Author: nthomas37

Google Street View Photography and the Visual Culture of American Poverty

Post author By nthomas37
Post date March 5, 2021

Owen G. Clow

Google Street View Photography and the Visual Culture of American Poverty

Note on copyright: This essay in its original form contained numerous in-text images. Out of an abundance of concern, these have been deleted and replaced with offsite links to the same images.

In May of 2007, a press release on the official Google Maps blog heralded “a new feature that will further enhance your ability to understand the world through images—Google Street View.”^[1] Initially limited to the downtown areas of a few American cities, Google Street View (GSV) was the product of a complex system of car-mounted cameras and algorithmic image manipulation. At the heart of the project was a panoramic camera affixed to the roof of a car. This car would drive around each city, take pictures at regular intervals, composite them together into a fully contiguous panorama, and then load each interval into Google Maps, mapping the spatial coordinates given by the position of the vehicle on the street onto the corresponding Cartesian space of Google Maps.^[2] In the intervening thirteen years, GSV has blossomed, both in geographical scope and technological sophistication.^[3] As Street View vehicles continue towards their ultimate goal—traveling and documenting every road on Earth—GSV has produced a unique culture of public digital spectatorship. It has also, more broadly, patterned how we see and understand the world around us.

Like many Google projects, GSV originated from an unspecific and broadly utopian impulse to make the world more accessible. There are legitimate reasons to celebrate its existence. GSV is a corporate product, but it is offered completely free of charge to all who access the website (or who download the free Google Earth software, which has GSV content embedded). There is the potential in GSV for genuine cross-cultural understanding: rather than traditional travel, which can be expensive and physically onerous, GSV offers those curious about the life and landscapes of distant places a first-person perspective on just that. Moreover, GSV can serve as a valuable pedagogical tool: over the years, Google has partnered with museums and other cultural sites to provide a “Street View” of their spaces and displays, enabling virtual access to students and patrons who are unable to visit in person.^[4] And, of course, GSV offers the entertainment value of pure escapism: it isn’t just that it’s interesting to virtually navigate a mountain pass in Kyrgyzstan, it’s that it’s fun.

Grigorievka Gorge in Kyrgyzstan. Imagery from Google, cropped and reproduced by the author.

GSV has also been highly controversial. It is, after all, a corporate surveillance project which renders the public landscape—not just trees and buildings but cars, people, animals, et cetera—permanently visible and permanently accessible. GSV photography is by definition nonconsensual. Within a year of GSV’s initial release, Google responded to complaints along these lines by adding an algorithm which procedurally blurred human faces, license plates, and other specifically identifiable elements of these images.^[5] Even with this addition, however, privacy concerns underwrite much of the public discourse surrounding GSV, and Google has spent substantial resources trying to reconcile its practice with laws surrounding personal privacy in a number of states. Germany, notably, remains largely unmapped by GSV due to legal obstacles.^[6] Sociological research has implicated GSV in perpetuating classist attitudes towards working class communities.^[7] And, among some critics, there remains a distinct feeling of unease at the notion that this technological project to create a visual record of the entire world is owned and controlled by an incomprehensibly powerful corporation worth over one trillion dollars.^[8]

The inherent tension between GSV’s utopian concept—enabling “people everywhere to virtually explore the world”—and the sophisticated apparatus of total public surveillance which drives the project has provided fertile soil for artistic exploration.^[9] One of the earliest visual projects involving GSV material, Jon Rafman’s ongoing 9 Eyes series attempts to capture the disorienting experience of total technological surveillance by curating GSV images that evoke tension, unease, and melancholia–offering, in Rafman’s words, “a sense of what it feels like to have everything recorded, but no particular significance accorded to anything.”^[10] Michael Wolf’s Fuck You, one of several of the artist’s related projects, criticizes GSV’s technique of surveillance by cataloging various instances of blur-faced humans on GSV holding up middle fingers to the passing camera.^[11] Tim Tetzner’s If The Eyes Can’t Touch (Blurred Modernism) highlights the visually jarring GSV dataset for Berlin, featuring rows of buildings with certain addresses blurred beyond recognition–the product of Google’s aforementioned capitulation to German privacy laws.^[12] Of course, not all GSV art is an implicit critique of corporate capitalism or unstoppable surveillance. Jacqui Kenny’sThe Agoraphobic Traveller uses GSV to create a comparatively traditional landscape/cityscape photo-series, its component images curated specifically to produce an attractive and glamorous photographic aesthetic.^[13] Kenny’s work is also noteworthy for its explicit approval from Google, which recently authorized the sale of a number of her prints for charity.^[14] Implicit in all of these projects is the notion that GSV reveals something about both the land and the human relations that take place upon it. But what happens when the revelatory, documentary power of GSV is directed towards questions of wealth and poverty?

