As a community and urban sociologist, publicly oriented sociology is a linchpin of my research methods through the practice of active participation observation with urban social movements and documentary work with public history organizations. Multiyear funding by a governmental partner got me involved in public policy, asset building, and community organizing in the neighborhoods surrounding my campus. Partnering with public media generated online publishing opportunities for me and my students, with our features garnering visibility for local public characters, attention to the impacts of gentrification and displacement, exposure to anti-gentrification movements, and promotion for public debate about housing justice and urban rights. My work also builds institutional capacity on campus for community-based learning, engaging in collaborative teaching, promoting public scholarship, and recognizing this scholarship’s impact in our profession.
Graduate School Roots in Public Sociology
Community-engaged research was a central part of my academic experience from my first year of graduate studies at the New School for Social Research in New York City in the late 1980s. My mentor, the urbanist Janet Abu-Lughod, organized local faculty in a research center called Research About Lower Manhattan (REALM). Channeling the work of urban advocates such as Jane Jacobs and critical ethnographers such as Michael Burawoy, Abu-Lughod spurred her students to engage in active participant observation around the anti-gentrification movement that resulted in her book From Urban Village to East Village: The Battle for New York’s Lower East Side (Wiley-Blackwell 1995).
Rather than employ me as a research assistant, she encouraged me to apply my work-study funding toward internships with organizations such as the Lower East Side Joint Planning Council and the New York Chinatown History Project. With the Chinatown History Project, I was involved with oral history interviews of Chinese women garment workers and exhibitions on the struggles of immigrant residential life in tenement buildings, recruiting participants and training students in the methods of interviewing and transcription. The Chinatown History Project and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum helped give visibility to women and immigrants as part of the multiculturalism and “new social history” movements of the 1980s and 1990s. My book, Reconstruction Chinatown: Ethnic Enclave, Global Change (University of Minnesota Press 1998) sought to explode popular myths—such as those that represented Chinatown through the lenses of poverty, vice, and organized crime—about an immigrant enclave experiencing transformative shifts representative of U.S. “global cities,” while bringing attention to the efforts of local social movements to advance community self-determination.
Governmental Funding and Building Institutional Capacity
After teaching stints at the University of Houston and Amherst College, I arrived at Occidental College in Los Angeles in 1998. A year later I was awarded a three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to work with the Northeast Community Resource Coordinating Council on several outreach and applied research projects in Northeast Los Angeles, along with a coprincipal investigator from Occidental’s Urban and Environmental Policy program.
Specifically, this grant funded a project manager and stipends for faculty and students to work on a broad range of projects with a variety of community partners, which were all linked through task forces in a Northeast Community Resource Coordinating Council. Task force meetings were held at the Hathaway Family Resource Center, a progressive social work organization that was our main community partner and the source of the majority of our matching funds, a key requirement for the governmental funding. Some of the projects were public policy oriented, such as producing map books and data tables from the U.S. census population and housing statistics, developing community resource guides, and implementing business improvement surveys. Other projects mobilized community assets by producing archival community histories; promoted grassroots organizing with tenants; and developed adult and youth leadership groups, community gardens, and nutrition guides.
In the late 1990s, community partners perceived Occidental College as an irrelevant and distant ivory tower. But perceptions improved as our Center for Community Based Learning began engaging more faculty, further linking the academic programs with local community interests. Additionally, student assistants were funded to be educators in action, forming great relationships with their sponsoring professors and becoming student leaders through their experiences training other students and working with communities. Faculty formed relationships with one another through faculty learning communities, leading some to do collaborative and team teaching. We were lucky that Occidental College was funding these programs and institutional advancement was actively raising external funds from progressive donors, such as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, that were seeking to support academic programs that could help build just communities and support diversity in urban arts and culture. Beyond building institutional capacity for community-based learning (CBL), there was also an ongoing campaign for building institutional legitimacy for CBL and recognizing it in the tenure and promotion process. In the 34 years since we first received this grant, a lot has changed. Occidental College has now reached the point where CBL is an integral component of strategic planning, accreditation, and assessment.
Media Partnerships and Critical Dialogue on Public Issues
Ten years after the HUD grant, the economic disadvantages of Northeast LA had morphed. The community was coming out of the Great Recession, and commercial and residential gentrification was becoming widespread across boulevards and neighborhoods. After decades of out-movement and white flight, white middle-class families were returning to historic inner-ring Northeast LA neighborhoods, fostering public debate about the livelihood of the working-class Latin American and Asian immigrant families threatened by displacement. In 2012–2013, I convinced producers at KCET’s Departures studio, the community-oriented online journalism unit of this Southern California public television station, to publish features based on the field interviews produced by my students on the experiences of Northeast LA artists, business people, and community leaders, and their perceptions of gentrification and its consequences. KCET Departures published about 30 of the 50 features we delivered and hired some of Occidental College’s sociology and media arts students as interns and staff. Working with the public media partner, we had more freedom to engage in critical dialogue on public issues than we had with our governmental partner. The research from my nearly 20 years of work in Northeast LA was eventually published as a book, Taking Back the Boulevard: Art, Activism, and Gentrification in Los Angeles (New York University Press 2019).
An important community partner during my research on the displacement effects of gentrification was the North East Los Angeles Alliance, an organization that works against commercial and residential gentrification by mobilizing public protests and organizing tenants against mass evictions at multifamily apartment buildings. John Urquiza was one of the anti-gentrification leaders and a key informant, was as well as a photographer documenting Northeast LA gentrification through the Sin Turistas Collective. With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and in collaboration with the sociology department and urban and environmental policy program, Occidental College was able to hire Urquiza to teach a course called Visualizing Gentrification: Bridging Land-Use Data and Photography. Urquiza and I collaborated on an article for the online publication Boom California that chronicled, through vivid ethnographic narrative and dramatic photos, the efforts of the anti-gentrification movement in Northeast LA to protest displacement and the lack of affordable housing, as well as assert the rights of residents in a city where gentrification and housing justice were becoming more palpable issues across a variety of Los Angeles neighborhoods—including Boyle Heights, Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Crenshaw, and Leimert Park.
Recognizing Publicly Engaged Scholarship
Throughout my 20 years teaching at Occidental College, I have engaged with public history partners, mobilized student participation in field interviews, and documented the oral histories of the local communities in the Los Angeles region. Some of the key takeaways from my work have been:
- Teaching public sociology—fostering faculty/student relationships—teaching collaboratively.
- Fundraising from governmental and nonprofit sources to help advance public engagement.
- Building institutional capacity through campus centers for community-based learning.
- Working with public media partners to bring visibility to key social issues and enhance critical dialogue.
- Collaborating with community partners to advance public policy, asset building, and public recognition of their issues.
- Promoting public scholarship and recognizing its impact in our profession.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the author and not the American Sociological Association.
