Seminar 2 Encyclopedia

Seminar Two

Professor: Grazyna Drabik
ITF: Andres Orejuela
Campus: City College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/20crossroads/

Students visited 20 crossroads on Broadway and Fifth Avenue. The stops began in lower Manhattan on Wall Street, and arrived at 181st Street in Washington Heights. The stops are arranged in order on the homepage of site, including the name of the street and neighborhood. For each entry, students wrote up a short post about their experience of the location and about the location itself.

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.

Storefront Survivors

Professor: Mike Benediktsson
ITF: Christina Nadler
Campus: Hunter College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/storefrontsurvivors

This website is the result of a unique research project undertaken by first year Macaulay Honors students at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY) under the supervision of Mike Owen Benediktsson, Marnie Brady, Caroline Loomis, Christina Nadler, and Tommy Wu. The interviews, images, and research collected here were collected entirely by students, as part of their coursework for the People of New York City seminar, or Seminar II, an interdisciplinary class on the past and present of the city’s neighborhoods, with a focus on migration and immigration. In the last few years, elected officials and the media have begun to acknowledge the plight of small, independent businesses in the city. Blogs like Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York have called attention to the loss of valuable landmark institutions due to unregulated commercial rent markets and municipal rezoning. Local elected officials, including Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, have put forth competing legislative measures that would seek to relieve some of the economic pressure faced by small business owners in the city. Attention to the precarious position of small business is growing. But is it enough? Explore our website to find profiles of small business owners across the city who are conducting their own individual struggles against the crosscurrents of economic, social, and policy change in the city.

NYC’s D Train

Professor: Nancy Aries
ITF: Owen Toews
Campus: Baruch College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/aries2014finalproject/

In Spring 2014, professor Nancy Aries’ CUNY Baruch/Macaulay Honors seminar studied the diverse neighborhoods linked by New York City’s D Train. The class broke into small teams, each researching one of seven neighborhoods. The primary purpose of the site is to bring together the seven neighborhood studies, with links to individual sites for each neighborhood (students decided to use the same theme for each of their sites, which gave them the united aesthetic they wanted, but limited some groups in what they could do). The secondary purpose of the site is to host a map displaying the seven stops along the D train. The map includes bubbles displaying photos and basic information for each stop, giving a nice overview of the entire project. However, the way the Google map embed displays makes it a bit difficult to see all this information at once. Students chose the ever-popular sliding doors theme to create a colorful, engaging snapshot of human life on the D train.

The Peopling of New York

Professor: Eric Alterman
ITF: Jennifer Corby
Campus: Brooklyn College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/alterman2014/

In this seminar, students worked independently or in small groups to make 2 presentations: one on an NYC neighborhood, and one biography of an NYC landmark.

The Peopling of New York City

Professor: Gabriel Haslip-Viera
ITF: Aaron Kendall
Campus: City College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/haslipviera2013/

Students investigated the role of immigration and migration in the shaping of New York’s identity – past, present, and future, through oral history interviews and neighborhood research projects. The projects were carried out individually and with little structuring, which made the website content too broad in my opinion. Next time around I would suggest the students do the project in groups and focus on a few particular issues related to immigration and migration.

Making it in New York

Professor: Jackie Brown
ITF: Fiona Lee
Campus: Hunter College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/collectiveproject/

This website presents students’ findings and reflections on what they learned in addressing the question, What does it take to “make it” in New York? Popular media, as captured in the music of Frank Sinatra (“If I can make it here, then I can make it anywhere…”) and of Jay-Z and Alicia Keys (“New York/concrete jungle where dreams are made up/there’s nothing you can’t do/Now you’re in New York”), New York City is pictured as a city of endless opportunity for those who have what it takes. Working in groups, students explored the question from a range of perspectives: people who are or who have experienced homelessness; adult English language learners; workers handing out free newspapers at subway stations; subway commuters encountering solicitors; and Hunter College students on the topic of diversity.

Students opted to use Prezi to showcase their findings, a tool that worked especially well when they presented their research and website to their peers in person. For readers encountering the site on their own, the text accompanying the Prezi slideshows, as well as on the page explaining the overall theme of the project, is a helpful guide that ties together the wide range of perspectives presented. The header image, a modification of an image of the well known piece of graffiti art created by a student in the class, also captures the themes of struggle, defiance and fortitude reflected in the stories the class encountered in completing the project.

Immigrant Eyes

Professor: Philip Kasinitz
ITF: Jesse Goldstein
Campus: Hunter
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/kasinitz11

Overview
In Prof Philip Kasinitz’s class at Hunter, ITF Jesse Goldstein worked with the class to make a multi-neighborhood site that presented the work of groups who completed specific investigative tasks about the areas they studied: Chelsea, Chinatown, Williamsburg, the East Village, the Upper East Side, and Jackson Heights. Each group was tasked with examining and presenting the census data for the neighborhood, comparing statistics with their own observations of the area, finding out how residents think of their neighborhood, and creating a multimedia virtual walking tour. Students also completed individual final projects about immigrant experiences in the neighborhoods.