This Minority Post-Doctoral Research and Training Fellowship in the Social and Behavioral Sciences involves four components which grow out of the PI's dissertation research. The dissertation research is a study of how urban inequality affects neighborhood mobilization at the neighborhood level in Chicago from 1970 to 1990. In this project, the PI will use event data to analyze the variation in mobilization rates for both protest and civic activity in Chicago's neighborhoods. The first component is to do a qualitative study of a small subset (four to six) of neighborhoods which (four to six) mobilized. The second component is to collect data from a Boston newspaper to compare mobilization rates to that of Chicago. Third, would be to combine voting data with that of protest and civic action to see if there is any relation between the three. Lastly, the project will undertake more advanced spatial and temporal modeling than in the dissertation to examine various issues. These issues include: 1) the diffusion of protest across Chicago; 2) what role the urban/suburban dichotomy plays in collective action; and 3) how the ecology of the city is related to the ecology of action and what that means for both the study of collective action and urban poverty. This research and training will be undertaken under the mentorship of Rob Sampson, who specializes in the understanding of neighborhood dynamics and urban poverty. This project will training a future researcher in the social and behavioral sciences who is underrepresented in the sciences. It will increase our understanding of collective action, political action, and inequality at the city level.
