Author: OTH

Interview: Dana Cuff, cityLAB

Posted on by OTH

Introduction

While researching cityLAB for the OTH Urban Humanities Issue, there were so many projects, people, and concepts that caught my eye that I feel I could discuss with the director, Dana Cuff, for longer than thirty minutes. We kept it pretty high level, as she offered perspective on cityLAB’s evolution in the past ten years and the parallels in their work and the field with the public view of the urban humanities. Thank you to Dr. Cuff for taking time to chat and connect over shared interests and cityLAB’s exciting work.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Chris 

Introduce yourself and cityLAB.

Dana 

Okay. So my name is Dana Cuff. I have a PhD in architecture, which is a humanities degree, because it’s primarily about architectural history, though the way I did my degree was also an anthropological kind of focus, and I have been teaching for 25 years at University of California, Los Angeles. And 16 years ago, I started cityLAB there, which was really a kind of design research center intended to bring architects, actually, to critical issues. Katrina had happened not long before that, speaking of New Orleans —

Chris 

–very familiar.*

*Chris is from South Louisiana and brought this up before the interview started.

Dana 

And we had no way of responding, so it seemed like we needed new formats. So cityLAB emerged out of that. We really took a proactive stance towards critical issues, not Katrina, but issues around Los Angeles, Southern California, and beyond. And then in 2012, I, along with my colleagues, got a big grant, a very generous grant from the Mellon Foundation to launch the Urban Humanities, which was really this experiment in integrative humanities between myself, a professor in planning, Anastasia Lukaitu-Saderas, and two humanities professors, Todd Presner, who works in digital humanities and is also a Germanic scholar and happen to pick up an extra PhD in art history while he was at it, literally just got two. And Maite Zubiaurre, who is a professor of Spanish and Portuguese languages and a translator and writes a really wide array of studies…she’s now working on films about border deaths in the Southwest. So it’s a really great, amazing group of core faculty, and it’s led by, most importantly, the day-to-day operations and management of it is now led by Dr. Gustavo Leclerc, who has his PhD in architecture from UCLA. He was one of my former students, but he’s a senior scholar in Latinx urbanism, so he’s been a terrific addition to the team.

Chris 

So since 2012 and the grant from the Mellon Foundation, there’s definitely been a lot of different movement—scholarship, public understanding, etc., around the urban humanities, defining what that is both in practice and in the classroom. So, ten years later…how has that definition changed for you. 

Well, it’s interesting. I think the definition we gave it at the start still holds for me. It’s just way more meaningful and robust than it used to be. So we defined it, and probably the book we wrote together* would be a better source than my memory, but we define it as the integrative study among architecture, planning and the humanities into the past histories of cities, the contemporary interpretation of everyday life in cities. And this is really what distinguishes what I think is most important about urban humanities—projections about possible futures based on those first two analyses. And to me, it’s that idea of opening possible futures based on historic and contemporary analyses that distinguishes urban humanities from other humanities, where that kind of projective or generative role is less clearly a component. And essentially that turns it into an ethical practice, which is also something that the university has really only explicitly dealt with in philosophy in the past. And at the same time, I would say there’s a tacit ethical dimension in every department in the university. So we try to flesh that out and really think through what that might mean for urban activism from a scholarly engagement perspective.

*Urban Humanities New Practices for Reimagining the City (MIT Press 2020)

Chris

That’s a really good segue—speaking about possible future—into what why “Education Workforce Housing in California: Developing the 21st Century Campus” caught my attention on cityLAB’s recent publication list. Having previously worked in a freelance contract for a graduate program with the ultimate goal of improved primary school teacher retention rates, to see a more wholistic and dynamic approach to educators and the space in policy and in our cities we carve out was impressive.

Dana 

Thinking about cityLAB and Urban Humanities, they’re kind of braided together, dovetailed. But cityLAB is kind of the design/research arm which we fund. We initiate projects and we fund from whatever we can call together, frankly. Humanities is our curricular piece, and it evolved later because we realized that we should be training a new generation of people who have those kind of convictions. Like you’re talking about—how could we make the world we want to live in and why can’t we bring our scholarship to that? So if scholarship, particularly in fields like anthropology but also in architecture and in planning—have been an extractive practice, meaning we go in, we learn about you, and then we go back and we do whatever we want with that knowledge. We wanted to make it an engaged practice where it was clear we were partners in that knowledge production.

So education, workforce housing, came out of cityLAB, but it’s really completely colored by everything that has happened in urban humanities. We basically realized there was land that–a lot of land in California, at least. It’s an interesting history. Again, looking at the history made us understand why this was available and what would be some of the boundaries for it.

When they were laying out the township and section system of Jeffersonian Land Management, two sections were given over to public schools in every township. Crazy. So they had all this land and in the early years of this, so that’s in the late 18th century, in the early years, they sold off portions to fund different things and basically they gave away the family jewels in a way.

And it wasn’t always clear that it had a long-lasting impact on education. Still, there’s a lot of land left, but we now have to be more cautious that whatever we’re taking it for is going to benefit the future of the students who are getting educated there or the teachers.

