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Community and Environmental Transitions in Metropolitan Trenton
Summary Report of Interdisciplinary Project Teamwork
As part of our NCUR-Lancy project, we met weekly to build a sense of community, provide a structured way to examine interrelated knowledge, and brainstorm solutions to local challenges. All ten students and seven faculty participated in these informal meetings, usually held as brown-bag luncheons around a conference table. At the first meeting, the group came together after a morning workshop led by co-director Diane Bates (Associate Professor of Sociology) on Trenton geography, demographics and social history followed by an extensive tour of the city. In a small group exercise, we brainstormed interdisciplinary questions about community and environmental transitions in Trenton, coming up with five broad-based topical questions and one set of general wrap-up questions to structure the six weekly discussions that would follow. In the subsequent weeks, faculty members on the team took turns coordinating these discussions, which were distributed according to faculty expertise.
The first question asked how the problems we were studying had an impact on the health and wellness of residents. Antonino Scarpati (Assistant Dean of the School of Nursing, Health, and Exercise Science) gave a short presentation on poverty and the healthcare crisis in the United States, with details about New Jersey and Trenton. He contrasted three dominant ways people think about poverty and social welfare—residual, institutional, and developmental perspectives—and then we did a small group exercise to determine which of these views best described the prevailing view in the U.S., in New Jersey, and in Trenton. Next, we had a general discussion about the public policy implications of these views for the problems studied by our research teams. This conversation was a great starting point for our project, because it gave us a background on local poverty—something that is related to all of the projects—and helped us see how worldview shapes policy choices relevant to all of the research we are doing.
The second question shifted our focus to institutional and non-institutional actors, and how they are related to our research. To highlight this theme, Martin Bierbaum (Executive Director of the Municipal Land Use Center) asked us to read a recent report produced by the Brookings Institution entitled “Restoring Prosperity: The State Role in Revitalizing America’s Older Industrial Cities.” When we met, we discussed the report’s conclusions for Trenton, one of 65 cities studied for the report, and the implications of the report for our research projects. We compared other institutional actors—at the federal, state, and local level, and considered the role of non-governmental actors like religious entities, social movements, and the non-profit sector. Each of our projects is related to an array of these actors, and this meeting helped us to see the various levels in which policy takes place, and to consider the importance of government for Trenton as a capitol city, in particular.
The third question asked how our land-use changes affect our research questions. Curt Elderkin (Assistant Professor of Biology) gave a presentation on river ecology, since the city is shaped in large part by the Delaware River and Assunpink Creek watersheds. We discussed the role of deindustrialization, and assessed ways that land-use has changed over time in the area, as well as the potential for revitalization and restoration of natural habitat. We concluded that the natural environment is an often-ignored aspect of Trenton’s redevelopment, and that a bigger picture considering Trenton’s integration with its surrounding area—part of the same watershed ecosystem—would be helpful for researchers and policymakers alike. We also discussed the now-defunct plans to develop a greenway along the Assunpink Creek in Trenton.
The fourth question focused our attention on human diversity, asking how it plays a role for our research projects. Rachel Adler (Associate Professor of Anthropology), who is the “veteran” of local research on our project, began the session by telling us about her ongoing five-year research project on the ethnic evolution of the Chambersburg neighborhood. This process parallels demographic change in many of Trenton’s neighborhoods, and we had a chance to discuss immigration, local housing segregation and racism, and economic class diversity during this meeting. Several of the student researchers had encountered examples of racist discourse during their research, so we also had a chance to discuss these experiences, and practical aspects of how to deal with them when you are in the field.
The fifth question asked how economic forces shape the problems we are studying. David Prensky (Director of the Bonner Center for Civic and Community Engagement and Associate Professor of Marketing) had the group think about about major trends and contemporary issues affecting global society, and we came up with a list that included globalization, war, neo-liberalism, terrorism, and global warming. He then asked us to consider the implication of these issues on New Jersey. We discussed major economic trends that affect competition for jobs in New Jersey, including rising housing costs, shift to large-scale farming, high property taxes, and high salaries. Finally, we talked about Trenton in particular, and the impact of the current tax structure, which suffers from the fact that more than half of the city’s land is not under local control and the majority of state employees are not city residents. Thinking about economic forces in the global, state, and local context helped us to see the varied levels at which the economy affects Trenton.
In our sixth and final interdisciplinary discussion, we addressed two inter-related questions about Trenton’s future: Where do we predict Trenton is going? How do our predictions differ from what we think is best? For this session, we were pleased to be joined by Andrew Carten, Trenton’s Director of Planning. Mr. Carten joined in the conversation about these questions, and then stayed to answer our additional questions at the end of the meeting. Co-director Elizabeth Borland (Assistant Professor of Sociology) first asked the seven teams to meet and review how their specific research was related to the five themes we had addressed in the earlier question sessions (health and wellness, institutional and non-institutional actors, land-use changes, human diversity, and economic forces). After a student representative from each team reported to all of us, we had a discussion about the patterns which emerged from the reports. Then, each participant did a short writing exercise to write a few paragraphs envisioning Trenton’s future. We passed our paragraphs around the table, reading and writing comments. Then we had a discussion about what we had written, heard, and read. Overall, our predictions were somewhat pessimistic, but there were signs of hope as well. The written notes from this session serve as a record of this final conversation, where students and faculty from various disciplines referenced the work of other teams, and expressed concern and hope about a broad set of the challenges facing Trenton.
Our weekly interdisciplinary meetings provided a firm foundation for students and faculty to exchange ideas and learn about various aspects of community and environmental transitions in Trenton. As we updated one another on our projects, and learned about the local area from diverse angles, we were able to compare and contrast aspects of our research, and to take away new ideas. Sometimes, these connections affected our research in progress. For example, the interdisciplinary discussion of racial and ethnic tension in Trenton spilled into a discussion of research ethics and neutrality as students learned to deal with interviewees, clients, and official representatives who made statements with which the student researchers disagreed. Likewise, students discussed the process of conducting research across social and class lines, and began to consider how their ideas about what should be done might conflict with their subjects. Students learned both the analytic relationship between a variety of issues—immigration, poverty, health, environment, economic change, violence, education—but they also found very practical overlaps. For example, student researcher Valerie Koch’s research on social entrepreneurship led her to find that the non-profit Meals on Wheels program would be negatively affected by the closure of the very hospital that team member Angel Hernandez was investigating. After Valerie told Angel that Meals on Wheels was using the hospital kitchen to get meals for homebound adults, he was able to raise concerns about the impact of the hospital closure to administrators as part of his project.
Students expressed a great deal of enthusiasm for the interdisciplinary discussions, and often remained in the conference room afterwards continuing to speak on issues that had been covered. We expect that these weekly meetings will have an even greater long-term impact that far outlives the eight weeks of the project. Faculty and students who thought and learned together have fostered ties to work cooperatively in the future, and to examine local research from interdisciplinary perspectives.
