Category Archives: Urban Studies

Faculty Writing, Home, Labor Studies, Urban Studies

Teachout’s Teach Out

By Joshua Freeman

This election season has seen an unusually open battle regarding political strategy among New York unionists and progressives.  At stake is a crucial issue: how to balance the demands of building a movement that can fundamentally change a political and economic system that fails to serve most Americans against the existing political arrangements that benefit particular groups of workers. This was the key issue at the Working Families Party convention last May.

In 2010, the WFP backed Cuomo even as he attacked public sector unions and ran as a pro-business centrist. Once in office, he forced state workers to accept repugnant give-back contracts under the threat of mass layoffs, fought to lower taxes at the expense of services, and blocked various progressive initiatives.

This year, many WFP activists vowed not to go down the same road again. Continue reading Teachout’s Teach Out →

Home, Student Work, Urban Studies

Community Organizing with WE ACT

Last fall, the Murphy Institute launched a B.A. in Urban and Community Studies. The program focuses on public policy, the delivery of services, and improving the quality of life for communities and working-class populations. Students in the program use methods and perspectives from sociology, economics, political science, history, and anthropology to analyze the conditions of cities, neighborhoods, and communities within a globalizing economy and culture. Our students have opportunities for experiential and applied learning, including fieldwork and workplace-based projects in New York City — our classroom.

Etinosa Emokpae is one of our students and had a chance this summer to intern at a community-based organization in Harlem that engages residents to address environmental justice/public health issues and find solutions. In this piece, she shares some of her impressions.

I’d like to recount my amazing experience in the Urban Studies Fieldwork seminar, which was co-taught by Professors James Steele and Eve Baron. The seminar allows students to intern at a public agency or community organization that fits their interests. Continue reading Community Organizing with WE ACT →

Home, Urban Studies

Welcome Fall 2014 JSMI Students!

We are excited to welcome incoming Fall 2014  students to The Murphy Institute this week! Below is  a reflection from Palma Dellaporta, a PSC member and a registrar at Brooklyn College, who attended the Urban Studies MA orientation last Saturday.

[The Urban Studies MA Orientation this past Saturday] was a comprehensive event that not only left me feeling like I had all the information I needed, but truly supported.The most striking aspect of the day was how genuinely interested in the students everyone was. Their interest was not only about our studies, but about our lives, what brought us to the program, and what our expectations were. The encouragement, kindness, wealth of knowledge, and the true welcome made me sure I have found my academic home for the next two years. Additionally, the diversity of my cohort is wonderful. I am energized, anxious to get to work, and looking forward to what this program will bring to my life overall.
Welcome Fall 2014 Students!
Home, Urban Studies

Cities Are Embracing the Worst Idea to Come Out of Ferguson

This article was originally posted in Quartz.

By Basil Smikle Jr.

Earlier this week, Missouri governor Jay Nixon ended the curfew imposed on the community of Ferguson over the weekend. Residents had been required to be indoors between midnight and 5 am.

It’s not surprising but it’s one of many moves authorities got wrong in their reaction to riots over the shooting death of Michael Brown.

The toxicity of curfews in the St. Louis suburb sparked additional and perhaps retaliatory unrest. The governor’s decision to restrict the movement of Ferguson’s mostly black population exacerbated long-simmering anger toward law enforcement, roiled community leaders, and extended confrontations with residents. Establishing this curfew was only one of many missteps by a clearly overwhelmed police department.

And yet, alarmingly, the tactic itself is gaining acceptance in major American cities.
Continue reading Cities Are Embracing the Worst Idea to Come Out of Ferguson →

Home, Labor Studies, Urban Studies

Developers and Labor Face Off at City Planning Commission Hearing

Labor and the city came together yesterday when the Astoria Cove development came up for public hearing at the NYC Department of City Council as part of the Uniform Land Use Review Process (ULURP). For those unfamiliar with the proposed development, Astoria Cove is Alma Realty’s 30-years-in-the-making development, with plans to build five mixed-use buildings in Hallets Point for a total of approximately 1,700 apartments, along with a bevy of retail stores — and it hasn’t been finding many allies.
Continue reading Developers and Labor Face Off at City Planning Commission Hearing →

Arts and Culture, Films, Home, Student Work, Urban Studies

Pushing Through Doors: Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing”

By Zenzile Greene

On the heels of the Spike Lee Retrospective being shown at BAM Cinematek through July 11th, I would like to present a piece I wrote up on assignment for my “Culture Through Film” class taken this past fall at the School of Professional studies. The course, taught by Professor Kelley Kawano, was developed brilliantly not only for the purpose of traditional Film History survey, but also towards the goal of turning a critical lens on the pervasive and myriad ways in which culture influences film and vice versa.

Over the course of the fall semester, we viewed and deconstructed a range of films from the Silent Era to the Hollywood Studio Era, to the groundbreaking independent films made by such pioneers as Irving Penn and Spike Lee. For several of our weekly assignments, we were asked to take one scene from a movie and analyze its use of one in a list of primary technical film elements, including editing, sound effects and direction.

For inspiration, I drew on the use of symbolism in Spike Lee’s “Do The Right Thing” from a paper I wrote in the class “Mass Media in Black America” taught by Professor Arthur Lewin at Baruch in 2010. I was very excited to write up a brief analysis of the symbolic use of editing in one particular scene of this, one of my favorite films in Lee’s “Brooklyn Trilogy” series.
Continue reading Pushing Through Doors: Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” →