Doctoral Dissertation Research: Minority Youth and Everyday Negotiations of Place and Marginalization

长期以来，研究人员和政策制定者一直对贫困社区的成长如何影响少数民族青年的生活前景感兴趣。随着富裕社区和贫困社区之间差距的扩大，以及年轻人仍然被困在贫困的城市社区，了解地方如何塑造年轻人的愿望和对未来的看法再次成为当务之急。本项目将通过分析城市少数民族青年对其社区的了解以及他们如何利用这些知识来评估他们未来的选择和机会来解决这些问题。鉴于旨在惠及边缘社区青年的基于地方的方案和政策的激增，本项目将及时提供与政策相关的信息，了解对构建年轻人的愿望和成年之路最具影响力的空间因素。因此，该项目的研究结果将为社区内正在进行的城市改革提供信息，这些改革最近已成为联邦政府支持的“选择社区”计划的一部分。该项目还将有助于制定基于地点的指标，以反映年轻人获得机会的机会和实现向上流动的前景。此外，通过将年轻人的知识和感知定位为分析地点影响的核心，该项目将产生理论见解，从而进一步理解特定地点如何在塑造年轻人的生活和生命历程中发挥重要作用。在这样做的过程中，它将有助于推进生命历程转变的地理研究，并推动关于邻里效应的社会学研究，以解释在边缘化社区中成长的日常经历。该项目融合了儿童地理学、社会流动性和生命历程研究等方面的文献，考察了年轻人的愿望是如何通过他们在日常生活中的经历而形成的。从概念上讲，该项目将年轻人的社区构建为形成性的地理空间，他们在其中吸收有关日常环境的信息，并利用这些知识来评估他们及其邻居可用的机会和途径。这项研究将结合参与者的观察和随同访谈，探讨年轻人的日常环境是如何形成的，以检查非洲裔美国人和拉丁裔/a青年对他们的社区有什么了解，以及这些了解如何与他们计划生活的方式联系起来。这些方法将使研究人员能够深入收集有关年轻人对周围的人、地点和空间的所见所闻、所见所闻、所见所闻和所感的民族志信息，并观察他们收到的关于如何成长和在生活中取得成功的信息和建议。半结构化访谈还将与社区成员、教师和物业经理进行，他们帮助年轻人构建他们的社区体验。综上所述，这种方法论方法提供了必要的空间化视角来分析城市少数民族青年如何理解他们生活的起点，并从他们特定的社会和空间位置评估可能的成功途径。

Researchers and policy makers have long been interested in understanding how growing up in impoverished neighborhoods impacts the life prospects of minority youth. As the gap between affluent and impoverished neighborhoods widens and as young adults remain stuck in poor urban communities, it has once again become imperative to understand how place shapes young people's aspirations and perceptions of their future. This project will address these questions by analyzing what urban minority youth learn about their community and how they use this knowledge to assess their future options and opportunities. Given the proliferation of place-based programs and policies geared to benefit youth in marginalized communities, this project will provide timely, policy-relevant information about the spatial factors most influential to structuring young people's aspirations and pathways to adulthood. The findings from this project will therefore inform urban reforms taking place within neighborhoods that have recently become part of a federally supported Choice Neighborhood program. The project will also contribute to efforts to create place-based indicators that capture young people's access to opportunities and prospects of attaining upward mobility. Additionally, by positioning young people's knowledge and perceptions as central to analyzing the effects of place, this project will generate theoretical insight that furthers our understanding of how particular places take on significance in shaping young people's lives and life course. In doing so, it will help advance geographical research on life course transitions and push sociological research on neighborhood effects to account for the everyday experience of growing up in a marginalized community. The project blends literature from children's geography, social mobility, and life course studies to examine how young people's aspirations are shaped through their experiences in and of everyday places. Conceptually, the project frames young people's communities as formative geographies, learning spaces wherein they are absorbing information about their everyday surroundings and using this knowledge to evaluate the opportunities and pathways that are available to them and to people from their neighborhood. The study will explore how young people's everyday surroundings become formative by combining participant observations with go-along interviews to examine what African American and Latino/a youth have learned about their community and how that links to the way how they plan their lives. These methods will enable the researchers to gather in-depth, ethnographic information about what young people see, hear, say, and feel about the people, places, and spaces around them and observe the messages and advice they receive about how to grow up and get ahead in life. Semi-structured interviews will also be conducted with community members, teachers, and property managers who help construct young people's experiences of their community. Taken together, this methodological approach provides the spatialized perspective necessary to analyze how urban minority youth make sense of where they start out in life and evaluate what the possible pathways to success are from their particular social and spatial location.