Chris

Well, and that’s something I imagine in teaching over the past 16-18 years, that hopefully the students that you’re encountering today are a little more acutely aware of. There’s less of that land, for example (chuckling). And so the decisions that we make going forward with it now have to be a little more thoughtful. And they do have to be engaged from a pedagogical level about these issues at an early level and how they can implement them after school.

We have a broad humanities audience for this newsletter. A lot of these conversations are often just about the tangible value of the work that people in humanities spaces produce. And it seems like you guys, by pairing those to both the design and lab aspect of it with the pedagogical, answer some of those concerns.

Dana

Absolutely. Think about the historical evolution of school land, just taking the same example, and then spending two full years trying to figure out what actually happens if someone—it was legal to build on school land before our current legislative bill, but nobody could get it done. And once you started studying that, that’s the sort of contemporary analysis—you understand that the people who know most about this—say administrators, communities who were blocking it, teachers who didn’t want to live in what was nearby, blah, blah, all these people who were stakeholders could teach us what it would mean to open that possibility for future generations of teachers and Californians. So this is the second time in my career I’ve successfully converted research into policy. And we’re nearly at the end of California state policy enabling and entitling the ability to build housing, affordable housing, 50% affordable on school property.

Yeah, it’d be amazing. Our calculation is if it was maxed out–we did a GIS analysis of all the school property in the entire state with our partners from UC Berkeley, and there’s 150,000 acres of school and, and half of that is potentially developable, meaning it isn’t having current uses on it. It is available to people for housing, blah, blah, blah. You could build 2.3 million units of housing at three stories or less, which is what the bill would allow. So it would solve California’s housing problem–like that. That’s not going to happen. But if 10% of that were built, it would be a huge difference.

Chris

Well, and I think that’s something—it must be hard. I’m not an architect, but being around architects all the time, balancing the aspirational with the practical, but also with the policy making, knowing you could fix all of it like that pretty quick. But even 10% at least is a step in the right direction, right?

Dana

Yeah. And, you know, what we think of is that we basically make architecture possible in new situations. That cityLAB’s job is never to do the architecture, but to make it possible for architects to do new kinds of work. So that’s what this policy would do. And your firm would be the kind of firm that might be interested in this, because there should be a lot more districts and nonprofit builders trying to do that.

Urban humanities does not get to that policy level. That’s really a kind of much more in the weeds, deep dive research project. But the people that we hire at cityLAB are always urban humanities graduates because they’re the ones who understand the full spectrum of concerns and issues. And our most successful graduates from urban humanities really are–well, one form of successful graduate are the 50 or so PhDs who went through the program, who got jobs based on, in part, their urban humanities graduate certificates and experiences, which really distinguishes them from other candidates, from art history or literature or education.

Chris 

Well, I think that analytical and engagement pairing serves really well as far as being able to apply—whether they stay in something related to the urban humanities or test waters outside. I think that’s something unique in urban humanities field, which is an ever-evolving discipline.

Dana

But an engagement is key, so you’re raising that again is really fundamental. There’s a part of me that wonders if the students interested in engagement aren’t the ones who come to us automatically. And so they’re just much more dynamic in terms of their thinking about the potential social justice impacts of their scholarship. But urban humanities, the program that we run, puts a very fine point on that and gives them direct experience about how to think through social and spatial justice in terms of humanities kind of contexts. 

Chris

That interplay in the urban humanities with the work and research that you guys do between the spatial justice and environmental justice, and then at the end, the policy making, there must be an activism part somewhere in there too.

Dana

Really, I don’t separate activism out of it. I think scholars engaged in social justice questions have to be recognized. They are also activists and grapple with that. It’s interesting, you know–I just had this happen again in the spring with some of my students, You know, historians and other scholars are rightly uncomfortable in community engaged projects where they don’t affiliate in some way, a kind of membership there. So what we were investigating this spring was the anti-Chinese massacre in Los Angeles. 18 men were hung in 1871 in a race riot, basically. Not exactly part of Los Angeles’ well-known history. And there’s a real reckoning and reparations that has to happen, and history and solid historical scholarship is fundamental to the new sort of regimes or paradigms of reparation. So I had two classes going. The one that was in urban humanities was around black displacement along the California coastlines, southern California. Two of us, three of us, actually, worked on that with students and trying to unearth the historical records–

Chris

Yeah, talk about hard research…

Dana 

Yeah, very hard. I mean, it’s really a rigorous historical past, and it’s absolutely activism, and it matters. And trying to get students to—or, connecting with those students who want to do work that matters in some way, that has an impact, is what urban humanities is able to do. And it surely isn’t all the university students. Humanities is kind of a luxurious enterprise, in some ways. We read archives. We read books —

Chris

Can be a tad esoteric for some. 

Dan

Exactly. And I am all for that being supported by the university. I think it’s wonderful that there’s still room for someone to sit in the basement with a bunch of old Roman coins and go through them. It’s wonderful. It really is a luxury. But that’s not everybody’s cup of tea. And we haven’t really allowed for other alternatives in the humanities as legitimate scholarship. And I think that’s one of the struggles that urban humanities–and I put urban humanities and public humanities together, though our focus on cities and space is more explicit. But there’s also other kinds of integrative humanities, like medical humanities–I think that those are all providing new ways for humanists to connect with impactful ideas about their research.

