Ethnographic Interventions in New York City Governance
In an era when decision-makers rely on quantitative analysis regardless of dataset quality or methodological rigor, this talk explores how ethnography in Southeast Queens has proven indispensable to understanding and exposing the nuances of injustice in New York City governance. Middle-class, working-class, and poor families live alongside one another in this majority Black region, where Latinx, South Asian, and Indo-Caribbean families have also settled in large numbers since the 1990s. Across three cases, Vena will discuss how long-term fieldwork has enabled her to perceive how state and local policies disadvantage Southeast Queens residents in ways that government officials obscure and deny. She will first analyze how South Ozone Park residents struggled for fair compensation after a massive sewage backup, becoming adversaries of their own city through a claims process administered by a local government bureaucracy. Vena will then discuss New York State’s official map designed to identify “disadvantaged communities” eligible for earmarked funding under the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (2019). In Manhattan, Hudson Yards and much of the High Line qualify as disadvantaged, while many communities of color in Queens do not. For the last and most recent case, Vena will outline how the city’s Department of City Planning concealed the pernicious effects of its 230-block upzoning of Downtown Jamaica by casting the plan (that is sure to accelerate gentrification) as community-driven. Throughout the talk, Vena will discuss her interventions in local governance as an ethnographer, with a particular focus on media engagement. The decimation of newsrooms in New York City and beyond has meant that many urgent stories go uncovered. By writing op-eds and cultivating relationships with individual reporters, ethnographers can translate complicated problems to make them salient to the press and to the public.
Natalie Bump Vena is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban Studies. She received her J.D. and Ph.D. from Northwestern University’s School of Law and Department of Anthropology. Her research and teaching interests concern environmental policymaking in U.S. cities. Her earlier work examines the history of natural resources preservation in the Forest Preserve District of Cook County, which protects 69,000 acres of land encompassing Chicago. Vena’s present research project is “The Fight for ‘Quality of Life’: Confronting Environmental Racism in Southeast Queens, NY” and is supported by a Russell Sage Foundation Pipeline Grant. Her writing has appeared in Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Journal of Planning History and in edited volumes. She has also written op-eds published in The Daily News and City Limits.
