, sociology, anthropology, public policy, public health, arts and design, and development studies (especially international development), among others. It is related to and sometimes alternately called Participatory Action Research (PAR), action research, and critical praxis. Although some researchers characterize community-based participatory research (CBPR) as a set of methods (alongside surveys, interviews, mapping, PhotoVoice, observation, ethnography, etc.), we will focus primarily on PAR as an epistemological standpoint, with a set of questions that spans across disciplines. Such an approach explicitly challenges positivist assumptions that universal, stable, ahistorical scientific criteria, data, and truths exist, and that these truths can be best “discovered” through laboratory settings and experimental designs in the social sciences, or through universal criteria for what becomes canonical in the arts. It compels us (researchers who work in the academy) to confront power dynamics in the research process, make our interpretivist approaches legible and explicit, and prioritize community needs alongside institutional, academic ones.
Rather than focusing on specific sets of methods, we will grapple with tensions that arise in projects aimed at producing both “academic” and “actionable” knowledge, with the goal of helping each workshop participant’s research project to make tangible progress. (We will provide resources for participants to get a quick but solid grasp on appropriate methods, if needed.) How should we collaborate with communities in meaningful ways, and co-produce “useful” outputs and knowledge? How do we engage in research that simultaneously critically examines the phenomenon at hand, and reflects commitment to larger social struggles? How do we navigate the logistical, political, and epistemological processes (both in the field and in our academic institutions)? Who owns this data, this knowledge?
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Just Research Syllabus:
Below please find additional information on the weekly workshops in the series. Each workshop session is designed to both question dominant, extractive and colonizing modes of research fieldwork, and ideally, to help participants to enact alternatives, producing useful tools or pieces of participatory research puzzles along the way: a research design outline or methods section, a memorandum of understanding, etc.
(As of January 13, 2021, exact readings and links may be subject to a bit of change.)
1. Unpacking the roots and uses of “participation” in research
Guiding question: Why pursue participatory research, and substantively work with community folks from outside the academy in our scholarship?
Readings:
1) Wallerstein, N and Duran, B. 2008. The theoretical, historical & practice roots of CBPR. In Minkler, M and Wallerstein, N, eds., Community Based Participatory Research for Health: From Process to Outcomes. Chapter 2, pp. 25-40. [See Minkler Wallerstein PDF.]
2) Cornwall, Andrea. 2008. Unpacking ‘Participation’: Models, Meanings, and Practice. Community Development Journal, 43:3, pp. 269–283.
3) Appadurai, A. 2006. The Right to Research. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 4:2, pp. 167-177.
4) Warner, Michael. 2002. Publics and Counterpublics (abbreviated version).
5) Mbembe, Achille. 2020. The Universal Right to Breathe.
DUE: one-page summary/notes on research project and goals for the workshops. Depending on how far along you are in your project, try to give us either your research puzzle or the different iterations of your “so-what” takeaways
IN SESSION: Case readings exercise
2. Articulating methodologies: Participatory methods and positionality statements
Guiding questions: How do we go about this? How do we select specific methods that help us to connect relevant theories and research questions to communities on the ground, and what we are ultimately interested in learning about? How do we articulate our positionalities using these methods?
Readings:
1) Stoecker, R. 1999. Are academics irrelevant? Approaches and roles for scholars in Community-Based Participatory Research. American Behavioral Scientist, pp. 840-854.
2) Saltmarsh, Hartley, Clayton. 2009. Democratic Engagement White Paper.
3) Pulido, L. FAQs: Frequently (Un)Asked Questions about Being a Scholar Activist, pp. 341-365, in Hale, Charles, ed., Engaging Contradictions. [See pp. 370-394 of Hale PDF.]
4) Cairns, K. 2011. Ethnographic locations, Chapter 3 of dissertation.
5) Corburn, J. 2007. The Mapping of Local Knowledge. Street Science: Environmental and Community Health Justice, pp. 173-199.
3. Navigating ethical dilemmas in participatory research : Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) and Memoranda Of Understanding (MOUs)
Guiding questions: What ethical dilemmas can we anticipate and prepare to navigate along the way, as best we can? How do we address tensions regarding power inequalities and our university/ institutional constraints?
Readings:
1) Minkler, M. 2004. Ethical challenges for the “outside” researcher in community-based participatory research. Health Education & Behavior, 31:7, pp. 684-697.
2) Coy, M. 2006. This morning I’m a researcher, this afternoon I’m an outreach worker: Ethical dilemmas in practitioner research. International Journal of Social Research Methodology: Theory & Practice, 9:5, pp. 419-431.
3) Fine, M. & Torre, M.E. 2006. Intimate details: Participatory action research in prison. Action Research, 4:3, pp. 253-269.
4) Noorani et al, 2017. “Participatory research and the medicalization of research ethics processes.” Social & Legal Studies, 26:3, pp. 378-400.
4. Emphasizing action: Impact validity, collective struggle, and policy change
Guiding question: How do we design our research and structure our sharings to amplify impact, to align with movement/ campaign timelines and priorities, and to prompt action?
Readings:
1) Sandwick, T., et al. 2018. Promise and Provocation: Humble Reflections on Critical Participatory Action Research for Social Policy. [See “Special URBAN issue” PDF, pp. 37-66 of PDF.]
2) Wyly, E. 2009. Strategic positivism. Professional Geographer, 61: pp. 310-322.
3) Massey et al. 2013. Introducing Impact validity.” Journal of Social Issues, 69,4, pp. 615-632.
4) Kelley, R, et al. 2016. Black Study, Black Struggle. Forum in the Boston Review.