Chris

Definitely. I think what stands out to me is that comparison of the scholar in the basement going through the coins compared to kind of what some of the urban humanities has to offer. I cringe at it a little bit at first because I was an English major, I was a specifically an English literature and political science major. But then you come to realize that, at least for me, the stuff that I learned coming up in those schools was stuff that informs how I see my environment. And what the urban humanities are working towards is always kind of environmental. So it’s always a little bit bigger than the person poring through the old book or the old coin collection. And that’s what it feels to me, and that’s why it’s interesting to me. And that’s what makes it harder for, I think, me and a lot of people to sometimes grasp where does it start, where does it end? And that’s not always the right question to ask. I think it’s, you know, the activities that get you there.

Dana

It’s interesting you say that, where it starts and where it ends. The way that resonates with me and my experience in teaching graduate students. We’ve had now, ten years, 250 students moved through our urban humanities program. And the vast majority of them, I think 210 of those, have gotten their graduate certificate in urban humanities. Big numbers now. And over the years, I’ve seen various kinds of intellectual or ethical stumbles that we make or our students make, but together we discover them. And one of them is that you can’t do trans-disciplinary work, work that spans disciplines as well, before you know what your own discipline’s boundaries are, So, people say,

“Oh, if you mix disciplines, you get a camel instead of a horse or something like that.”

I mean, I don’t really believe that. I think that’s a ridiculous adage. But what has seemed true to me is that when you come to graduate school, especially, and you’re getting a PhD in some field, everyone comes with a kind of imposter syndrome, like how’d I get in–or all the decent people do. And as they go through that, one way of answering that question is–what is my discipline and how do I fit within it?

So they’re searching for the boundaries–so we can’t immediately go in and poke holes in that to say, Oh, look, here’s where we can leak out. This is where we can make a connection. Here’s where art history and planning might intersect in public arts or social practice arts. They’re just too busy trying to make sure they know where art history lives. And I really think that’s an important step in an individual’s understanding of their capacities to respect. So at the beginning, I was always talking about trans-disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity and realized that really the first step is to discuss and acknowledge disciplinarity and the value that has.

So then you find what you’re able to—what porous parts of the boundary might make sense for you and your work.

Chris

Yes. Now that totally makes sense. You should know your own space first before you venture off too far I guess (chuckles).

Dana

Yeah. And that is something you learn all your life, but especially when you’re starting as an academic or an advanced graduate student–that’s a plague, almost seems to be a plague in an important rite of passage.

Chris 

Any last projects, news, or upcoming cityLAB happenings you want to plug?

Dana 

Sure. I’ll plug this. There are many things about cityLAB I’d like to plug, but one of the things we’ve done, particularly because of our work in urban humanities at City Lab, is to launch a second satellite cityLAB in the city, not on campus. So we call it cityLAB Westlake or CoLAB. I’m sitting in City Lab Westlake. Now, we formed deep partnerships with three or four community organizations here so that instead of each year engaging with, say, the history of Black Santa Monica and its advocates, we have here really long-term partners who are working, say with Latinx immigration issues, especially in the neighborhood we are.

Chris

Yeah. They’re integrated outside of your scope. They’re already existing there.

Dana

Yeah, that’s right. And really, they’re the experts here, and we’re their guests, and if we do well, become their partners. So that’s this new model of engaged scholarship that’s really taking partnerships and collaboration much more seriously and kind of living where we work. People here are super generous and don’t mind us always lurking around, but we then develop projects with them. We develop research proposals. We have one right now called Reflections, which is telling immigrant histories and the histories of this neighborhood, which is almost entirely Latinx but has waves of different national immigrant histories at the local public library. So we’re working with the library, with Ola which is a Heart of Los Angeles youth education group and our kind of historical background. And together we’re going to make this public project where this urban humanities gets integrated into the neighborhood through the public library.

Chris 

Nice. That’s really cool.

Dana

Yeah, the public library is being central to taking a kind of neutral and politically ethical stand in neighborhoods in general.

 

OTH Podcast Picks: Urban Humanities

Posted on by OTH

by Megan Smith

Covid-19 perpetuated a worldwide pause in which problems of the city unit such as spatial justice, urban planning and living, food production, and city architecture became more salient and were critically analyzed. The realities of climate change also became clear as the cessation of global travel and social-economic activities improved air quality and decreased water pollution (Rume & Islam, 2020). As the world begins to reopen, humans have the opportunity to use the insight gained from the societal closures to reimagine new cityscapes and develop environmentally-conscious living practices. OTH has gathered relevant recent episodes of podcasts discussing topics in the Urban humanities, a field that has been addressing these problems since long before the pandemic and offers innovative ideas, practices, and solutions to living sustainably and rebuilding more equitable cities.

