Please join us TODAY for our PSRG Network Event, Residents’ feelings towards park renovations in low-income gentrifying neighborhoods: Latest findings of an ethnographic study in NYC, presented by Javier Otero Peña.

Everyone deserves access to parks of quality. In an effort to make cities more just, local authorities in many cities around the world are investing in public spaces in neglected, low-income and highly dense neighborhoods. However, studies show that such investments may contribute to increasing land values and rents (Crompton, 2005), and as a paradoxical consequence, population in these areas shifts, and the low-income residents for whom the renovations were intended end up displaced to other areas of the city (Gould & Lewis, 2017). It is unclear whether this threat of displacement is known by residents, and whether the degree of gentrification in the area changes how residents perceive park renovations and investment in their neighborhoods. Do they welcome the changes or are they wary of improvements allegedly intended for them? This study is an ethnography of parks renovated in low-income gentrifying neighborhoods in New York City, from an urban environmental justice perspective. Using Rapid Ethnographic Assessment Procedures (Low et al., 2005), residents and users of four parks in minority-majority neighborhoods at different stages of gentrification were interviewed about their feelings towards renovations and neighborhood change itself, with an emphasis on procedural and interactional justice, and on identifying potential mixed feelings.

Event information

Friday, April 9, 2021 / 12p ET / On the Web

Zoom Registration Link

https://gc-cuny-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0scOyorjMpHtDHVY_E8_QM_2C0_-v9Xqh4

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Javier Otero Peña is a PhD candidate in Environmental Psychology from Caracas, Venezuela. Javier is the Student Advisor for the M.S. in Data Analysis and Visualization at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is also a research associate at the Public Space Research Group, and a research assistant for the PARCS study in the CUNY School for Public Health. His dissertation looks at park use, park renovations and place attachment in New York City.

Javier’s field research paper studied the politicization of public spaces through a participatory mural in East Harlem. He was a GC Digital Fellow from 2016-2020. In 2016, he took part in the CUNY-Humboldt University Summer School in Berlin, and in 2017 he participated in the Digital Humanities Research Institute in Victoria University, Canada. He was a Digital Humanities Research Institute Fellow in 2018-19, and received the Provost’s Digital Innovation Grant in 2017 and 2019.

Javier holds a Master in Environmental Policies and Sustainable Development, and taught a class on Sustainable Development in Latin America and the Caribbean at the Paris Catholic University. He also studied Urban Planning and Management at UCV, and Sustainable Urban Mobility in Developing Countries (UNITAR). Javier worked as a consultant for the United Nations Environment Programme for three years.

Research interests: public space,  urban environmental justice, place attachment, arts, culture & identity, sustainability & climate change action, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Gathering of Critical Transnational Inquiry

Please click here for more info: Gathering of Critical Transnational Inquiry

TESANDA is a transnational interdisciplinary network of scholarship and pedagogy born during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Linking educators, scholars, and academics across borders, TESANDA has a collective of folks engaging in interdisciplinary transnational work focused on justice and equity. TESANDA was initiated by EP student Chris Hoffman, EP faculty member Dr. Michelle Fine, Dr. Peiwei Li, and Dr. Barbara Dennis.

TESANDA aims to:

• Building a network of colleagues in the U.S. and transnationally to share references, methods, experiences on research within and across national borders.
• Elevate examples of research from the Global South to integrate into our teaching and our literature reviews.
• Strengthen opportunities from colleagues outside the U.S. to apply for grants that will enhance their local work.
• Evolve and collaboratively publish a platform for thinking through transnational ethics
• Deepen cross-cultural psychology (both scholarship and teaching) with a commitment to decolonizing knowledge.

Welcome to our First Years in the Environmental Psychology Program!

Nicolette Dakin is a dual doctoral student in the Environmental Psychology and Critical Social/Personality Psychology programs at the CUNY Graduate Center.  After graduating summa cum laude with her BA in Psychology from Purchase College, Nicolette went on to complete a Master of Social Work at NYU. Prior to beginning her doctoral education, Nicolette worked as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker providing therapy and harm reduction counseling.