IN SESSION: Discussion of individual projects
5. Reflecting on analyses and sharing our research : Plans of dissemination
Guiding questions: How do we disseminate our findings? What sorts of multiple products and multiple audiences do we wish to prioritize and focus on, both within and outside of academia?
Readings:
1) Neale, J. 2008. Ranting and silence: Contradictions of Writing for Activists and Academics, in Heidi Armbruster & Anna Lærke, eds., Taking Sides: Ethics, Politics, and Fieldwork in Anthropology. Berghahn Books.
2) Davis, D. and C. Craven. 2016. Feminist Ethnography, Chapter 6, pp. 121-143.
3) Chen, K. 2016. Navigating the descent: Getting ethnographic research into print. Draft shared with permission.
4) In addition to readings, explore Humanities for All projects:
IN SESSION: Discussion of Humanities for All (especially Angeles Donoso Macaya’s work)
This workshop series is organized and co-sponsored by the Gittell Collective and Center for the Humanities Mellon Foundation-funded Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research.
The Center for the Humanities’ CUNY Adjunct Incubator, co-sponsored by the Gittell Urban Studies Collective, is a framework for supporting the significant scholarly, creative, and pedagogical work of adjuncts teaching in the humanities and humanistic social sciences across CUNY. Providing social, logistical, financial, and professional support for the production and circulation of knowledge by CUNY adjuncts, this platform promotes the crucial work of part-time faculty across CUNY community and senior college campuses.
In 2018-19, the CUNY Adjunct Incubator awarded grants to 13 CUNY adjuncts from 6 CUNY colleges to develop a wide-range of deeply impactful public and applied projects in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. These projects range from addressing the needs and amplifying the successes of CUNY student-parents, to writing and performing new musical compositions for 3D-printed instruments, to photo-documentation of the erasure of Kurdish language from Kurdistan/Turkey, to food provision mapping that elucidates eating habits, access, and food inequities, and many more projects taking the form of concerts, dance, music, workshops, books, film, performance, classes, independent scholarship, and events. Read more about these grant-funded projects and the vital research and work by these outstanding CUNY adjuncts:
This project seeks to develop institutional and pedagogical policies and practices aimed at better serving the needs of student-parents at CUNY. Click here for more information about this project.
Aaron Botwick and Gabrielle Kappes (English, Lehman College, CUNY)
This project is designed to enable students to better grasp the relationships between literature, culture, and history by drawing connections between the digital archives of 8th- through 20th-century literature and aspects of the current digital communications revolution. Click here for more information about this project.
Harry Stafylakis (Music, City College of New York, CUNY)
This public research project is to create a new musical composition, Singularity, 2018, for 3D-printed string octet and orchestra. Click here for more information about this project. https://www.youtube.com/embed/xcLR6xwYpkA
Angelika Winner (Earth Science and Geography, Lehman College/Hunter College, CUNY)
This project is an ethnographic study of food provisioning practices in Newark, NJ, seeking to develop an intersectional and dynamic understanding of food environments, eating habits, access, and their entanglements with food inequities. Click here for more information about this project.
This project is a collection of essays that offers a critical introduction to the groundbreaking videos and activism of Abounaddara, the anonymous Syrian film collective, framing the ethical, political, and aesthetic insights of their work within the transformative effects of new digital technologies in war reporting and social justice campaigns. Click here for more information about this project.
Nia Love (Drama, Theatre & Dance, Queens College, CUNY)
This project is an unfolding of the term “ghost,” which grapples with what it means to live within conditions shaped by the “afterlife” of slavery. This project will take the form of a four-part performance installation which is driven by this fundamental query: what remains of the Middle Passage as force, gesture, and affect? Click here for more information about this project.
Corinna Mullin (Political Science, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY)
This project builds upon the multi-method qualitative research she has conducted in Tunisia over the past six years on the colonial origins, architecture, and imperial imbrications of Tunisia’s security state. Click here for more information about this project.
Maria Grewe and Mark Alpert (English, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY)
This project is a three-part pedagogy workshop series led by composition/rhetoric and literature adjunct faculty in the English Department at John Jay College, CUNY to provide a forum for and foster collaboration between adjunct faculty. Click here for more information about this project.
Pamela A. Proscia (Education, Hunter College, CUNY)
This project is a series of educational events that seek to expand the ways in which we think about growing and harvesting plant life through the perspectives of cross-cultural communities. Click here for more information about this project.
This project is a series of events and workshops bringing together faculty from the Mathematics and Computer Science departments at Queens College, CUNY to discuss interdisciplinary approaches to computer science and mathematics by putting them in conversation around mutual relevance. Click here for more information about this project.
The CUNY Adjunct Incubator Advisory Committee is comprised of: Ujju Aggarwal, Celina Su, Kendra Sullivan, and Mary N. Taylor.
The CUNY Adjunct Incubator is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities through generous grants from theSylvia Klatzkin Steinig Fund and the Gittell Urban Studies Collective at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
The CUNY Adjunct Incubator is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanitiesand the Gittell Urban Studies Collective at the Graduate Center, CUNY. The Center for the Humanities thanks the Sylvia Klatzkin Steinig Fund for their generous support.
Kendra Krueger (left) and Ricardo Toledo-Crow (right), co-founders of The Community Sensor Lab, work with CUNY students Samaiyah Morgan (Laguardia Community College) and Peter Christakos (City College of New York) as part of the ASRC’s Community Sensor Lab.
Image from an except of Eric Dean Wilson’s book “After Cooling” featured in Esquire
Gittell Collective 