Rume, T., & Islam, S. (2020). Environmental effects of COVID-19 pandemic and potential strategies of sustainability. Heliyon, 6(9), e04965. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e04965

Urban Homesteading- Heirloom Skills and Permaculture

LISTEN: https://pdcastsusworldradio.libsyn.com/urban-homesteading-heirloom-skills-and-permaculture 

Architecture and Design

“For Trey Trahan, founder of Trahan Architects, human connection, ecology, and unvarnished beauty encompass the core ethos of his work which primarily focuses on creating cultural architectural spaces. With roots in New Orleans, and their global perspective based in New York, they have risen to the rank of the number one design firm by Architect 50, an official publication of the American Institute of Architects. He leads his firm with the conviction of bringing humility and awareness into a mindful design process to create authentic spaces that elevate our lives and the human experience.” via reSITE

LISTEN: https://www.resite.org/stories/trey-trahan-on-building-sacred-spaces-for-connection

Spatial Justice

“We often think of our cities and towns as their own entities in control of what they do, and for a good part history they have been. On this episode, we’re going to look at how emerging tensions with states and the erosion of  Local Control has been playing out in our communities and impacting spatial issues including the environment, economic development, and social issues.” via Isn’t that Spatial

LISTEN: https://isntthatspatial.net/episodes/2019/4/18/local-control

Public Water Access and Sustainability

LISTEN: https://anchor.fm/urd

Digital Society 


 

LISTEN: https://mysmart.community/podcast/

OTH Bookshelf: Urban Humanities

Posted on by OTH

by Clare Doyle, OTH

“A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.” 

Margaret Mead, World Enough (1975)

This issue of OTH Bookshelf comprises over 120 academic open access titles in the areas of urban humanities, focusing on books that would be of most interest and value to HSS scholars and students. 

The OTH list includes the book’s author or editor names, title and title remainder, year of publication, publisher, and open access format (PDF, EPUB, MOBI, etc.) Subject headings in the list are taken from WorldCat records, if available: if not, original cataloging of subject headings is provided in WorldCat format, for consistency. The DOI (Digital Object Identifier) of the book is given if it is available on the publisher’s website; if not, the URL is provided. The ISBNs listed are for the online version of the book if available, and if more than one online ISBN is available the ISBN for the PDF version has been preferred; if there is not an online or e-book ISBN, the ISBN featured on the publisher’s website is included. The book’s license type (Creative Commons, etc.) is included if this has been provided by the publisher.

The OTH Bookshelf: Urban Humanities lists titles from some 30 publishers: if our readers are aware of any title or publishers that are not included, please feel free to submit them for consideration. To be included in OTH Bookshelf, a book must be available to read online and/or download for free and must have been assigned an ISBN.

Download Spreadsheet Version (.xslx)

OTH Bookshelf: Ecology and Environmental Studies

Posted on by OTH

by Clare Doyle, OTH

This issue of OTH Bookshelf comprises over 120 academic open access titles in the areas of environmental and ecology studies, focusing on books that would be of most interest and value to HSS scholars and students. 

The OTH list includes the book’s author or editor names, title and title remainder, year of publication, publisher, and open access format (PDF, EPUB, MOBI, etc.) Subject headings in the list are taken from WorldCat records, if available: if not, original cataloging of subject headings is provided in WorldCat format, for consistency. The DOI (Digital Object Identifier) of the book is given if it is available on the publisher’s website; if not, the URL is provided. The ISBNs listed are for the online version of the book if available, and if more than one online ISBN is available the ISBN for the PDF version has been preferred; if there is no online or e-book ISBN, the ISBN featured on the publisher’s website is included. The book’s license type (Creative Commons, etc.) is included if this has been provided by the publisher.

The OTH Bookshelf: Ecology and Environmental Studies lists titles from some 40 publishers: if our readers are aware of any title or publishers that are not included, please feel free to submit them for consideration. To be included in OTH Bookshelf, a book must be available to read online and/or download for free and must have been assigned an ISBN.

Download Spreadsheet Version (.xslx)

Highlight: The Alternatives Project (TAP)

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by Megan Smith, OTH

In honor of Earth Month 2022, OTH is highlighting The Alternatives Project (TAP) and three of their associated organizations for their efforts in environmental justice. These organizations exemplify the power of the people to resist the current extractive economy organizing society today and offer hope that there are alternatives to creating an equal and sustainable future for humanity and our earth. TAP is a transnational organization on a mission to build “a global collective, critical voice-oriented towards education. 

UPROSE

Read about UPROSE, a women of color-led, grassroots organization that established Sunset Park Climate Justice Center, a climate adaptation and community resiliency planning project in Brooklyn, New York.

The Sunrise Movement

The Sunrise Movement is a youth led movement that is fighting climate change through their current campaign “The Green New Deal,” a congressional resolution to mobilize American society to use 100% clean and renewable energy, sustainable living-wage jobs for all, and a people centered economy.

The United Frontline Table

The United Frontline Table is an indigenous-led organization that is human-centered and focused on building a regenerative economy that respects the principle of all peoples right to health and equal environmental law.

 

Princeton’s Mellon Fellows are bringing fresh perspectives to research and teaching in architecture, urbanism and the humanities

Posted on by OTH

by Jamie Saxon, Office of Communications

This article was originally published by the Office of Communications at Princeton University. OTH received permission to republish this article and the original story can be viewed here.

Since 2014, this interdisciplinary program housed in the School of Architecture has brought together students and faculty with an interest in cities and the built environment through public programming and a series of undergraduate and graduate courses.

A critical component of the initiative is a fellowship program that brings a small select cohort of scholars to campus annually.                              

