Penn Undergraduates Present Urban Research Findings as Part of the 2019 UURC

Each spring semester, Penn IUR sponsors the Undergraduate Urban Research Colloquium (UURC), an advanced research seminar for undergraduate scholars with an interest in urban-focused research. The program pairs students with a faculty mentor with expertise in their areas of interest. Students and faculty teams come from academic departments throughout the University, with students receiving credits through the School of Design’s City and Regional Planning Department or the School of Arts and Sciences’ Urban Studies Program.

In the spring of 2019, Penn IUR sponsored the 15th annual UURC. Over the course of the semester, students learned about existing research resources at Penn, visited the Architecture Archives, attended community meetings relevant to their individual research, and learned about systematic research process by refining their research design, collecting data and presenting their results. Each session, faculty from different schools visited the class to introduce students to variety of ways that urban-centered research could be pursued. Students learned about conducting historical research using public and private archives, establishing relationship with community partners for community-based research, and using spatial analysis to inform public policy. The semester wrapped with a presentation on actionable intelligence or how academic research could be translated to practice. 

The seven student–faculty teams and their topics of study this year were:

• A Comparative Ethnographic Study on Employment Practices at Local Urban Universities  | Student: Samantha Stein (SAS); Mentor: Aaron Levy (SAS)
• Community Engagement in City-Based Human Service Funding Decisions | Student: Kavya Singh (SAS); Mentor: Megan Farwell (SP2 PhD Candidate)
• The Construction of Histories of James Town: Oral, Written & Mapped| Student: Anunya Bahanda (SAS); Mentor: Kimberly Noronha (Design PhD Candidate)
• Local Accountability Effects in Philadelphia | Student: Aaron Soo Ping Chow (SAS); Mentor:  Haisheng Yang (GSE PhD Candidate)
• Restorying the Scale of Death: Thirteen Reasons Why We Need “Small Stories” in Urban Education | Student: Pinar Goktas (Nursing/SAS); Mentors: Emily Plummer & Josh Coleman (GSE PhD Candidates)
• Smart Cities | Students: Patrick Teese (SAS), Rachel Chu (SAS), Sophia Ye (Wharton); Mentors: Eugenie Birch, Allison Lassiter (Design)
• The Role of Teachers in Creating Positive School Climate In The Context of Low-Income and Conflict-Affected Countries | Student: Adamseged Abebe (SAS/SP2); Mentor: Christiana Kallon (GSE PhD Candidate)

Read detailed descriptions of each project below:

Participant: Adamseged Abebe; Project: The Role of Teachers as Agents of Peacebuilding and Social Cohesion; Mentor: Christiana Kallon Kelly, Education, Culture and Society

Description: Teachers are the critical drivers in teaching and learning processes in schools. In the field of education and conflict studies, while there has been a significant emphasis on the positive and negative role of education in helping minimize or foster conflict, there has not been explicit studies that focus on teachers. This research project aims to explore how and to what extent of education, more specifically teacher, are contributing to conflict or peacebuilding efforts. As students learn cultures of peace, conflict resolution skills and character educations in schools, the role of teachers in teaching such lessons could affect students’ engagement in more peaceful dialogues and conflict resolutions that celebrate ethnic diversity among them. Studying the teachers' role in peacebuilding is significant in shaping national teacher education and curriculum policies that better prepares and supports in their role as peace and nation builders. As a result, my research question is: what are the perceptions and practices of teachers as peacebuilding and social cohesion agents in the context of ethnic-conflict Ethiopian schools?

Participant: Rachel Chu; Project: Bike Sharing in Shenzhen; Mentors: Dr. Allison Lassiter and Dr. Eugenie Birch, City and Regional Planning

Description: As China’s overall wealth increases, Chinese residents see themselves needing more mobility services. However, due to the pollution and traffic congestion of large Chinese cities, these residents face regulations to prevent rising private car ownership rates. Thus, due to transformations in technology and environmental challenges, increasing amounts of citizens have turned to shared mobility services. Companies such as Ofo and Mobike have experienced a rapid expansion across the nation, capitalizing on producing a large quantity of bikes to be accessible to citizens. Current dockless bike sharing programs in China use a rich past to usher China into a “smart” future. Shenzhen is a pertinent case study for research because it is an example of a city in which bike share operators first flourished under lack of regulation, until the point of oversaturation so that the government eventually stepped in and now controls the bike quality and quantities.

Participant: Kavya Singh; Project: Community Grantmaking Committees; Mentor: Megan Farwell, Social Welfare

Description: In 1964, President Johnson introduced a nationwide legislation declaring ‘war on poverty’ which further embodied the idea of maximum feasible participation. This created a shifted in the decision-making process for the distribution of grants. Grant-making power was tiered down to local governments and community committees. Non-profit entities also came to play a crucial role in providing basic services. The human services bracket came on to tackle a wide array of issues such as homelessness, housing affordability, health, welfare, social services and community services. Many federal programs since then have come to be launched- this research is centered around the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program that is provides the basic housing and sustainable living environment, and expands economic opportunities, principally for low- and moderate-income populations.1 Communities and the decision-making body have become increasingly responsible for distributing the funding dollars from such programs

Participant: Anunya Bahanda; Project: How is James Town Portrayed in the Written and Mapped Histories of the Settlement?; Mentor: Kimberly Noronha, City and Regional Planning 

Description: The histories of informal settlement histories are rarely told. This paper works to understand how a meaningful history of an informal settlement may be constructed from archival material. We aim to identify the ways in which the settlement of James Town, Accra, is portrayed in the written and mapped histories of the settlement. We hope that by doing so, it will encourage academia and policy to understand such subaltern spaces as having historical value that has hitherto been ignored.