Nicolette is interested in advancing policy and visions of social justice through mixed methods research, particularly participatory action research (PAR). Her research interests are focused on emergent threats rooted in legacies of colonialism and neoliberalism, and how impacted communities are adaptively responding.

She is currently working under Dr. Brett Stoudt on a PAR project with Communities United for Police Reform which is exploring questions around policing and visions of community safety.

Shokran Rahiminezhad is a Ph.D. student in the Environmental Psychology Program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
He has a background and professional experience in Urban Design, with a Bachelor of Science in Urban Planning and Design, and a Masters in Social Studies. He mainly works on public space, the public sphere, everyday life, social change, and social movements. Geographically, he is focused on MENA and South Caucasus regions.

Irina Shirobokova is a PhD student at the Environmental psychology program. She is specializing in political anthropology, urban geography and transdisciplinary research with the focus on spatial justice, uneven development, collaborative methods and embodied knowledge production.

She holds BA in sociology and MA in political geography from Saint Petersburg State University. She started her career as a part of the interdisciplinary team Urban Lab engaging with various research and urban planning projects from neighborhood scale to strategic development of the cities.

She was a research fellow in Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Leipzig, Germany, 2016 and at the New School for Social Research, New York, 2019.

She is Research fellow at the Center for Independent Social Research (CISR), St. Petersburg since 2011 https://cisr.pro/en/team/irina-shirobokova/

She is currently a leading researcher and coordinator of the international art-science project Female Arctic devoted to women visibility and empowerment in Russian industrial Arctic. It is a collaborative project developed jointly with different initiatives in Russian Arctic and Nordregio (international research center for regional development and planning in Nordic countries), https://nordregio.org/research/female-arctic-empowering-young-women-in-the-industrialized-russian-north-femarc/

She is a part of ERA.NET research project Estates After Transition that studies recent urbanization processes in post-socialist housing estates in Germany, Estonia and Russia https://www.estatestransition.org/.

She is also a part of two research projects dedicated to uneven geographical development: Enhancing liveability of small shrinking cities through co-creation with University of Applied Sciences Erfurt, Germany, Aalto University, Finland, Institute of Geography Russian Academy of Science and Urban Margins, Global Transitions: Everyday Security and Mobility in Four Russian Cities, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, CISR.

Congratulations to current Environmental Psychology students Erin Lilli and Fernanda Blanco Vidal for receiving a grant to fund a gathering of EP educators to share newly created or adapted assignments that critically examine the lived experience of our students during COVID pandemic. Environmental Psychologists Responding to COVID: Re-creating Assignments in a Context of Global Crisis and it will be co-sponsored by Transformative Learning in the Humanities (TLH). 

This event will take place on Friday, April 30th from 11 AM to 2:30 PM. Presenters will be focusing on assignments/projects created or adapted to address the COVID crisis in a critical and meaningful way that privileges the student-experience. More details to come!

Please click here to reserve your spot!

Please email Erin Lilli (elilli@gradcenter.cuny.edu) and Fernanda Blanco Vidal (fblancovidal@gradcenter.cuny.edu) for more details!

Dr. Jason A. Douglas and a team of researchers (Lawrence Brown, Angel Miles Nash, Emmanuel John, Georgiana Bostean) received a rapid-response project grant for research into the disparities in care during COVID-19. Titled “Viral Pandemic Health Disparities: An Examination of Social and Environmental Determinants of COVID-19 Incidence and Mortality in New York and Los Angeles,” Professor Douglas and Chapman University students together study the environmental inequities that minority groups in both cities face during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Dr. Jason A. Douglas is an assistant professor of public health in the Department of Health Sciences within Crean College of Health and Behavioral Sciences. Leveraging community-based participatory research frameworks, Douglas works with community-based organizations and residents in underserved Black and Latinx communities to investigate social and environmental determinants of public health disparities.

