News and Events – Page 3 – Center for Urban Research and Education

CURE’s Next Chapter, by Dr. Stephen Danley

Ten years ago, I came to Rutgers-Camden because of the university’s commitment to community work. The Center for Urban Research and Education (CURE) has been the intellectual heart of that commitment, which is why I’m honored to be named its Director. At CURE, research and community work go hand-in-hand – that’s why I took this new position, and why I want to share a little more about my vision for CURE with you.

I have always admired CURE, particularly Dr. Paul Jargowsky’s work on segregation. To me, this is what research should be: it should build knowledge on the critical issues of our time, be a part of our policy and political discourse, and further justice in our communities. CURE has a legacy of doing just that.

When I got to Rutgers, CURE was conducting the Camden Neighborhood Change Study. Every day, folks were walking through neighborhoods conducting a survey of houses so that a) the city better understood its blight epidemic, and b) future researchers had a baseline to understand the changes already coming to Camden. I did what any young community-engaged scholar would do. I picked up a clipboard and volunteered to join.

My commitment to CURE is to make more of this work possible, and to do so in partnership with community. In that spirit, we are launching Community First, an initiative places the needs, aspirations, and voices of our local community at the forefront of our research endeavors. Community First represents a pledge to ensure that our work is not just academically rigorous but deeply relevant and impactful for the communities we call home.

CURE will continue to be an engine for that kind of work. Community First projects will be conceived at kitchen tables and nonprofit board rooms, building academic knowledge and pursuing justice. We’ll be piloting that model this Spring through a Community First class where PhD students conduct projects with community groups. We’ve also received over $100,000 in funding from Rutgers’ Urban Innovation Fund and the Rutgers Equity Alliance for Community Health (REACH) to work with One Camden to better understand how Camden residents are navigating the city’s school choice landscape.

This, of course, is only the beginning. We’ll be announcing new community partnerships, hosting seminars with community-engaged scholars, and continuing CURE’s legacy of world-class urban research.

Please join us in this work. Reach out to our team. Join our mailing list. Attend our events. Volunteer for CURE. Consider donating to the center. My email address is stephen.danley@rutgers.edu if you’d like to connect with our team and learn more about any of these possibilities.

I’m honored to be leading this next chapter in CURE’s illustrious history. Now, let’s get to the work.

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.

December 8 CURE Seminar with Dr. Yoonhwan Park

Comparison of urban problems between Korea and the United States through quantitative data analysis

Thursday, December 8
12:30 p.m. – 1:45 p.m.
Alumni House Conference Room (Hybrid via Zoom)
Lunch will be served
Open to the public

Abstract

South Korean cities face many of the same problems that American cities have experienced in the past. The problems of increasing heterogeneity in urban composition, poverty and inequality between classes, gentrification, transportation, and housing are challenges that cities in both countries need to solve. South Korea faces additional challenges with excessive concentration of people and economic power in the Seoul Metro and extremely low fertility rates. Without balanced national development to address these issues, Korea’s national competitiveness is likely to decline.

Registration link: https://rcit.rutgers.edu/apps/payment/register.php?event_id=857

November 10 CURE Seminar Series with Nikil Saval

The Whole-Home Repair Program

Thursday, November 10
12:30 p.m. – 1:45 p.m.
Alumni House Conference Room (Hybrid via Zoom)
Lunch will be served
Open to the public

Abstract:

Creating equitable and just communities and maintaining safe and healthy homes are two sides of the same coin. Hundreds of thousands of homes across Pennsylvania have moderate to severe physical inadequacies, including leaky roofs or windows, inadequate wiring, unreliable heat, or the lack of a flushing toilet. This deferred maintenance endangers the health of the home’s residents, including through exposure to mold, lead, and extreme temperatures in the winter and summer. The climate crisis, causing Pennsylvania to become increasingly hotter and wetter, exacerbates the deterioration of our homes by exposing them to conditions they were never intended to withstand, simultaneously burdening residents with crushing utility bills.

The Whole-Home Repairs Program—introduced by Senator Saval this past March and signed into law in July—establishes a one-stop shop for home repairs and weatherization while building out local workforces and adding new family-sustaining jobs in a growing field. This program is the first of its kind in the nation, making it so that Pennsylvanians can stay warm, safe, and dry in homes they can afford.

This program reinforces the adage that “the most affordable home is the one you already have.” It also speaks to the belief in the preservation community that preserving a home is about more than saving a building and keeping its occupants healthy; it is about preserving cultural memory and the character of neighborhoods and cities.

The Whole-Home Repairs Program won because of bipartisan support in both chambers of the Pennsylvania General Assembly, champions at all levels of government, and grassroots support from practitioners, advocates, community organizations, and residents across the state, revealing that rural and urban communities alike are engaged in a shared struggle against the detrimental effects of blight, abandonment, vacancy, and displacement, and the accompanying community-wide harms that this cycle triggers.

About Nikil Saval:

Senator Nikil Saval represents the First Senate District in the Pennsylvania legislature, where he serves as Democratic Chair of the Senate’s Urban Affairs & Housing Committee. Saval’s legislative work is focused on addressing Pennsylvania’s ongoing housing, mass incarceration, wage, and climate crises, while simultaneously pushing for structural change. His office led the creation of the Whole-Home Repairs Program, which establishes a one-stop shop for home repairs and weatherization, and which was adopted by the legislature in July.

Saval has written extensively for The New York Times and The New Yorker and served as co-editor of literary journal n+1 (he remains on its board). He is the author of Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace (Doubleday, 2014).