Seeing the
City
Teaching urban sociology at an urban public university is both easy and difficult. It is easy because students are naturally interested in the city, since it is the foundation of their lived experience. Urban sociology is about them. It is difficult because the sociological imagination is not effortlessly acquired, and to see anything sociologically requires the ability to achieve critical distance from it. That urban life is so familiar makes seeing the city sociologically toilsome.
For this reason, I use a community profile assignment in almost every course I teach. The assignment structures lessons that help students understand what Mills' means by the sociological imagination. It is an opportunity to see the structure of urban life, to see how the familiar patterns of daily urban living are the result of a complex set of social forces and institutional practices.
In most of my courses, I use the topic of inequality as a thread that ties together the various topics to be covered. The community profile assignment, then, is designed to call attention to some aspect of urban life that represents a form of inequality. In other words, students select some salient characteristic of their neighborhood and investigate it as an element of inequality. Since not everyone experiences this element in exactly the same way, the student is charged with thinking sociologically about how this difference is socially structured as a form of inequality.
In this paper, I will discuss the elements of the community profile assignment using an example from one of the courses I teach regularly, People, Power & Politics. It is the social science core course, required of all students at the college. Thus, the students mixed with regard to class year and major; for many, it serves as an introduction to sociology. It is not, strictly speaking, a standard course in urban sociology. But, because it is supposed to be focused on contemporary society — in order to play its assigned role in the core curriculum, I choose to focus on contemporary life in New York, and more specifically, Brooklyn.
Learning Goals
There are three important learning goals for the community profile: (i) to master the logic of a sociological argument; (ii) to become familiar with sources of and kinds of demographic information available on the Internet; and, (iii) to reflect on the socially meaningful qualities of public space — that is, to apply a social semiotic interpretation to narrative data about the neighborhood.
Let me take a moment to elaborate on these learning goals before I discuss how the community profile attempts to accomplish them. The first learning goal might seem the most obvious. It is a common enough learning goal in any sociology course. But I emphasize the notion of logic. I expect students to do more than just describe their neighborhood. I want them to make an argument about the aspect of inequality they've selected. That argument must adhere to the rules, if you will, of sociological evidence.
It is probably clear by now that I am a methodologist. Yes, I admit it. This emphasis on the 'how' of the argument as much as the 'what' is, I guess, the tell-tale sign. Not all sociological arguments play by these rules, of course, but I believe students need to know how to follow them in order to when and how it is acceptible to violate them. If you want to be a post-positivist, I believe, you ought to be very familiar with positivism.
The second learning goal is also not terribly surprising, though certainly not as common in sociology courses. This, I hope, is changing. Some sociologists still regard the Internet with a great deal of suspicion, especially as a resource for students. This is, in part, based on a misperception of the quality of information available. But those of us who've paid closer attention to technology developments understand that there is a great deal of fabulous data to be found from trustworthy sources. Students need to be educated about this; they need to learn to be savvy consumers of this data. Evaluating online information is a sorely neglected skill in many (most?) sociology courses today.
The third learning goal may be the most unexpected. Indeed, it is the newest goal to be incorporated into the assignment. Its origins are two-fold. First, I wanted students to be able to collect a second kind of data, besides the demographic, in order to understand that sociologists have to be prepared to deal with different kinds of information. Not everything that we want to know about is easily quantifiable. Some form of narrative data is needed in this assignment. Second, I began the assignment using personal experience as the narrative data. I began thinking about the importance of visual literacy as a form of sociological knowledge, and eventually decided that this should be incorporated somehow into the profile. I am fortunate to be working with a very talented visual sociologist, my colleague Jerome Krase, so adding this to the assignment has not been terribly difficult.
Students collect narrative data by observing their neighborhood. In addition, I am in the process of building, with Jerry Krase, Mary Howard and Chris Toulouse, an online archive of images of Brooklyn. This will make it possible for students to illustrate their narrative data with images from their neighborhood. Jerry has been photographing urban neighborhoods — in Brooklyn and all over the world — for more than thirty years. He has an (offline) archive of tens of thousands of photographs. The number of photographs continues to grow. We have several years of work ahead of us to get them into a usable online form. There currently isn't much data in our online archive, BrooklynSoc.Org, but it is enough to illustrate the principles.
The visual narrative data, and the selection of photographic images, provide the opportunity to reflect on the ways in which meaning is invested in public space. While the demographic data may reveal the unfamiliar in the neighborhood, the visual narrative data illuminates the familiar. This is an important opening for the engagment of the sociological imagination, for the visual data begs the question, "How do we know that is what it means?"
The Assignment
You can see the assignment as it is used in People, Power & Politics. Some of the details vary depending on the course I am teaching, but the assignment retains a basic structure that can be seen in the Core 3 version linked to here. The students study their own neighborhood, collecting quantitative demographic data and narrative visual data. They write a draft of the essay and receive feedback. They incoporate elements from the theoretical and empirical sources we study in the course to fashion a clearly stated and supported sociological argument about inequality in their community.
