Projects

Undergraduate Community Based Research in Jersey City

During the fall of 2005, a handful of Saint Peter’s faculty and Jersey City community based organizations (CBOs) are working together to fulfill CBO research needs by engaging students in projects that will assist the CBOs in learning more about their clients, their internal operations and other factors related to them carrying out their missions. This initiative was funded by a grant from the Simon Foundation.

My fall 2005 Social Problems course is currently participating with York Street, an agency that serves homeless women with children in the downtown Jersey City area.  Students will carry out three projects for York Street: 1) an over of Census data to establish the changes in poverty, education and housing in Jersey City between 1990 and 2000; 2) An assessment of HUD’s initiative to end chronic homelessness; 3) An asset mapping of several Jersey City communities.

In the spring of 2006 my Research Methods and Statistics course will continue this work with a more in-depth analysis of updated 2004 Census data and by furthering the asset mapping project.  The results will be presented to York Street both as progress reports and a final report, which will be posted on this site.

The Oaxaca Graffiti Project

In the spring of 2005, I took a group of nine students from Saint Xavier University to Oaxaca, Mexico.  Initially, the class was conceived of as a service learning venture that, at one point, was asked to engage in a set of tasks that included painting over graffiti.  This didn’t sit well with me or the students. For starters, it seemed problematic to send 10 North Americans to another country to paint over their graffiti.  More importantly, as we began to ask questions about this issue, we quickly realized that just about everyone involved in the planning of this trip had a very limited understanding of graffiti and virtually none them had taken the time to investigate it, or to talk to the grafiteros about their perceptions of the situation. 

We concluded that the best thing to do would be to put our sociological skills to work to further research this issue and to try to up the level of the debate.  With nine cameras, one video camera, taxi money and comfortable shoes, we set out to document a variety of Oaxacan graffiti.  We also made efforts at talking to people who were either involved with or had access to what we might call the grafitero communities. 

We began by roaming the city streets in no particular pattern, taking pictures, taking notes and trying to decipher the details as best as possible.  Eventually, we divided up the city center into three sections and documented types of graffiti by different neighborhoods.  We also met with young Oaxacans from a hip-hop school where students took classes in rapping, break-dancing and urban style graffiti.  The school housed other kinds of public art like stenciling, animation drawings (including “Japanimation”) and more conventional styles of painting. 

In the end, what I and the students surmised was the following: First, while most people tend to discuss graffiti in dichotomous terms of “art vs. vandalism”, what we observed suggests that graffiti in all its forms in Mexico is something far more complex.  We observed some basic tagging in the form of slogans like “Lucia te amo” (Lucia, I love you) or even the writing ones name on the wall.  But we also saw things that seemed to grow right out of the rich Mexican tradition of using public art (and wall space) as a form of social commentary.  We saw political slogans that alluded to important historical events in Mexican history.  We saw formal murals and scribbling that commented on political elections, and other writings that pointed to the corruption of specific political figures.  We also creative stencils, many of which were addressed at the implications of globalization, racial and ethnic struggles between mainstream Mexico and indigenous communities, and some that equated town crier calls for people to do a variety of things like return borrowed money.  Finally, we noted that murals were often used as a form of education.  Such was the case with a drawing that outlined the male and female reproductive systems and encouraged women to have regular checkups.  Indeed, there was a variety of public art that addressed many of the social issues emerging in Oaxaca.

We also found some evidence of “gang-like” tags.  However, given the ongoing back-and-forth migration between Oaxaca and the east and west coasts in the U.S., it was hard to know if these were real gangs or copycats who had spent some time in the states.  We saw no other evidence of gang-like activity and one tag in particular prompted some students to wonder if it was tourists who were doing some of the tagging.

Suburban Homelessness

In the spring of 2005 I taught the Saint Xavier sociology department’s Senior Seminar course.  The class was structured around a community research project in which students applied for positions such as project manager, statistician and field researcher.  (Credit for this idea goes to Dr. Greg Scott of DePaul University whom I had the fortune of meeting in a summer fellows program on Participatory Action Research at the Field Museum of Chicago.) The students worked with a local shelter agency to help enumerate the chronic homeless in the southwest suburbs, to build a coherent list of homeless service providers in the area and to interview shelter users about a variety of issues.  Preliminary results of the study are just now emerging and should be available, in more elaborate from, by December 2005.