Kirwan Fall Forum Series 2024

You can find the forum recording here.

 “If you’re not at the table, you might be on the menu.” Decision-making tables often reflect those that have historically held power, which is concerning as communities tackle big issues, such as policing. Yet, much of the research on inequitable civic engagement focuses on individual conditions, not institutional or environmental factors. As such, we asked the research question: What are the qualities of inclusive, equitable, and antiracist local civic engagement environments? We answer this question via a multi-site, engaged research project with neighborhood commissions. Using a theory-informed framework, we illustrate how city-level policies interact with commissions and organizational-level driving forces to create experiences for citizens. Interview, document, and observational data were analyzed using structural and elaborative coding and suggest there is value in using the cultural frames of strict father and nurturing parent as an interpretive tool. The strict father frame shapes the environment via norms, policies, and practices, and communicates preferences for citizen identities producing inequity. Time pressures reinforce this strict father practices. To realize environments that advance social equity, findings reveal that three conditions must be present: a) nurturing parent norms, practices, and policies that are coupled with a consensus on the purpose of participation, b) mutual understanding of past racist policies, and c) trust between actors. Seven propositions are offered for further study. In addition, we also offer practical advice for neighborhood commissions.

You can find the recording of this forum here.

1. Black homeownership declines across the U.S.A. at significantly higher rates than white, Hispanic, or Asian homeownership. Although the cost to own a home is lower in Republican states, Black Americans are much less likely to maintain homeownership in those areas. What is the penalty of political parties on Black homeownership in America? The findings that will be discussed in this seminar provide support to the notion that there is a nationwide penalty of political parties on Black homeownership. The variation in this penalty is dependent on a given state’s opportunity structure for institutional racism, which changes based on the state’s foreclosure laws and partisan leanings. This case study on Black homeownership across the state of New York’s judicial districts with 221 partisan-elected judges reveals that there remains a penalty in Republican judicial districts. 
2. Recently, there have been media accounts of Black homeowners who received lower than expected home valuations, as well as of homeowners who found that "whitewashing" their homes to erase signs of racial identity yielded higher valuations. A number of recent studies have shown that appraisal bias is a significant problem that denies Black homeowners' wealth, although it is widely viewed as an "objective" market process. In this seminar, we will discuss how the surprise at bias in home valuations is misplaced. Indeed, conceptions of housing value are highly racialized and remain so despite fair housing and lending laws. We use the concepts of racial capitalism and economic performativity to examine historical accounts of the development of the appraisal profession, to show how they incorporated racialized notions of spatial value. We also examine contemporary appraisal textbooks and public documents, including the testimony and data compiled by the Biden administration about the problem to show how appraisal methods continue to accommodate racialized conceptions of space and value.

Miranda Martinez is an Associate Professor in the Comparative Studies department at Ohio State.  She was previously Associate Professor in the Department of Puerto Rican and Latino studies at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.  She has completed fieldwork in Puerto Rico and specializes in Latino and Puerto Rican Studies in addition to Urban Studies.

Broadly speaking, her current research interest is in the area of economic sociology and examines racialization and predation in financial services and credit. Professor Martinez looks both at the complex processes embedding predation and devaluation of wealth in Black and Brown communities and looks at locally derived responses to a predatory economy. She has looked at local spaces of financial counsel, and the use of the "financial coaching" model to help vulnerable consumers, and is also looking at social economy spaces, such as credit unions working to create a more just, accessible financial system for low income, immigrant, and other vulnerable consumers. In looking at local economic spaces and responses to predation, Professor Martinez focuses on the kinds of subjectivities and affects that surround the financialization of daily life, especially in low income and minority communities where safe credit and banking are less available.

Kendrick Roberson is currently an Assistant Professor at Pepperdine University, where he teaches political science courses centered around American Politics as well as Race and Ethnic Politics. Dr. Roberson is also a visiting lecturer at UCLA, where he teaches Black Labor Activism.