In addition to their own research, the Princeton Mellon Fellows teach courses and contribute to programming related to the initiative’s continuing theme, “Cities on the Edge: Hemispheric Comparisons and Connections.” This theme explores the ways in which cities exist on the edge of sustainability and climate change, are sites for the connective and comparative study of migration, and allow for scholarship that foregrounds hemispheric comparisons and connections. The program also creates opportunities for social justice-oriented scholarship and civic engagement within urban studies.

Fellows also present and discuss their research as part of the Mellon Forum on the Urban Environment, which serves as the intellectual core of the program.

Principal investigators Mario Gandelsonas, the Class of 1913 Lecturer in Architecture, professor of the School of Architecture and director of the Program in Urban Studies, and Alison Isenberg, professor of history, lead the cohort.

Gandelsonas said the fellows contribute in important ways to the School of Architecture (SoA), where their impact in the classroom inspires and informs the work of undergraduate and graduate students.

“The Mellon Initiative Fellows have been teaching courses at the SoA that expand the range of offerings and subjects with a focus on urbanism, urban architecture and planning,” he said. “The influence of these very well-attended courses is visible particularly in the graduate program, where an increasing number of students have been proposing themes for their master’s theses related to urban and environmental issues.”

Each year, one of the fellows also co-teaches with Gandelsonas the undergraduate interdisciplinary urban studio (ARC205) at the School of Architecture. “The role of the Mellon fellow has been, on one hand to develop a seminar that is an integral part of this unique studio, and on the other hand to bring an interdisciplinary voice that expands and enriches the development of the student projects,” Gandelsonas said.

‘A truly interdisciplinary cohort’

From initial partnerships with the School of Architecture, the Humanities Council and the Program in Latin America Studies, the Mellon Initiative now works with most academic units across campus. The initiative collaborates closely with High Meadows Environmental Institute, PIIRS, SPIA, the Lewis Center for the Arts, and the Metropolis Project of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, as well as many humanities departments to bring in each year’s Mellon Fellows. These connections, Isenberg said, “creates a truly interdisciplinary cohort.”

Every fellow teaches at least one course, which in some cases helps campus partners fill shifting demands in methods or topics.

“We bring to campus top scholars in disciplines with large student interest but no Princeton department, for example, in fields like urban planning and geography,” said Isenberg, who has worked with the Mellon Initiative since its launch. She added that these courses also serve the University by “bridging humanities and the arts to engineering, policy and environmental studies.” Fellows also have helped campus partners expand scholarship in fields such as trans and queer studies, and gender and sexuality studies.

“Having a call for interdisciplinary fellows each year enables us to hire a dynamic group of scholars who are at the leading edge of their fields,” said Aaron Shkuda, program manager of the Princeton Mellon Initiative and a lecturer in architecture. Often the fellows have combined advanced degrees from several fields such as landscape architecture and geography, urban planning and international development, or engineering and anthropology.

“This interdisciplinarity helps illuminate the research and teaching opportunities of the fellows program,” Isenberg said. 

New areas of research and scholarship

Shkuda added that the fellows have an important impact on the future direction of teaching and research on cities and the built environment at the University.

“Our fellows design programming and classes that draw broad interest from students, faculty and the public at large,” he said. “They are often among the first Princeton scholars to focus on topics that have come to define discourse across the disciplines, such as the way climate change has changed our view of urban planning and architecture; the intersection between race, gender and the urban environment; the study of camps, prisons and borders; and the way that architecture was critical to nation-building in postcolonial societies.”

Isenberg said that the biggest development since the Mellon Initiative’s inception in 2014 has been the University’s decision to continue the program beyond 2025, the final year of support from the Mellon Foundation.

In many ways that was the Mellon Foundation’s goal, Isenberg noted. Princeton is one of more than a dozen research universities and institutes in the U.S., Canada, U.K., and South Africa that the Mellon Foundation engages and connects through its Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities initiative.

“The Foundation helped spark new research and teaching collaborations that maximized the unique departmental and programmatic configuration of each university or institution,” she said. “At Princeton, the initiative demonstrated the intellectual vitality of this field at the intersection of architecture, urbanism and the humanities, while simultaneously joining forces with existing programs on campus to strengthen their respective priorities.”

Below, meet this year’s fellows and learn about the focus of their research and teaching in the classroom.

Chandana Anusha

Chandana Anusha is a scholar of social and environmental dynamics in India, with a special interest in coastal regions. Her research focuses on how ecological and infrastructural processes intersect in an era defined by climate change and global trade.

This spring, she is teaching the course “Coastal Justice: Ecologies, Societies, Infrastructures in South Asia.”

Anusha’s fellowship is made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the M.S. Chadha Center for Global India and the Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies.

Devanne Brookins

Devanne Brookins’research explores comparative urban studies, urban transformation and the production of inequality, with a focus on African cities. This agenda is driven by a desire to understand how urban transformations in Sub-Saharan Africa reflect and differ from those in regions that have bridged the urban transition in earlier periods.

With urbanization and transformation proliferating across Africa, many urban development interventions are taking place amid questions regarding the governance of urban land: how it is assembled, how the value is captured and distributed, and who has access. These contemporary processes of urbanization, expansion and restructuring are producing concerning patterns of inequality. Brookins examines how urban inequality is manufactured through governance processes as socio-political compromises that become spatially embedded in land and the built environment.

