As urban areas typically tend to be home to heterogenous populations, research on cities has led urban studies scholars to strongly theorize that the intersecting and conflicting categories through which urban sociality emerges are also central to the formation of public life. As witnessed in many cities across the United States, these encounters and interactions both across and within social categories of difference are not without their deeply political stakes. The ways in which people encounter each other are in part determined by how this diversity is managed by the state, especially with regards to how urban space is planned. This project, which trains a graduate student in scientific methods of data collection and analysis, aims to understand how everyday relationships between communities are shaped by urban integration strategies. The project would enhance understanding of science and the scientific method by broadly disseminating its findings to organizations, scientists, and government agencies.
The research will take place in a historically multiethnic context, where municipal and state authorities have developed a systematic urban planning strategy of integration to manage socioeconomic, cultural, and demographic differences. By interrogating how everyday social relations among demographically and socioeconomically diverse individuals are experienced, how people inhabit and negotiate their own and others’ categories of cultural difference, and how sociodemographic integration shapes ideas about subjectivity, this project utilizes anthropology’s skills in deep, ground level ethnographic engagement to gain a more detailed, practical, and lived understanding of sociocultural encounters and relations. Over twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork combining participant observation, semi-structured interviews, participant mapping exercises, and archival research, this inquiry will evaluate ongoing social relations formed through particular approaches to urban plurality.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
