Seminar 2 Encyclopedia

NYCROPOLIS

Professor: Peter Vellon
ITF: Amanda Matles
Campus: Queens College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/vellon18/

New York is dying. “But wait,” you say. “New York is dying? Impossible.” Sure, a visit to the Big Apple on any given day will yield sights of glass high-rises, bustling crowds of tourists and professionals, and shops with bedazzling variety: from classic bodegas to swanky yoga studios. But look closer. How can there be so many new skyscrapers and yet so many homeless? Why are trains on-time in Yorkville but not in Van Nest? And what on earth happened to the rent in Chelsea?

A visit to NYCropolis might leave you angry and frustrated with the current state of affairs. Good- that’s why we made it. The issues we researched relate to deep, unsolved problems in New York’s physical and social architecture. But our city is an amazing city, a feat of history that’s constantly reinventing itself. And we need you to be a part of its resurrection. Today, New York’s development conceals its death in essential areas. New life only comes when we stop treating the symptoms and start honestly working toward a cure. The more of NYCropolis you read, the more you will find that solutions to these problems don’t lie with the powers that be, but with the power of the people. Call your council member, join an advocacy group, and participate in Community Board meetings using your informed opinions. Turn this dying city into bright lights that inspire you and streets that make you feel brand-new.

-From the students of Honors 126, “The Peopling of New York,” Professor Vellon, and Amanda Matles

Macaulay Honors College and Queens College
Spring 2018
*With apologies to Jay-Z and Alicia Keys

A People's Guide to NYC

Professor: Arianna Martinez
ITF: Lindsey Albracht
Campus: Queens College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/peoplesguidetonyc/

Inspired by the recently published book, A People’s Guide to Los Angeles, this assignment asked students at Queens Macaulay Honors College to construct an alternative tourist guide to New York City: a guide that highlights immigrant stories, prioritizes contested spaces, and creates a geographic record of sites of social movements and political struggles within the city.

Students selected a site in their own neighborhood or a neighborhood that was familiar to them, conducted research on the site, visited it to take photographs, and crafted a story about the site using excerpts from A People’s Guide to Los Angeles as a model.

The Peopling of New York

Professor: Stephen Steinberg
ITF: Lindsey Albracht
Campus: Queens College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/steinberg17/category/oral-history-project/

For the final project in this Seminar 2, students interviewed a member of their family about an immigration experience. They also reflected on the exercise in a brief statement that accompanied the post.

The goal of the oral history was to consider how some of the more abstract themes of the class actually played out in the particular lives of people that students actually knew. In the reflection, they were asked to make the connection between course themes and the interview, but also to reflect on the experience of interviewing itself.

The professor opted to display these projects on the existing course website rather than asking students to create separate sites or asking me to create something new. I think a site which displayed all of the posts at once (in Aesop, though I know that theme has its issues) and allowing the user to navigate to the histories that interested them would have been a better design choice, because the histories of students who posted early are a bit buried. But overall, I think the reflections mostly demonstrate that students met the goal of the assignment.

Contested New York

Professor: Peter Vellon
ITF: Amanda Matles
Campus: Queens College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/vellon17/

This website is the hub for a collection of six digital projects that focus on several key points of socio-economic conflict, struggle, and tension in New York City from the post World War II period to the present.

It would have been great to coordinate link-backs to the hub site from each of the group project sites, but not all of the groups included one.

Contested New York

Professor: Peter Vellon
ITF: Amanda Matles
Campus: Queens College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/vellon16/

Contested New York is a collection of digital essays that focus on several key points of socio-economic conflict, struggle, and tension in New York City from the post World War II period to the present. Our guiding questions were: Does NYC always “work,” and what happens when it does not? Our project was created during the Spring 2016 semester by students from the Macaulay Honors College at Queens College, Class of 2019, as part of the seminar course The Peopling of New York City.

The Astoria Project

Professor: Christos Ioannides
ITF: Caroline Erb
Campus: Queens College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/ioannides16_astoriaproject/

Professor Christos Ioannides’ students created a site to highlight the demographic changes, cultural outlets, institutions, and commercial ventures of Greeks in Astoria, Queens. The website showcases the highlights of the Greek community as Astoria rapidly gentrifies. Each student authored a page for the site and the entire class revised different portions of the website.

Astoria Project: A Brief Overview of Life in Astoria, Queens

Professor: Christos Ioannides
ITF: Caroline Erb-Medina
Campus: Queens College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/ioannides15_astoriaproject

Welcome to the Astoria Project, a website completed by the Macaulay Honors College students of Dr. Christos Ioannides’ Seminar 2 course, The Peopling of New York. Students used WordPress and custom CSS coding to create an in-depth view of the cultural, historical, and social aspects of one of the most important ethnic enclaves in New York City. These aspects, as you will see as you explore the site, range from the influence of the Greek Orthodox Church to the importance of soccer in the area. The class hopes that their efforts and the website will give you an insight into how important and amazing Astoria, NY is.

Astoria Project

Professor: Christos Ioannides
ITF: Caroline Erb
Campus: Queens College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/ioannides14_astoriaproject/

For our Macaulay Seminar 2, The Peopling of New York City, we focused on the Greek influence in the ethnic enclave of Astoria. If one were to walk down Ditmars Boulevard, one would see thriving “cafenions” (Greek coffee shops), Greek regional organizations, Greek diners and restaurants, Greek Orthodox Churches, and most notably, a bustling community rich with Greek tradition. Our seminar was dedicated to this flourishing Greek community in Astoria, and this website is the culmination of a semester’s work as we discovered how Greek immigrants made Astoria their new home without losing traditions from their heritage.