This spring, she is teaching two graduate courses in Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs: “Urbanization and Development” and, with Keith Wailoo, the Henry Putnam University Professor of History and Public Affairs, “Identity, Power and Policy.”

Dean Chahim

Dean Chahim’s research examines the relationship between engineering, political power and the production of urban environments. His current project is an ethnography and history of flood control engineering and urbanization in Mexico City. It examines how engineers, under political pressure to enable urban growth, have transformed flooding into a routinized and spatially diffuse form of environmental suffering that disproportionately affects the urban poor.

This spring, he is teaching the undergraduate course “Engineering Justice and the City: Technologies, Environments, and Power.”

His fellowship is made possible through the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Humanities Council, the University Center for Human Values, the Metropolis Project, and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Chukwuemeka V. Chukwuemeka

Chukwuemeka V. Chukwuemeka is an architect and urbanist with international experience in project development, project management and systems design. His research is on emergent dynamics and self-organization processes of spatial productions in rapidly urbanizing sub-Saharan African cities, with a focus on Onitsha Markets in Nigeria.

In fall 2021, he and Gandelsonas co-taught the undergraduate course “Interdisciplinary Design Studio” for certificate students in the Program in Urban Studies.

Chukwuemeka’s fellowship is made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Program in African Studies, and the Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies.

Seth Denizen

Seth Denizen is a researcher and design practitioner trained in landscape architecture and human geography. His published work is multidisciplinary, addressing art and design, microbial ecology, soil science, urban geography and the politics of climate change. He is currently a member of the editorial board of Scapegoat Journal: Architecture/Landscape/Political Economy.

In fall 2021, he taught the undergraduate course “Thinking Through Soil.”

Denizen’s fellowship is sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the High Meadows Environmental Institute.

Shoshana Goldstein

Shoshana Goldstein’s research explores the impacts of India’s economic liberalization on urban planning, governance, and placemaking for migrant and formerly agrarian communities in peri-urban New Delhi. Her current project charts the complex planning history of Delhi’s satellite city, Gurgaon.

In fall 2021, she taught the undergraduate course “South Asian Migrations.” This spring, she is teaching an undergraduate policy research seminar.

Goldstein’s fellowship is sponsored by the the M.S. Chadha Center for Global India, the Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.

Davy Knittle

Davy Knittle’s research considers how normative ideas of race, sexuality and gender have shaped the redevelopment of the built and non-built environments of U.S. cities from the 1950s to the present. His current book project, “Designs on the Future: Gender, Race, and Environment in the Transitional City,” uses a multidisciplinary archive of literary and cultural texts to trace resistance to dominant narratives of urban progress.

“Designs on the Future” engages a queer and trans method of reading urban and environmental change that identifies the entanglement of urban, environmental, and queer and trans experiences of loss in U.S. cities in the wake of urban renewal.

This spring, he is teaching the undergraduate course “Race, Gender and the Urban Environment.”

Knittle’s fellowship is sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Effron Center for the Study of America and the High Meadows Environmental Institute. The fellowship will span the spring and fall 2022 semesters.

Listen in: Libraries and the Environment, Podcasts to Tune in to

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by Chris Plattsmier

There is an abundance of great podcasts coming out of libraries of all scale and size, ranging from small community colleges to some of the larger public branches in the country. Then there is the bundle of podcasts produced by industry-adjacent services, products, organizations, media, etc. that make finding a quality listen even harder. OTH wanted to share a list of podcasts and episodes to pair with our latest issue, which focused on topics related to environmental history and studies, for our readers to enjoy and add to their listening list moving forward. 

Don’t see your favorite podcast related to libraries, climate change, and the environment? Let us know!

In This Climate

A podcast from Indiana University’s Environmental Resilience Institute and The Media School focusing on engaging scientists on the front lines of environmental resilience battles and legislation, plus ways you can stay resilient.

 

TILclimate Podcast

Produced by MIT, these 10 minute listens are a great way to learn or engage students about the science, technologies, and policies driving climate change and it’s possible solutions. 


 

Yale Climate Collection

“Yale Climate Connections is a nonpartisan, multimedia service providing daily broadcast radio programming and original web-based reporting, commentary, and analysis on the issue of climate change, one of the greatest challenges and stories confronting modern society.”

Check out one of their recent pieces, “Chicago nonprofit transforms old library into climate-friendly headquarters”, to get an idea of some of the daily/weekly stories that YCC produces.

More Options

The Society of Environmental Journalists compiled a great list of podcasts to listen to related to climate change, environmental studies, environmental justice, and more to check out if you are interested. Also, the library at the University of Colorado recently announced a new podcast, “Why We Did This”, that explores access to climate research as a human right.

OTH Bookshelf: Women’s Studies OA Title List

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by Clare Doyle, OTH

This issue of OTH Bookshelf comprises more than 200 academic open access titles in the area of Women’s Studies. 

