May 22nd is our Environmental Psychology Day 2018!
Environmental Psychology Day 2018 Schedule
This is a public event and all are welcome!
Please take a look at our new schedule.
We will also end with a memorial for Dr. Ittelson.
See you there!
Congratulations to alumna Dr. Sutton on her new book!
When Ivory Towers Were Black lies at the potent intersection of race, urban development, and higher education. It tells the story of how an unparalleled cohort of ethnic minority students earned degrees from a world-class university. The story takes place in New York City at Columbia University’s School of Architecture and spans a decade of institutional evolution that mirrored the emergence and denouement of the Black Power Movement. Chronicling a surprisingly little-known era in U.S. educational, architectural, and urban history, the book traces an evolutionary arc that begins with an unsettling effort to end Columbia’s exercise of authoritarian power on campus and in the community, and ends with an equally unsettling return to the status quo.
When Ivory Towers Were Black follows two university units that steered the School of Architecture toward an emancipatory approach to education early along its evolutionary arc: the school’s Division of Planning and the university-wide Ford Foundation–funded Urban Center. It illustrates both units’ struggle to open the ivory tower to ethnic minority students and to involve them, and their revolutionary white peers, in improving Harlem’s slum conditions. The evolutionary arc ends as backlash against reforms wrought by civil rights legislation grew and whites bought into President Richard M. Nixon’s law-and-order agenda. The story is narrated through the oral histories of twenty-four Columbia alumni who received the gift of an Ivy League education during this era of transformation but who exited the School of Architecture to find the doors of their careers all but closed due to Nixon-era urban disinvestment policies.
When Ivory Towers Were Black assesses the triumphs and subsequent unraveling of this bold experiment to achieve racial justice in the school and in the nearby Harlem/East Harlem community. It demonstrates how the experiment’s triumphs lived on not only in the lives of the ethnic minority graduates but also as best practices in university/community relationships and in the fields of architecture and urban planning. The book can inform contemporary struggles for racial and economic equality as an array of crushing injustices generate movements similar to those of the 1960s and ’70s. Its first-person portrayal of how a transformative process was reversed can help extend the period of experimentation, and it can also help reopen the door of opportunity to ethnic minority students, who are still in strikingly short supply in elite professions like architecture and planning.
Dr. Sharon Egretta Sutton, FAIA is visiting professor at Parsons School of Design and adjunct professor at Columbia University. She has also served on the faculties of Parsons School of Design, Pratt Institute, the University of Cincinnati, the University of Michigan, and the University of Washington. The twelfth African American woman in the United States to be licensed to practice architecture, Sutton is a fellow in the American Institute of Architects and a distinguished professor of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.
Environmental Psychology Day 2018!
Environmental Psychology Day 2018 Poster
Environmental Psychology Day 2018 Schedule – Sheet
Please come join us for our annual Environmental Psychology Day! Join us in celebrating the first Environmental Psychology program in the country!
We have an excellent group of students, faculty, and alumni presenting their research and other work.
Professor Celina Su will also read poetry from her new and award winning collection of poems, Landia.
Lastly, we will end the day off with a memorial to Dr. William E. Ittelson, one of the founders of our field.
All are welcome and we hope to see you there!
Please RSVP here!
Please click here to see the schedule!
Congratulations, Professor Setha Low!
Congratulations, Professor Setha Low!
Professor Setha Low has been awarded the first ever Athena Accolade City Award!
Professor Low is being honored for her outstanding contribution to the fields of Anthropology, Space, Place, Ethnography, & Qualitative Methodology.
She has received this honor from the KTH/ABE School and the CFP/Centre for the Future of Places!
You can see Professor Low’s Athena lecture, Space matters: Justice, Diversity and Democracy, at the KTH Centre for the Future of Places, please click here.
Certification Letter Athena Award (1)
Come Join Us for Our Brown Bag 2/5
Come join us for Dr. Muñoz’s lecture “Against All Odds: Chilean Workers Win Against Walmart!”
As always, our Brown Bags are open to the public!
Hope to see you there!
Brown Bag 4/25
Please join us on Wednesday, 4/25 for a presentation and discussion:
Dr. Krystal Perkins, a CSP alumna, “Discursive framings of immigration and immigrants and the ideological consequences for questions of multiculturalism and national identity”. We will be in Room 6304.01, at 11:45 am.
All Brown Bags are free and open to the public! Hope to see you there!
Faculty Member Celina Su’s New Poetry Collection and Reading
Join us for the book launch of EP faculty member Celina Su’s debut poetry collection Landia, which questions spatial practices, architecture and cities as they relate to language, the visual, and literature, featuring Caroline Crumpacker, Paolo Javier, EP faculty member Cindi Katz, Alissa Quart, and special guest Youmna Chlala, whose first collection The Paper Camera (Litmus Press) is forthcoming. Both Su and Chlala’s new books intersect with their artistic and academic practices in multiple ways along the lines of race, translation, movement, and displacement. In Landia (Belladonna* Series), Celina Su excavates literal and figurative borderlands—redrawn boundaries, architectural palimpsests, underground transport systems—to reckon with the historical and cultural forces that shape our cities and our intimate lives.
Co-sponsored by Belladonna* Series, Litmus Press, The James Gallery, Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, the Gittell Collective, The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
Thursday, April 26th, at 6:30 pm in the James Gallery.
For more details, see Event Info.
Landia excavates literal and figurative borderlands—redrawn boundaries, architectural palimpsests, underground transport systems—to reckon with the historical and cultural forces that shape our cities and our intimate lives.
