Mapping the Boundaries of Class, Race, and Documentation Status in New York City

Svetlana Jović (SUNY Old Westbury)
Jennifer Pipitone (College of Mount Saint Vincent)

This project took place at Bronx Community College located in the poorest congressional district in the USA. Youth from underprivileged backgrounds are far less likely to be civically engaged and to take a proactive stance in relation to various aspects of their lives, compared to their more privileged counterparts who are better at voicing their needs (and feel more entitled to do so) and demanding accommodation in various institutional contexts. Using photography, writing, and mapping to explore what different environments mean to students, what they perceive as assets and challenges, and how they see their role in society, this project aimed to foster underserved students’ sense of agency and ownership over their communities. Using diverse vehicles for storytelling, we explored students’ sense of community and their experiences of power arrangements through social class, race, and documentation status. In bi-weekly 2-hour workshops over an academic year, students received training in, and engaged with, community-based action research methodology, photography, and visual analysis. Findings suggest students experienced the blatant socioeconomic disparities characteristic of NYC neighborhoods as they traversed from one environment to another, which impacted their sense of engagement and investment in certain communities. The students articulated the notion that they are “the one side of the two cities,” illustrating a sense of otherness from the rest of the city. This finding was also supported by the geolocations of their photo making, which clustered within the “small radius” in which their lives took place. Students restricted their movement to the area north of Central Park, delineating the borders of class, race, and documentation status. Overall, findings suggest that the resulting increase in students’ sense of ownership and agency over their communities was mediated by their deeper sense-making about their individual— and their communities’—position within the broader inequitable distribution of power and resources.