The OTH list includes the book’s author or editor names, title and title remainder, year of publication, publisher, and open access format (PDF, EPUB, MOBI, etc.) Subject headings in the list are taken from WorldCat records, if available: if not, original cataloging of subject headings is provided in WorldCat format, for consistency. The DOI (Digital Object Identifier) of the book is given if it is available on the publisher’s website; if not, the URL is provided. The ISBNs listed are for the online version of the book if available, and if more than one online ISBN is available the ISBN for the PDF version has been preferred; if there is no online or e-book ISBN, the ISBN featured on the publisher’s website is included. The book’s license type is included if this has been provided by the publisher.

The OTH Women’s Studies Bookshelf lists titles from more than 40 publishers: if our readers are aware of any title or publishers that are not included, please feel free to submit them for consideration. To be included in OTH Bookshelf, a book must be available to read online and/or download for free and must have been assigned an ISBN.

Download Spreadsheet Version (.xslx)

Women's Studies OA Title List

Updated March 2022

 

Women’s History Month

Posted on by OTH

by Megan Smith, OTH 

In honor of women’s month, OTH celebrates Black women artists from the U.S. and Africa for their creative genius and activism projects. Black women are underrepresented, undervalued, and underappreciated in the music and art world despite how valiant their efforts are in fostering change and uplifting humanity. From female empowerment, climate change activism, and children’s rights, to fighting poverty, girls’ education, and anti-racism efforts, these women use their art as a force to be reckoned with. Now, take a moment to appreciate the vibrant colors, unique sounds, joyful dances, and brilliant artistry of these Black women leaders and let your soul be touched by their powerful messages.

Women’s Day Playlist – Via Music in Africa

“The cultural contributions of female African musicians cannot be overstressed. Although underrepresented and often marginalized, they are behind some of the most glorious artistic moments across the continent and on the world stage – from crafting enduring records resulting in continual Grammy success, among other high-profile global honours, to serving as beacons of leadership and advocates of pertinent causes.” 

READ ORIGINAL STORY

16 Black Women Artist-Activists From the Past & Present That We Must Celebrate – Via The Culture

 

Nina Simone (1965)

“And despite the fact that in the telling and retelling of the stories of our movements for justice and equality, men figure prominently as protagonists, there have been numerous Black women artists who have hoisted the mantle of leadership onto their shoulders and spoken, sung, written and painted us free.”  

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Women Whose Music Helped Shape The African Music – Via Sounds of Africa

 

Angelique Kidjo

“Over the years, African music (afrobeats) has made great strides in both sound and recognition; this evolution is often attributed to the greats like Fela. ET Mensah and 2face and more. While they deserve the recognition, there isn’t enough celebration of the female pioneers who have contributed to it; this attitude of levity has trickled down into the industry today, shaping it into one that men largely dominate and has very little regards for women.”  

READ ORIGINAL STORY

Revitalizing a Gender and Women’s Studies Program in South Texas

Posted on by OTH

by Linda English, PhD

In December 2016, the co-program directors of the Gender and Women’s Studies Program (GWSP) at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley received the good news that their application for a National Endowment to Humanities Initiative Grant to revitalize the GWSP at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley was approved. The following is an overview of the implementation of the NEH grant, a 20-month project entitled “Revitalizing UTRGV’s Gender and Women’s Studies Program” beginning in the spring of 2017 through its conclusion in August 2018. It highlights the insights, experience, and recommendations of external consultants who participated in the grant; specialists who oversee successful gender, sexuality, and women’s studies programs across the country . The distinguished specialists who visited campus over the course of the grant generated both interest in gender-related topics among our students as well as excitement for the field of study among our affiliated faculty.

In the fall of 2015, a new university opened its doors to students in deep-south Texas: The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. UTRGV brought together the resources and assets of two legacy institutions: the University of Texas, Brownsville (UTB) and the University of Texas, Pan American (UTPA). At the time of the merger, the Gender and Women’s Studies Program faced the challenges associated with the creation of a new university: faculty reorientation and adjustment as well as the reworking of the program’s infrastructure. The project was undertaken by a group of ten faculty members from UTRGV’s College of Liberal Arts dedicated to developing a flourishing program focused on gender studies. Affiliated with GWSP, they researched and taught in the fields of history and philosophy as well as literature, languages, and cultural studies. The plan was to incorporate best practices from successful programs at other universities as well expand UTRGV’s course offerings into areas of emerging scholarship. We wanted to analyze how we could improve our curriculum to (re)build a consistent, high-quality program. Strengthening the GWSP in this way provided new opportunities for faculty to expand their scholarly horizons and to study together to become well-versed and effective teachers. Ultimately, we believed that we could not achieve such goals without external input and support.

To do so, the project was divided into two major phases. The first phase focused on assessing and improving the overall organization and structure of the GWSP. The second phase was dedicated to creating new opportunities for UTRGV’s faculty to deepen their knowledge in the fields of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and thus become more-informed teachers. The first phase was comprised of four workshops dedicated to assessing the GWSP—its shortcomings and its potential. During the first internal workshop in February 2017, the project directors and the affiliated faculty met to:

  • discuss faculty’s experience in teaching and researching in the field of gender, women’s and sexuality studies;
  • assess the current status of the GWSP (enrollment at this point was six students, enrollment history, degree plans and courses etc.);
  • and exchange ideas and opinions about future directions of the GWSP (its mission, its focus, and its goal).