Early in his career, Kendrick attained an associate's degree in the field of Economics from El Camino Community College. During his time at El Camino College, Kendrick was a winner in a nationwide competition hosted by NASA and began 9 years of work estimating the costs of satellite systems at the Los Angeles Air Force Base, Space and Missile Systems Center. In 2013, after transferring to Pepperdine for his undergraduate career, Kendrick achieved his bachelor's degree in economics, and was accepted into Pepperdine's business school. Kendrick finished his time at Pepperdine by delivering the student address during his master’s graduation ceremony, ultimately receiving his master's degree in finance. In 2021, he received his second and third master's degrees in economics and political science from the University of Southern California (USC). In 2022, Kendrick attained his PhD in Political Science and International Relations from USC. Outside of academia, Kendrick is currently the elected Chair of the American Federation of Employees’ (AFGE) National YOUNG Committee, where he represents over 100,000 federal employees across the nation who are under the age of 40. Further, he is the Executive Vice President of AFGE Local 2429, which represents military civilians in Los Angeles, CA.

You can find a recording of this forum here.

How can we understand the 2020 Census finding that two or more race/ethnicity is the second largest category of people as well as the adoption of a combined race and ethnicity standard in the 2024 updated Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guidelines and the absence of interdisciplinary social scientific research on inequities to inform these decisions? What is the impact of these changes for examining outcomes in Latinx communities? How can intersectionality as inquiry and praxis create a new vision for examining inequities across a variety of policy domains and inform the future of race and ethnicity data collection? Using the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) 2024 revisions to race and ethnicity standards and the 2020 Census as sites of analysis, Dr. López traces the ontological contests, inverted epistemologies, epistemologies of ignorance, aesthetic vs. authentic accuracy, statistical gaslighting, racial ventriloquy to illuminate the data racial contract as processes that have fundamentally shaped and transformed our understanding inequities by race and ethnicity. Dr. López ends with an invitation for imagining a different future that improves equity-based data collection through intersectionality as inquiry and praxis, departing from the premise that race is a multi-dimensional social status (e.g., identity narrative, street race/perceived race), ethnicity (cultural heritage status), are analytically distinct and require separate questions and are yet simultaneous categories of experience.

Dr. Nancy López is a professor of sociology at the University of New Mexico. Dr. López directs/co-founded the Institute for the Study of "Race" and Social Justice. Her scholarship, teaching and service are guided by the insights of intersectionality--the importance of examining the simultaneity of race, gender, class, ethnicity and other systems of inequalities across a variety of social outcomes, including education, health, employment, housing, for developing contextualized solutions that advance social justice. Dr. López is author of Hopeful Girls, Troubled Boys: Race & Gender Disparity in Urban Education (2003); co-editor of, Creating Alternative Discourses in the Education of Latinas & Latinos (2003), Mapping "Race": Critical Approaches to Health Disparities Research (2013); and, QuantCrit: An Antiracist Approach to Education Equity (2023). Dr. López is a Black Latina, New York City-born daughter of Dominican immigrants with a second-grade education rich in cultural wealth. She is the first woman of color tenured in Sociology and the first woman of the African Diaspora tenured in the College of Arts and Sciences (2008) and promoted to full professor (2018) at UNM.

You can find a recording of this forum here.

Join us for a presentation and discussion about how community-engaged research can and should advance environmental justice. We will draw from our recent book to illustrate how and why community engaged research contributes to EJ and how researchers can prepare themselves to do more and better research with community partners. Through a framework of justice, we will focus on how community engaged research for EJ is rooted in and reflected by examples in the field of public health.

Martha Matsuoka ’83 focuses her teaching and research on community-based organizing and social movements for environmental justice, particularly in planning and policy.

Since 2015, she has served as the Executive Director of the Urban & Environmental Policy Institute, the applied community-based research and program in the department of Urban & Environmental Policy. Her work in community-based research draws on work with a wide range of NGOs including East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, Asian Pacific Environmental Network, the Urban Habitat Program, the Liberty Hill Foundation, the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, and the International Women's Network Against Militarism. She currently serves on the Board of Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity, a multi-racial, multi-faith organization working for the dignity and full inclusion of immigrants and people impacted by incarceration.

