News – Page 3 – Center for Urban Research and Education

Reflecting on CURE’s Legacy, by Dr. Paul Jargowsky Founding Director Emeritus

After 12 years as Director of the Center for Urban Research and Education (CURE), I am stepping down and turning over the leadership of the Center to Associate Professor Stephen Danley. Professor Danley, a noted urban scholar whose research focuses on social engagement and community development, has deep ties to the Camden community. I am very excited to watch CURE continue to grow and develop under his leader- ship. In anticipation of this new birth of CURE, it is useful to revisit the Center’s first 12 years serving the Rutgers-Camden campus and the Camden community.

In 2011, under the leadership of Executive Dean Margaret Marsh and Chancellor Wendell Pritchett, Rutgers University – Camden established the Center for Urban Research and Education. I was delighted and honored to come to Rutgers-Camden to be the founding director of CURE. Rutgers-Camden is an ideal set- ting for a center that bridges academic research with outreach to an economically challenged urban community. Camden, NJ, is one of the poorest cities in the United States, situated within the poorest major metropolitan area. Yet both Camden and the Greater Philadelphia Region have enormous potential, underutilized resources, and enthusiastic and engaged citizens.

CURE has several complimentary missions. First, CURE fosters a community of urban scholars across the campus that transcends academic departments and disciplinary backgrounds. Second, CURE promotes and facilitates new and interesting urban research by Rutgers-Camden faculty and students. Third, CURE builds links between the university and its community by partner- ing with government agencies, non-profit organizations, and community groups.

CURE has hosted memorable seminars, academic conferences, research projects, and publications. We have sought out emerging urban scholars, particularly from underrepresented groups, and promoted their work within Rutgers and beyond. We have also funded student research and conference attendance to help train the next generation of urban scholars. As CURE enters its second decade, this report looks back on some highlights of the first 12 years. We look forward to building on these accomplishments and invite you to join us as we seek to bring research to bear on problems and opportunities in urban America.

CURE’s successful program of research and public events were the result of the hard work of many people. I was fortunate to have Natasha Fletcher serving as Associate Director for most of the first ten years. More recently, Public Affairs graduate student Sarah DeGiorgis has been invaluable at keeping CURE functioning. Many Rutgers-Camden faculty have played important roles, as have many graduate students. In the same spirit, I am committed to helping income Director Stephen Danley in any way that I can as he takes the helm. Onward!

CANCELED: April 13 CURE Seminar Series with Camille Z. Charles, Ph.D.

Young, Gifted and Diverse

This event has been canceled until further notice.

Seminar Overview

Despite their diversity, Black Americans have long been studied as a uniformly disadvantaged group. Drawing from a representative sample of over a thousand Black students and in-depth interviews and focus groups with over one hundred more, Young, Gifted and Diverse highlights diversity among the new educated Black elite—those graduating from America’s selective colleges and universities in the early twenty-first century.

Differences in childhood experiences shape this generation, including their racial and other social identities and attitudes, and beliefs about and interactions with one another. While those in the new Black elite come from myriad backgrounds and have varied views on American racism, as they progress through college and toward the Black professional class they develop a shared worldview and group consciousness. They graduate with optimism about their own futures, but remain guarded about racial equality more broadly. This internal diversity alongside political consensus among the elite complicates assumptions about both a monolithic Black experience and the future of Black political solidarity.

About Professor Charles

Camille Z. Charles is Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Social Sciences in the Departments of Sociology and Africana Studies, and in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests are in the areas of racial inequality, racial identity, racial attitudes, intergroup relations, residential segregation, and higher education.

Professor Charles currently serves as Chair of the Department of Africana Studies, and as Interim Director of the Center for Africana Studies. In addition to these roles, she is also Faculty Co-Director of Penn First Plus, the University’s initiative to support first-generation, low-income Penn students. And, since 2006 she has served as Director of the Center for Africana Studies Summer Institute for Pre-Freshmen.

She is author of Won’t You Be My Neighbor: Race, Class and Residence in Los Angeles, which explores explanations for persisting residential segregation by race, and co-author of The Source of the River: The Social Origins of Freshmen at America’s Selective Colleges and Universities and Taming the River: Negotiating the Academic, Financial, and Social Currents in Selective Colleges and Universities, each based research from The National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen (NLSF), an effort to understand racial differences in the experience of elite higher education in the United States. Most recently, she is co-author of the forthcoming book, Young, Gifted, and Diverse: Origins of the New Black Elite, which employs a mixed-methods approach and an intersectional framework to explore the varied and multiple dimensions of diversity among Black students in elite higher education. Professor Charles earned her Ph.D. in at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1996.

CURE is part of State Policy Lab established at Rutgers via $1 Million awarded by NJ Secretary of Higher Education

Date

April 26, 2021

Media Contact

Megan Schumann

848-445-1907

megan.schumann@rutgers.edu

Rutgers has received $1 million from the New Jersey Office of the Secretary of Higher Education to establish a policy lab that will analyze solutions to critical issues facing the Garden State.

The State Policy Lab, housed in Rutgers’ Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy and managed in conjunction with the Rutgers-Newark School of Public Affairs and Administration, will include expertise from a network of scholars, community members and external policy experts.

“Rutgers-New Brunswick and its Bloustein School have always focused on serving the people of New Jersey,” said Rutgers-New Brunswick Chancellor Christopher J. Molloy. “We are proud to collaborate with the state on this partnership, which provides another important venue by which our world-class research will help enhance the quality of life in the Garden State.”