The subsequent months of March, April, and May 2017 featured workshops with invited, external consultants who had in-depth knowledge of establishing, running, and enhancing gender-focused programs. Each workshop consisted of a 30-45 minute-long presentation (plus Q&A session) by the invited consultant about their work and program; followed by a 2 hour-long work and discussion session that focused on how UTRGV’s GWSP could be revised and enhanced.

After the internal workshop with affiliated faculty, the external consultants began their campus visits. The first external consultant was Dr. Jennifer Lynn from Montana State University, Billings who led a workshop titled “From Women to Gender? Pitfalls and Opportunities.” Dr. Lynn detailed the evolution of the Women and Gender Studies program at Montana State. She also stressed the importance of a dedicated space on campus for program visibility and her program’s successful efforts at community outreach (in particular, a brown bag session opened to both students and community members). The second external consultant to visit UTRGV was Dr. Guillermo De Los Reyes from the University of Houston whose workshop was titled “Integrating Sexualities into a Gender and Women’s Studies Program.” Dr. De Los Reyes provided an overview of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at the University of Houston. He traced the development of the program from a minor to a major and the success of the in their introductory course in the core (over twelve classes per semester, four sections of LBGTQ core class). He also discussed community outreach and fundraising, particularly the Friends of the Women’s Studies Program which raises funds for research and travel grants. The last external consultant for first phase of the grant was Dr. Lorraine Bayard de Volo from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Dr. Bayard de Volo discussed some of the early obstacles of the program and its evolution from a minor to a major. She also discussed certificate options for UC-Boulder students, including an LBGTQ Certificate and Global Gender & Sexuality Certificate. Her discussion included the challenges of offering a global gender perspective.

After the spring campus visits, the program directors led two summer retreats for participating affiliated faculty. Both retreats focused on examining and integrating the suggestions provided by the three external consultants. The two retreats were titled: “Evaluating External Input and Defining Future Steps” and “Implementing External Input and Internal Evaluation.” Participants from the spring workshops were invited to contribute. At the first retreat, we focused on our outward “face” to students. This entailed articulating our mission, developing rationale as to why to study gender (through a minor or certificate), and creating a glossary of terms for our website. The second retreat involved planning for the fall semester, including developing syllabus for an introductory course on Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies.

The second phase of the initiative was dedicated to creating new learning opportunities for the faculty associated with the GWSP by inviting six gender content specialists to campus. The first of our six invited content specialists arrived in September 2017 to conduct a pedagogical workshop for our affiliated faculty in the morning and provide a public lecture for the UTRGV community in the evening. The audience was twofold: the GWSP affiliated faculty and UTRGV faculty, students, and the public at large. The public lecture served to generate general interest in gender topics and our program, more specifically. Our first invited content specialist was Dr. Nicholas Syrett from the University of Kansas. We had planned on three specialists for the fall and three for the spring, but due to a scheduling conflict, moved the lecture schedule to two in the fall and four in the spring. Our second content specialist, Dr. Michelle King, from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, came to campus in early December and offered a global-focused workshop and public lecture titled, “The Julia Child of Chinese Cooking, or the Fu Pei-mei of French Food? Comparative Contexts of Female Culinary Celebrity.”

Beginning in January 2018, the GWSP invited four content specialists to campus to, once again, lead a morning workshop for affiliated faculty (focused on strategies for incorporating gender into our teaching) and provide a public lecture that evening to the UTRGV community. The four specialists were Dr. Nancy Hirschmann (University of Pennsylvania), Dr. Crystal Feimster (Yale University), Dr. Robert Irwin (University of California, Davis), and Dr. Emma Pérez (University of Arizona). With four campus visits during the spring semester, our affiliated faculty were especially busy, but the experience proved extremely rewarding; the content specialists provided the faculty with valuable insights on “teaching gender” and the public lectures galvanized interest in our program and gender topics, more broadly. For example, Dr. Feimster focused much of the workshop on demonstrating some of the innovative class projects that she assigns to her students that encourage both creativity and analytical thought. These assignments included having her students create “zines,” initially the assignment focused on Pauli Murray; as well, she has her students develop a children’s book (she brought examples from her classes). Affiliated faculty created their own “zines” in the workshop. Dr. Pérez introduced an exercise to the workshop participants where they wrote 1st person accounts on: “I used to be ______ and now I am _________.” Dr. Perez’s public lecture was the largest of all, with over two hundred students and faculty in attendance. In the summer 2018, we organized a three-day retreat for affiliated faculty that enabled faculty to perform teaching demonstrations, incorporating some of the strategies they gleaned from the 2017-2018 pedagogical workshops.

The grant concluded after the 2018 summer retreats. The monies provided by the NEH allowed the GWSP to increase its exposure to the UTRGV community; consequently, we have seen the program grow in popularity. We developed an introductory course for the GWSP, “Introduction to Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies,” offered at least once a year, which generates student interest in the GWSP minor and certificates. Indicative of faculty interest in gender-related fields, the affiliated faculty has grown from the original ten to a robust 35 affiliates.

About the Author

Dr. Linda English is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.  She teaches courses on Texas History, the American West, Modern American Women’s History, and Gender in the American West.