His current research examines COVID-19-related health disparities, food and housing insecurity-related health disparities, the nexus of crime and violence and legal drug retail locations (e.g., tobacco shops, liquor stores), public park and physical activity disparities in underserved communities, and community organizing practices for advancing health and wellbeing. In his community-engaged research, Douglas has developed and adapted innovative participatory methods for public health, including structured observation and neighborhood mapping approaches for examining novel public health challenges.

Douglas completed his environmental psychology doctoral training at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York, wherein he worked with children from underserved communities in New York City and forest-fringe community residents in Jamaica to examine social and environmental inequities that challenge community health and wellbeing. He then honed his participatory research practice through a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded postdoctoral research fellowship in the Psychology Applied Research Center at Loyola Marymount University, where he worked with a national cohort of community-based organizations to evaluate community organizing strategies and practices for addressing health, education, and built environment disparities in underserved communities. He extended these research practices as an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at San José State University before joining Chapman University.

Teaching Environmental Psychology Critically:
Open Education with Laurie Hurson

All are invited to attend the Teaching Environmental Psychology Critically will be a focus on different ways to improve our teaching by using Open Educational Resources. Since we all, at some point, have to create a syllabus  and define readings and assignments, this meeting will be a great opportunity to think about those issues more broadly. We will have a workshop with our dearest Laurie Hurson who is an EP Candidate and also an Open Educational Technologist.

For those who are part of the CUNY system, please check below and attached for instructions to Register at the Commons. This will help you to follow parts of the workshop with a concrete space to play around in.  It would be best if you could register prior to the meeting, but if you can’t, please still come to the meeting and we will figure it out. If you are not part of the CUNY system, do not worry–we will have plenty of conversations and options in this meeting with you as well.

Zoom Information 

When: Mar 19, 2021 11:30 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Register in advance for this meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwrdOuoqzgqHtKLDui3Wjvw9w892nX1WCFO

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Info for Registering with the CUNY Academic Commons: 

– Register and activate your CUNY Academic Commons Commons account

– Make sure you can log in to the Commons before the meeting

– Explore the Courses Tab on the Commons, click into a public group or site

– Read more about using OER on the Commons

NOTE: We are developing a more focused contact list of attendees and interested folks for these meetings and in the future will not be sending these emails to the broader listservs. If you would like to receive these emails, please add your contact information here.

Laurie Hurson is a PhD Candidate in the CUNY Graduate Center’s Environmental Psychology program. Her research and work weaves together ecological approaches to learning, digital/physical space, pedagogy, and critical university studies. Laurie’s dissertation explores students’ learning ecologies and how these resource networks shape student learning and engagement. Laurie also completed her Masters thesis at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her project examined processes of simplistic and minimalist living.

Laurie has a background in faculty development programming and educational technology and works as an Open Education Technologist within the GC’s Teaching and Learning Center. Prior to working with the GC TLC, Laurie was a Hybrid Coordinator at Baruch College’s Center for Teaching and Learning, an Instructional Technology Fellow at Macaulay Honors College, and the Coordinator for Planning and Development of OpenCUNY.org.

In collaboration with Dr. Shelly Eversley (English, Baruch College), Laurie helped develop EqualityArchive, an OER focused on the history of sex and gender equality in the United States. She teaches Principles of New Media at Baruch College.

Come hear Professor Nandini Bagchee share her experience of documenting place based stories and assembling the community archive THIS THURSDAY March 18th at 4:15 PM EST 