The main purposes of the lab, which is being funded through Gov. Phil Murphy’s 2021 state budget, includes providing policy-makers with clear and accessible research on state and local governance while assisting stakeholders in troubleshooting unanticipated implementation issues; generating data modeling for policy recommendations to enable state policymakers to test different budgetary and legislative scenarios; and building coalitions across governments, institutions of higher education and community organizations to support evidence-based policy initiatives.

“We look forward to providing our expertise with policy research, big data analytics and community engagement towards evidence-based decision-making in critical areas of policy and operations within the state of New Jersey,” said Piyushimita (Vonu) Thakuriah, dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy. “I am particularly excited to be working with the School of Public Affairs and Administration in Rutgers-Newark, and a wider network of academic and policy collaborators throughout the university, statewide, nationally and even internationally to solve grand policy challenges. This is a fantastic opportunity for our students, as it is for us to be of service to our state.”

Charles Menifield, dean of the School of Public Affairs and Administration said he is hoping the new collaboration with Bloustein will be the first of many.

“This is an exciting time for SPAA and we are excited to work with the Bloustein School in launching this endeavor,” Menifield said. “It is a great opportunity for Rutgers to provide expertise to the governor and state legislature. I hope this opportunity leads to other collaborations.”

For New Jersey to continue to be at the forefront of innovation throughout the nation, policy issues need to be carefully addressed, said Brian Bridges, secretary of Higher Education.

“High-quality research and analysis is crucial to ensure New Jersey remains at the center of innovation,” said Bridges. “This will be even more critical as our economy recovers from the pandemic, as the State Policy Lab will examine how to address long-term issues facing the state and improve the lives of New Jerseyans. I look forward to Rutgers’ leadership in this high quality research endeavor.”

The State Policy Lab will utilize an equity framework to analyze policies and programs with the goal of identifying improvements that benefit all residents, particularly those from low-income backgrounds and those who have been historically disadvantaged.

Additional partners include the Walter Rand Institute (Camden), the Cornwall Center (Newark), the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling (New Brunswick), the Center for Urban Research & Education (Camden), the Rutgers Law School Center on Law, Inequality, and Metropolitan Equity, Kean University and New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Public Affairs Ph.D. Student Leads Camden’s Return to Urban Gardening Roots

Looking at the City of Camden, says Lew Bivona, its reputation as the community gardening epicenter of the Garden State, let alone the country, may not be outwardly obvious.

However, explains the Rutgers University–Camden doctoral student, there was a time when the city may have actually held the unofficial title. He cites a 2010 report from the University of Pennsylvania that led its authors to suggest that Camden growers may have created more community gardens per person than any city in the United States.

“The city’s rich legacy of gardening was built on maintaining cultural and historical ties,” says the Ph.D. student in public affairs. “Many gardeners had grandparents who were sharecroppers and much of the food produced was mutually shared among neighbors.”

…

View full story on Rutgers–Camden NewsNow at https://news.camden.rutgers.edu/2021/04/ph-d-student-leads-camdens-return-to-urban-gardening-roots/

Learn more about the Camden Urban Agriculture Collaborative (CUAC) project

CURE Virtual Roundtable: Bandos, Symbolism, and Placemaking in Camden, NJ

Header image with talk title listed above and below

“Bandos, Symbolism, and Placemaking in Camden, NJ”

Thursday, March 25, 2021 from 12:30 – 1:30 p.m.

In her forthcoming book Toward Camden, Mercy Romero writes about the relationships that make and sustain the largely African American and Puerto Rican Cramer Hill neighborhood in Camden, New Jersey where she grew up. She walks the city and writes outdoors to think about the collapse and transformation of property. She revisits lost and empty houses—her family’s house, the Walt Whitman House, and the landscape of a vacant lot. Throughout, Romero engages with the aesthetics of fragment and ruin; her writing juts against idioms of redevelopment. She resists narratives of the city that are inextricable from crime and decline and witnesses everyday lives lived at the intersection of spatial and Puerto Rican diasporic memory.

Toward Camden travels between what official reports say and what the city’s vacant lots withhold. In this virtual roundtable, Mercy Romero, Ph.D. was joined by Vedra Chandler, Rev. PJ Craig, and Sis. Anetha Ann Perry to talk about landscape, dispossession, and the making of public memory in Camden, New Jersey.

Panelists:

Mercy Romero, Ph.D. Associate Professor of American Literature and American Studies, Hutchins School of Liberal Studies, Sonoma State University, CA Author of Toward Camden (Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study). Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press (release date 10/15/21).
Rev. PJ Craig Sr. Pastor, Cumberland Presbyterian Church of Germantown, TN Ph.D. candidate in Public Affairs at Rutgers–Camden. PJ’s work focuses on youth connections with place. In her current project, she worked alongside youth as co-researchers in North Philadelphia, PA and Camden, NJ to understand how youth shape stories about their neighborhoods and themselves.
Vedra Chandler (pronouns: she/her) Project Manager, Cooper’s Ferry Partnership. Born and raised in Camden, Vedra Chandler graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Government before pursuing a careers in business, music and now community development and creative placemaking. Since 2017 Vedra has worked as a project manager at Cooper’s Ferry Partnership where she uses the arts as a vehicle to tap into the potential of Camden city and its residents. She coordinates the Connect the Lots and A New View initiatives which revitalize underutilized spaces with vibrant programming and public art.
Moderator: Sis. Anetha Ann Perry Ph.D. candidate in Public Affairs at Rutgers–Camden. Sis. Anetha Ann Perry grew up in Camden. In her dissertation research she uses auto-ethnography to tell the story of her family’s home, Perry House, and investigates the uses of “good neighboring” as an African American survival strategy. Despite evolving societal dynamics, Anetha’s study purports to show how settlement houses such as Perry House practice “good neighboring” as part of a modern-day underground railroad support system to African Americans living in urban fragmented communities.