Celina Su’s Landia is worldly in the best sense: it is truly about the world. A capacious and much needed response to America’s rising xenophobia… this most sophisticated poetry about our networked society is a set of maps of our shifting and vanishing neighborhoods, tastes and citizenships. “I cannot differentiate the homage from the lament,” Su writes. Landia is both. You will finish it all the wiser.
—Alissa Quart, author of Monetized
A consummate wordsmith, Celina Su’s Landia is a searingly fun collection of imagery and meter. It proves that mapping is as subjective as memory and language, and that the Chinatown movie theater is the center of the universe—until it isn’t.
—Paul Beatty, author of The Sellout
In her impressive debut collection, Celina Su extends the possibilities of the poetic, bringing as much careful attention (and firsthand experience) to the concrete details of what she calls “prosaic subjection” as she does to the syntax and moods of poetic language. In this particular political moment, the poems in Landia feel especially urgent… Landia brings together the freedom of the poetic imagination and the realities of state and corporate power, forcing us to re-think the borders of the literary and of the political.
—Dorothy Wang, author of Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry
In the dream-real spaces of “succulent mines,” words travel, dart, bleed, and hide like refugees, like aid workers, like artists, like animals, like exiles, like warriors. The unsettled unsettles everywhere. And yet is seen, known, made viscerally apparent in Celina Su’s astonishing poems. Su’s rage is so raw that it pierces your heart, but so beautifully rendered that each fragment is somehow spliced to another’s.
—Cindi Katz, author of Growing Up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives
CHE Brown Bag April 18th!
Come check out the Center for Human Environments‘ Round Table Discussion on April 18th at 11:45 in Room 6304.01 (The Hub)!
All Brown Bag Events are free and open to the public!
Congratulations, Tellisia!
We are pleased to announce that Tellisia Williams has been awarded the Graduate Center Kenneth B. and Mamie Phipps Clark Dissertation Fellowship for the 2018-19 Academic Year.
Dr. Kenneth Clark was a distinguished Professor of Psychology in CUNY’s City College of New York and, with Dr. Mamie Clark, did the research that led to the 1954 Supreme Court “desegregation” ruling in Brown v. Board of Education stating the “separate” is “not equal.” The Clarks were also friends with Dr. Proshansky. Dr. Hal Proshansky was a founder of the Environmental Psychology Ph.D. program as well as the second President of the CUNY Graduate Center.
Tellisia’s research represents a continuation of the work of Kenneth and Mamie Clark. While the dream of de-segregation has been realized, actual equality in academic spaces, including higher education has yet to come to fruition.
Her dissertation will investigate the built environment, educational policy, place making, and the personalized lived experiences of people in ‘diverse’ academic spaces. With the lens of Critical Race Theory, her project will center counter narratives that complicate diversity rhetoric used within academic spaces, in order to animate the various forms of resistance and transformation engaged by students of color. Additionally, this work complicates the discourse on inter-group relations by investigating how students of color discuss diversity and spaces of inclusion and exclusion.
Congratulations, Tellisia!
Welcome New Students!
The Environmental Psychology program at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York would like to welcome 3 new students!
Manju Adikesavan
Manju Adikesavan is an architect-planner with multi-sectoral experience in urban planning and design, technology training, gender justice, and youth empowerment. Manju began her career working first as a planning consultant for regional development agencies and subsequently as an urban researcher of context and evidence-based planning and design practices in southern and western India. A wish to expand her horizons led Manju to enroll in CUNY Graduate Center’s M.A. in Liberal Studies program in 2014. Since then she has worked in advocacy, capacity building, and community service activities with New York City’s at-risk youth and under-served communities.
Manju believes a well-designed, affirming, healthful, and inclusive built environment is a crucial need and a basic human right. And, the facilitation of positive people-place connections that ensure access to the resources and opportunities necessary for living healthy, happy, and fulfilled lives is a vital requirement of urban planning and environmental design. Towards this end, Manju intends her doctoral work to further understanding of people-place connections and place-making practices. Of special interest are small-scale, critical, and creative people-place interactions that emphasize the individual and collective agency of people and communities in making their environments livable.
Sarah Kahl
Sarah graduated from Oberlin College in 2016 with a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies and Psychology. She received honors for her senior project, which addressed how biophilic architecture is more likely to increase ones sense of well-being and emotional connection with the natural world than regular buildings. Sarah was also a researcher for the Community-Based Social Marketing group at Oberlin, which aimed to promote sustainable behaviors in students throughout Oberlin. She co-wrote a chapter about some of the initial environmental marketing campaigns in, “The Contribution of Social Sciences to Sustainable Development at Universities”.
Sarah will be starting at CUNY in the Fall of 2018 and will study how housing policies and gentrification affect minority populations, as well as how to promote sustainable and affordable housing.
Mahnaz Izadi
I studied Bachelor of Architectural Engineering and Master of Architecture, both at University of Art at Tehran, Iran. My main area of research interest is studying human-environment interactions, with a special focus on vulnerable populations like children, and my Master’s thesis was in this domain, Designing a Foster Group Home, with emphasis on the effects of environmental factors on foster children’s development and well-being. It was an interdisciplinary study, bridging the theories of developmental and environmental psychology to architectural design. Currently, I am working on a review of foster care system in Iran based on Deinstitutionalization Theory, and its implications for architectural design. At the Graduate Center, I’m willing to continue working on children’s environments, especially for more sensitive children, such as foster kids and street children. I’m also interested in participatory design with children and the issues of social justice in planning and design.
Research interests:
Environmental Psychology, Children’s Environment, Participatory Planning and Design, Social Ecology, Social and Environmental Justice, Child-Friendly Environments, Environment and Health, Environments of Vulnerable Populations
Welcome to the Environmental Psychology program!