The Peopling of New York City: Neighborhood Stories

Professor: Ellen Scott
ITF: Andres Orejuela
Campus: Queens College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/neighborhoodstories14/

This site conglomerates the individual sites that each student group made. One of the strengths of this approach was that students were not only able to design and think about their site’s organization, but also worked with tools that were new to them.

Food and Immigration in NYC

Professor: Kim Libman
ITF: Maggie Dickinson
Campus: Queens College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/libman2014/

Our Peopling of New York Seminar looked at the issue of immigration in New York City through the lens of food and foodways. Each group focused on a particular neighborhood, researching the local history and culture by collecting both qualitative and quantitive data. We also produced menus featuring typical, culturally appropriate foods for each neighborhood based on our research. Each neighborhood group produced their own website, showcased on our collective class site. Take a look at our neighborhood websites to learn more!

The Peopling of NYC

Professor: Omri Elisha
ITF: Maggie Dickinson
Campus: Queens College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/elisha2013/

This course site is a showcase of each five individual group projects. Each group picked an organization to study that mediates the cultural politics of difference in some way. The group projects include a look at the role of the New York City Tenement Museum in historicizing poverty, a Polish neighborhood association, the role of Women for Afghan Women in the Afghani community in NYC, an education non-profit called the All Stars project, and Restore NYC, which works to end human trafficking. Together, all of these projects made efforts to move away from simplistic narratives of “melting pots” and multiculturalism, to take in a more nuanced and complex view of New York City. Each group used various methods of data collection including web research, scholarly literature reviews, interviews, and fieldwork.

The Peopling of New York

Professor: Peter Vellon
ITF: Caroline Erb
Campus: Queens College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/vellon13/finalprojects/

During the Spring 2013 semester, the students in Professor Peter Vellon’s Seminar 2 class researched the relationship between immigration and migration, race, and class on the Lower East Side’s identity. They translated their research into websites geared toward the general public with the help of the course’s Instructional Technology Fellow, Caroline Erb-Medina. Students were divided into groups to focus on the history, labor, food, culture, and demographics of different ethnic groups on the Lower East Side. Along with their research, students also learned how to customize a WordPress site. Every student participated in making the main design decisions for their sites. Each group incorporated tools including Google Maps, iMovie, iPhoto, and embedded music on their sites.

Exploring Diversity in Jackson Heights

JacksonSights compiles historical and empirical studies of Jackson Heights in Queens. Aiming at providing an overview of the diversity found within Jackson Heights, the site is divided into four different sections: history, religion, food, and fashion. Information has been gleaned from on-site excursions, personal interviews, mini-ethnographic studies, and scholarly research materials. In addition to representing the culmination of the class’s exploration, this site hopes to share gained insights and to transform into learning to appreciate the hardships, the triumphs, and the rich heritages offered by the people of New York City.

Dr. Scott's The Peopling of New York

Professor: Ellen Scott
ITF: Soniya Munshi
Campus: Queens
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/peoplingnycwebsiteproject/

Dr. Ellen Scott’s course at Queens Colleges used media (films, radio shows, and television shows) to elucidate various (im)migrant experiences in New York City and to grant volume to voices from the margins. The theme of this course centered on how different ethnic and racial groups have formed and fashioned their identities around this unique metropolis. The class created a website that contains a series of selected or created media fragments: a frame, single-shot scene, image or sound that represents an important aspect or characteristic of ethnic New York. Accompanying these pieces of media are short, creative reflection about why this fragment was chosen and why it is significant to New York’s ethnic imaginary.

Religious Peoples of Flushing, New York

Professor: Omri Elisha
ITF: Tsai-Shiou Hsieh
Campus: Queens
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/qcpony11/

Professor Omri Elisha’s class completed an in-depth study of the various religious communities that can be found in Flushing. Groups worked on investigating Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, and Sikh communities, noting houses of worship, histories of the faiths, and the people who are part of each center in Flushing.

The Peopling of East Harlem

Professor: Peter Vellon
ITF: Maggie Dickinson
Campus: Queens
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/vellon/

Professor Vellon’s class at Queens College worked with ITF Maggie Dickinson to complete a site focused on the East Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan. They created a photo gallery on the front page, detailed demographic trends, made maps, videos, and timelines to show important institutions and events, and kept a class blog.

Thoughts on the project from ITF Maggie Dickinson

The central theme of this class was the economic, political and demographic transitions that have taken place in East Harlem over the past hundred years. Students were introduced to the history of East Harlem through historical, biographical and sociological texts. But the subject matter really came alive when they got to explore the neighborhood through walking tours of the area. One of the things we emphasized was documenting what they saw as they walked around the neighborhood through photography and video, most of which was shot on Vado cameras provided by Macualay.

What started out as an unorganized mass of photographs and video clips became, over the course of the semester, the basis for maps locating important institutions in the neighborhood, short videos and images that introduce the viewer to the neighborhood’s everyday sights and sounds, and evidence of the changing economic, cultural and political landscapes in the area. Students were generous with one another, sharing their images by uploading them to the website library and allowing all the students in the class to draw on these images to build their particular sections.

This student-generated content was paired up with other kinds of research data that students felt lent itself to the visual medium of a website, including demographic maps made with Social Explorer and documentary and archival photos used for building interactive timelines using Dipity. The site came together by balancing the autonomy of the working groups, who were each responsible for producing the content of one section based on the work they were doing for their research papers, and coming together as a group to create an aesthetic framework that lent cohesion to the website as a whole. The front page, with its gallery of images used throughout the website, showcases the people, politics, culture and institutions that make up the East Harlem community.