Chad Raphael (B.A., Harvard; Ph.D., Northwestern) is a Professor of Communication at Santa Clara University. He consults on communication campaigns for environmental organizations and has chaired the boards of two environmental justice organizations: the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation and the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. He is also a Design Team member of the Clean Electronics Production Network and a member of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities’ Laudato Si’ Commission. Chad is the co-editor and co-author of Ground Truths: Community-Engaged Research for Environmental Justice (University of California Press - Luminos), which grew out of an earlier guide he wrote for the Initiative. He has also published a research agenda for community-engaged communication research on environmental justice. His prior research on political communication encompasses environmental communication, news and politics, deliberative democracy, and games for civic learning. He has frequently co-authored articles with undergraduate students. Chad has also chaired the Communication Department, as well as committees that designed Santa Clara’s Core Curriculum and that helped draft the University’s Strategic Plan, and he led a task force on greening the International Communication Association.

Dr. Petteway thinks ANOVA GEE would be an interesting choice for a child’s name, and that BDP can tell us more about health than TPB. He’s probably drinking bougie-fied coffee in the rain right now, going to extreme measures to protect his Griffey Max 1 Freshwaters

“Criminal aliens are easy to tar and hard to defend. But defending criminal aliens’ place in the United States is exactly what this book does. Migration should never be criminalized, and evidence of a crime should have no place in deciding who gets to live here and who doesn’t.”—César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, from the book’s introduction.

In his most recent book Welcome the Wretched: In Defense of the “Criminal Alien” , law professor and immigration lawyer César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández makes a powerful case for divorcing immigration law from criminal law—including abolishing so-called immigration crimes (such as crossing and re-crossing the border without the federal government’s permission), and allowing migrants who have been accused or convicted of crimes to remain in the United States as residents or citizens.

Research consistently notes the value of early care and education for children’s development, parental stability, and the productivity of the country. Despite these benefits, navigating early care and education in the United States is a challenging endeavor. There is considerable fragmentation and variability in early care and education systems, access to high quality and affordable care is limited, and pay is low for the workforce. During this research forum, Dr. Chrishana M. Lloyd will facilitate understanding about why the early care and education field is devalued and underfunded using a historical and equity lens. Dr. Lloyd will also share policy and practice recommendations to address these challenges.

Dr. Lloyd is a nationally recognized expert in understanding challenges facing the early childcare and education sector. Her expertise is uniquely situated at the cross-section of social science and education. Using a racial equity lens, Dr. Lloyd aims to integrate research findings and policy in ways that improve high-quality and equitable practices to positively impact communities.

Social justice organizations often espouse multi-racial solidarity as a value but struggle with putting this value into practice. How can organizations build bonds and extend solidarity to other organizations and activists across different racial identities? In this study, I espouse a theory of racial caucus organizing that discusses the opportunities and challenges of operationalizing solidary for racial groups within multi-racial coalitions. Importantly, race-based caucuses require more than just making space for people of different identities; rather, they require specific forms of organizational structure. I argue that the process of race-based caucus organizing requires establishing a power-shifting politic and praxis, exchanging resources, and fostering intersectional solidarity within racial groups. The findings in this study arise through a year of relationship building, observation, participation, and in-depth interviewing with Houston in Action (HiA), a non-partisan multi-racial coalition in Houston, Texas.

 Dr. Elizabeth Jordie Davies is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California Irvine. She is also an affiliate faculty member of the UCI Culture and Theory Ph.D. Program. Jordie’s research and writing interests include Black politics and political thought, US social movements, solidarity, and Black feminism. Her research agenda focuses on the influence of social movements on political attitudes, activism, and political participation. Jordie’s book project proposes the framework “Alienated Activism” to describe the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Her research is supported by the Russell Sage Foundation, the APSA Early Career Scholars Grant, Berkeley’s Center on Democracy and Organizing, and she was awarded the Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, and the Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellowship.  Jordie has published research and review essays in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Politics, Groups, and Identities; Social Science Quarterly; Contemporary Political Theory; Ideology, Theory, Practice; and the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics. Jordie also writes a culture and politics newsletter, part and parcel.

Jordie was previously a postdoctoral scholar in the P3 Lab at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. She received her PhD in political science from the University of Chicago.  Jordie also holds a Master of Arts in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago. She received a BA in Political Science from Emory University, in Atlanta, GA, with a minor in Educational Studies.