Students must send me a summary of the data that they collect for use in the profile. I use simple email forms embedded in the assignment instructions to facilitate communication. By requiring that the students submit data a week before the draft is due, I make it more difficult for students to try to do everything in a rush at the last minute. (Students, as we know from experience, often ignore instructions when working on assignments the night before they are due.) It also gives me the opportunity to give additional feedback to students who are having difficulty making sense of the demographic data.
I require that students send me their draft through the course site — by this time in the semester, about the mid-point, this is not an all an issue, since students are used to communicating with me through the site. I also require that they bring a copy of the draft to a particular class meeting, during which we discuss the assignment and they give/get peer feedback on the draft.
Teaching the
Community Profile
The community profile works very well for me. I think it is generally successful in providing students with an opportunity to achieve the three learning goals previously discussed. I am optimistic that as I continue work on the photo archive of Brooklyn, the assignment will be even more effective.
I devote some class time to introducing the community profile assignment at the beginning of the semester, so students can prepare themselves for it. (Ambitious students often begin the assignment on their own, since the instructions are always available on the course site, before we get to the class meeting at which I formally discuss it.) Several weeks before the draft is due, I spend class time covering the details of the assignment — reminding the students of due dates and requirements, etc. — and I show them some of the web sites that they may use to collect demographic data.
There is a great deal of useful information "out there" from reliable sources. In New York, we are especially blessed with outstanding sites about the city and its people. I begin with the U.S. Census site. When I first started this assignment, the Census site was rough going. It has, however, been transformed into a wonderful site. I also show them some of the academic sites that collect and present demographic data about New York. Finally, I show them the web site of the City of New York. (It, too, has undergone a remarkable transformation.) The office of City Planning has a great deal of easy to use information about New York neighborhoods.
This raises an important issue that I call their attention to at the beginning of the assignment. They have to generate a working definition of "neighborhood". The problem of operational definitions is a familiar one to any empirical researcher, so I think it is important to expose students to the decision-making process here. I let them chose their own definition, provided they can tell me how they are defining "neighborhood" and why. They can opt for methodologically neat administrative units of the agencies that collect data (such as a Census Tract or a Community District) or the ecologically valid definition of neighborhood likely to be held by residents themselves (such as, in Brooklyn, Sunset Park, Prospect Heights, or DUMBO). Or, something in-between. They can choose a large or small area as suits their own sensiblity, keeping in mind the practical considerations.
I try to avoid giving students too much step-by-step instruction on the navigation of these sites, since that is a valuable skill to acquire. I encourage them to find useful sites and look around. We discuss the issue of site reliability, but in general, I leave them to arrive at their own conclusions in that regard for they sites they visit beyond the few I show them in class. I would rather have a few papers with poor citations as the cost of the opportunity to develop critical browsing in students.
I provide feedback to students based on the demographic data they send to me. Some students need help making sense of quantitative information, but much more common is the need for feedback regarding the utility of various empirical facts in support of the kind of inequality the student has chosen to investigate.
In class, I also introduce the students to the collection of narrative data. In this assignment, the students are required to do field observations during a walk through their neighborhood. I give them some basic methodological advice regarding field observations, and then we discuss the more general issue of how we know the meaning of what we see.
I have my students look at a module on gentrification to give us a common focus for the discussion of social semiotics. My colleague Jerry Krase has done some very interesting work on gentrification as a visual style, and I ask my students to read an essay in which Professor Krase compares a neighborhood in Brooklyn with one in Krakow, Poland.
One of the most important points that emerges from this discussion is the need, in sociological research, to see without judgment. We need a critical visual literacy; we need a way of looking that is informed by social theory (such as is necessary to see gentrification, for example). But most importantly, we need a way of looking that allows us to step outside of our usual preconceptions and attributions. This is, at its most basic, the key to the sociological imagination. In the discussion, I try to get the students to adopt a vocabulary of seeing that is descriptive rather than evaluative. So, for example, one can see buildings in disrepair rather than "a neighborhood in which people don't care about where they live."
Selected
Bibliography
City of New York. 2002. Annual Report of Social Indicators. New York: Department of City Planning.
Evans, P et al. 2001. Livable Cities: The Politics of Urban Livelihood and Sustainability, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Krase, J. 2002. Navigating Ethnic Vernacular Landscapes: Then and Now. Journal of Architectural and Planning Research. 19(4):274-281.
Logan, JR. 2000. Still a Global City: The Racial and Ethnic Segmentation of New York. In Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order?, edited by P Marcuse and R van Kempen. Oxford: Blackwell.
Marcuse, P and R van Kempen. 2000. Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order?, Oxford: Blackwell.
Talwar, JP. 2002. Fast Food, Fast Track? Immigrants, Big Business, and the American Dream. Boulder, CO: Westview.
van Vliet, W. 2002. Cities in a globalizing world: from engines of growth to agents of change. Environment & Urbanization. 14(1):31-40.
All content on this site is copyright © 2003-2004 by Prof. Timothy Shortell, except where copyright is retained by the original owners. No infringement of rights is meant or implied. This page is U.S. Section 508 accessible.