East Pawtucketville Neighborhood Project: A Public Ethnography Emerging

 

 

Call for Participation in the Neighborhood Project

Over the next year I will be conducting a public ethnography, exploring the pathways of connection and disconnection in one urban neighborhood. A special focus of the study will be the ways the community and its educational institutions interact. 

The neighborhood is East Pawtucketville in Lowell, Massachusetts, where I have lived since 1999. 

In undertaking this study, I am unabashedly an activist for the neighborhood.  I approach this project from a very embedded, action research perspective. 

I invite you to join me on this journey!

 

 

 

 

 

Shaping the Study

The study will be conducted publicly through a blog and wiki.  The

blog will be the place where I report on events, conversations, musings and reflections about the neighborhood and my ongoing interactions with organizations and individuals.  This will also be a place where I can consider theory of value to the methodology and substance of the study.

The wiki will be a place to store more extensive resources:  neighborhood plans, photos, historical artifacts, and theoretical resources related to the study.

You can participate in the study by following the blog and visiting the wiki.  The site will be available soon.  Let me know if you are interested in taking part! 

East Pawtucketville

East Pawtucketville is a small dense urban neighborhood founded, in large part, by Franco-Americans who moved to Lowell, Massachusetts for jobs in the textile mills.  Today it is a diverse neighborhood including people from many cultural backgrounds.  It lies along the northern bank of the Merrimack River at the spectacular Pawtucket Falls.  UMass Lowell’s North Campus is located here and two elementary schools—one public and one parochial. Author Jack Kerouac writes extensively of this neighborhood—his childhood home.

If you are interested in participating in the Neighborhood Project Public Ethnography, please provide me with your email so I can let you know when the official site is up and running and/or watch for more information on my blog:  QRfrag.blogspot.com. 

 

 

Graduate School of Education

UMASS Lowell

61 Wilder St.

Lowell, MA  01854

Judith_Davidson@uml.edu

http://qrfrag.blogspot.com/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Join me over the next year as I explore the neighborhood, learn about connections and disconnections within the community, and seek ways to encourage and nourish this world.

International Congress on Qualitative Inquiry: 2013 Conference is almost here!

The 2013 ICQI conference is almost here, and I am getting very excited. 

I will be making one paper presentation.  The title is "Contextualizing the Changes New Technologies Raise for Qualitative Research Methodologies:  Case Example--Perspectives on Youth and Sexting".  It is part of panel #1017, which is titled "Small Data in a Big Data World".  We are slotted for Friday morning (5/17/13) from 9:30 to 10:50 am in 1051 Lincoln. 

As usual I am working like crazy at the last minute on my paper.  It's been an opportunity to bring a lot of disparate pieces together--from sexting...and all that this has to do with new technologies to notions of archiving qualitative research, visualizing data, and many other topics.  I am hoping it will all cohere by the time I get to the University of Illinois. 

Please come by and say hello if you are in town too!