Participant: Pinar Goktas; Project: Restorying Death: Thirteen Reasons Why We Need “Small Stories” in Urban Education; Mentors: Emily Plummer and James Joshua Coleman, Reading, Writing, and Literacy

Description: Youth attitudes towards suicide and death in general are generally neglected in studies due to the taboo nature of the subject and sensitivity to adolescent’s developing emotional capacities. However, with teen suicide a prominent public health issue in the U.S. today, it is important to understand how youth receive, comprehend, and process information related to suicide. This project follows a youth participatory action (YPAR) methodology in order to gather qualitative data on the thoughts and attitudes of the students at a design-based innovation high school in the School District of Philadelphia, which is referred to as “The Innovate School”. YPAR is an innovative new research method that questions the research-subject power hierarchy by encouraging subjects to interact with researchers then formulate their own opinions and potential solutions to the (usually social justice oriented) research question they are both coactively studying. The YPAR model was used to set up the Literacy Lab, a unique learning space in the Innovate School where students are encouraged to engage in literary and artistic activities. Other activities in the Literacy Lab include a literary magazine, popular amongst the students as the most organized activity and also for being able to produce a tangible outcome, and formerly a tutoring center. The space is also unique in that there are plans for it to be entirely student-run next year.

Participant: Aaron Soo Ping Chow; Project: Local Accountability Effects in Philadelphia; Mentor: Haisheng Yang, Education Policy

Description: Accountability systems in education have typically been used to evaluate school performance based on a series of school quality measures such as academic achievement. The implementation of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in 2002 led to a centralization of school accountability. Since the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), however, the backlash to NCLB led to a decentralized school accountability system and more responsibility has thus been delegated to states and local districts. In this era, accountability has become more localized and many school districts have adopted their own rating systems. Although an extensive literature exists that evaluates the effect of accountability systems before and during NCLB (Carnoy & Loeb, 2002; Hanushek & Raymond, 2005; Dee & Jacob, 2011), little evidence exists on how local accountability pressures affect student achievement in the post-NCLB era. Our research aims to contribute to the accountability literature by using Philadelphia as an empirical case study of whether local accountability policies affect student achievement, teacher effectiveness, or enrollment. We use the School Progress Report (SPR), a local accountability tool introduced by the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) in 2012-13, to understand the effects of local accountability on school-level outcomes.

Participant: Samantha Stein; Project: Slought Foundation Work & Exception from Informed Consent; Mentor: Dr. Aaron Levy, English and History of Art

Description: This term I embarked on two distinct but connected projects with the support of the Undergraduate Urban Research Colloquium. Both projects relate to public engagement with and participation in science. Slought Endeavor: I organized and hosted a two day event at the Slought Foundation to promote reflexivity about power and privilege, and to facilitate discourse about public engagement with science. The multi-day event challenged participants (myself included) to reflect on the semiotics of knowing, and to consider uncertainty and crises of privilege as means to addressing social inequities. In his talk at the Slought Foundation entitled "A Letter of Love and White Backlash," philosopher Dr. George Yancy attended to the semiotics of security by examining racial relations in the U.S. The choice not to not produce violence, Yancy posits, is an ethical one and thus the white individual is ethically responsible for the pain experienced by the black individual each time that the white individual exists in a state of certainty. The narrative of comfort for all is semiotically impossible, and thus an acceptance of privilege implicates one in someone else’s pain and is therefore an act of violence. To make this symbolic, semiotic violence more visible, Yancy advocates for “dangerous spaces.” Dangerous spaces are those in which a crisis of privileged identity occurs. Yancy frames the academic institution as a key location for such crisis to be provoked. As I consider scientific resistance to involving publics in science, I contextualize such resistance within the narrative of certainty in which comfort lies. I recognize that public participation in science is uncomfortable because it forces us to confront new eligibility for knowing. By involving publics in science, I can provoke crisis and thus push against epistemically-endowed oppression.

Participant: Patrick Teese; Project: India’s Smart Cities Mission and Positive Perceptions of Smart City Pune; Mentors: Dr. Allison Lassiter and Dr. Eugenie Birch, City and Regional Planning

Description: My project includes a literature review on smart city development as well as a two-part case study examining India’s national Smart Cities Mission (SCM) and Pune, a west Indian city participating in this initiative. After reading broadly about smart cities, I researched the details of the SCM initiative and how it is manifesting in Pune and conducted interviews with Pune residents experiencing these changes firsthand to gauge their feelings about it. Research Context: My interests in environmental sustainability, international development, and urban infrastructure brought me to Dr. Lassiter and Dr. Birch and their project on smart cities in low-income nations. Having had no direct connection to India, my choice of research topic was largely dictated by my access and resources. India is an english-speaking country with very notable examples of smart city development, and some of my friends and classmates at Penn were willing and able to connect me with people in India (specifically Pune) whom they knew. This topic is important to me because it explores how real people interact with these big concepts. As such, my main research question was: Do Pune residents perceive this “smart” transition positively?