Associate Professor Nandini Bagchee is the director of MS Architecture Program and Associate Professor at City College of New York. Nandini Bagchee, founded Bagchee Architects in 2005. She is licensed to practice architecture in New York State.  Prior to starting her own firm, Nandini worked with architectural firms in New York and with the international practice of Herzog and De Meuron on the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis.  Her architectural work has been exhibited in galleries such as the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. In 2009, she received grants from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council to coordinate an architectural competition for the project, “Peace Pentagon: A Call to Action”. This project, intended to garner community support was presented to a public audience in the form of an exhibition in four different venues in April 2010. Nandini Bagchee is a Full Time Assistant Professor at the Spitzer School of Architecture in New York. She coordinates and teaches undergraduate design studios and seminars on Urbanism in the Middle East and Asia. She has presented her work and lectured at the Bauhaus University in Weimar and the BNCC Architecture College in Pune. Nandini Bagchee holds a Bachelors degree from the Cooper Union and a Masters degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Reilly Bergin Wilson, with the City University of New York, will be presenting From Minneapolis to NYC: Neglected Histories of Adventure Playgrounds in the United States as part of the event ADVENTURE PLAYGROUNDS: A DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND EUROPE.

It is scheduled for March 15, 2021 from 5:20-5:35 PM CET / 11:20-11:35 AM EST

The full event is runs 3:00p-6:00p CET and can be found live on YouTube.

Please visit this link for more details.

Reilly is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and research associate at the Children’s Environments Research Group. She was awarded a Masters by Research with Distinction in Geography from the University of Leeds for her thesis, Who Owns the Playground: Space and Power at Lollard Adventure Playground (1954-1961), funded through a US-UK Fulbright Commission University of Leeds Partnership Award. She also holds an Honors B.A. in Geography from Temple University, for which she conducted funded research in Bosnia-Herzegovina on playground privatization. Currently, Reilly is conducting archive research in attempt to construct a critical history of New York City adventure playgrounds, as well as working with a collective to open a (de)construction adventure playground in Brooklyn, NY, the first of its kind in New York City in forty years.

Research Interests: play environments built for/with young people, social reproduction, childcare, children’s mobilities, the production of space, social constructions of waste, and geographies of the recent past

On Tuesday March 16 from 4 to 5:30 pm EP Faculty Member Nicholas Freudenberg, CUNY Distinguished Professor of Public Health is launching his newest book!

The new book At What Cost Modern Capitalism and the Future of Health (Oxford University Press) explores how recent changes in capitalism have made it harder for people to get the food, health care, education, work, transportation and social connections they need to sustain health. The book also analyzes the many efforts across the country and the planet to create healthier, more equitable and sustainable alternatives to corporate domination  and suggests how we can build a more effective and powerful movement to achieve these changes. At the event, Nick will provide an overview of the book and Marion Nestle, Professor Emerita of Nutrition at NYU,  and Mary Bassett, the former NYC Health Commissioner now at Harvard University , will comment on the book, followed by a Q and A. The registration link for the zoom event is https://sph.cuny.edu/event/at-what-cost-modern-capitalism-and-the-future-of-health/

Click here for more information on the event!

Distinguished Environmental Psychology Professor Michelle Fine has accepted an affiliation as Professor Extraordinarius at the University of South Africa, continuing to grow connections between the University of South Africa and CUNY.

Congratulations, Dr. Fine!

Michelle Fine is a Distinguished Professor of Critical Psychology, Women’s Studies and Urban Education at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Founding faculty member, with Maria Elena Torre, of The Public Science Project, Fine is author of more than 15 books and over 100 articles. Current projects involve collaborations with domestic violence activists fighting for the release of DV survivors from prison; youth of color documenting the impact of the pandemic and racial uprisings on their generation; a collaborative series of national conversations with Muslim American youth and a national participatory project designed by and for LGBTQIA+ youth of color. Her newest book, JUST research in Contentious Times was published in 20217 by Teachers College Press.

Fine has testified as an expert witness in well known gender, sexuality and race discrimination education cases, and is the recipient of a range of awards including: 2018 STAATS Award from the American Psychological Foundation for Lifetime Achievements in Science; the 2017 Award for Distinguished Contributions to Qualitative Methods from Division 5 of the American Psychological Association; the 2013 Strickland-Daniels Mentoring Award from the Division of Psychology of Women of the American Psychological Association, 2013 American Psychological Association Public Policy Research Award, the 2012 Henry Murray Award from the Social Psychology and Personality Society, 2011 Kurt Lewin Award from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.