Untitled, 9 Eyes, Jon Rafman, 2020.

“Synchronized Camels, UAE,” The Agoraphobic Traveller , Jacqui Kenny, 2017.

This essay examines three projects which use GSV photography to explore and question American poverty: Doug Rickard’s A New American Picture, Justin Blinder’s Vacated, and Alex Alsup’s GooBing Detroit. The technology of GSV informs both the aesthetics and the message of these projects: the panoramic visual field of the Street View camera reveals the world in a way that closely resembles reality, just as it conceals the ideology of benevolent corporate surveillance that enables this kind of seeing. Furthermore, the processing of each image to remove faces, text, or copyrighted content often yields a disorienting mixture of supposed verisimilitude and obvious visual manipulation. While animated by an activist motivation generally similar to that of social documentary photography—the belief that visually documenting and publicizing social ills fosters empathy and encourages the amelioration of those ills—the art of Rickard, Blinder, and Alsup deviates from the genre’s traditional tendency toward human portraiture. Where traditional forms of social documentary photography portrayed poverty inscribed on the human body, “Street View” photography portrays poverty in the landscape, in architectural shifts, in dilapidated houses and overgrown yards, rather than in the furrowed brows and dirty feet of indigent families. In this sense, the message is limited by the medium: GSV is a tool that catalogs and documents “real” property–land and buildings which people own, build, exchange, and destroy–and, consequently, GSV enables one to see clearly the street address of a house, to see its features and its architecture, all the while obscuring the people on the sidewalk, the stoop, the porch, all of whom become literally faceless. Rickard, Blinder, and Alsup make a useful intervention, but GSV technology nevertheless constrains their work within a visual vocabulary of American poverty that centers property in lieu of people.

Social documentary photography: poverty in image and imagination

Situating these GSV projects within the artistic tradition of social documentary photography provides important context for understanding their messaging and impact. It is admittedly an unusual designation, given that neither Rickard, Blinder, nor Alsup actually photographed their subjects, or even held (for these purposes) a camera. More accurately, these artists assembled procedurally-generated photographs and arranged them into a serial structure, adding captioning and contextual information where necessary, thereby making them viable for public presentation. Their works each resemble a photo-series, and in most senses function as one. The artists under consideration are not photographers per se, but they share an activist motivation and aesthetic orientation with a long tradition of similarly-intentioned social documentary photography.

Social documentary photography is, as the name implies, a tradition of photography that is both documentary, in the sense that it aims to document the visible conditions of reality, and social, in the sense that this documentation explicitly engages with social problems. In America, historians often use the turn-of-the-century reformer Jacob Riis’s widely-reproduced How The Other Half Lives, a photographic expedition into the tenements, boarding houses, and working-class environs of New York City to clarify the origins of social documentary photography.

Taken during the 1880s, Riis’s photographs reflect an embryonic stage of development, both for social documentary and for photography more generally. In his so-called “magic lantern shows” for middle-class audiences, Riis supplemented his visual content with extensive text and oratory, later claiming in an autobiography that he was “no good at all as a photographer.”^[15] The formal content of the images is likely familiar, but one visual theme bears deeper analysis: an emphasis on human bodies—wiry musculature and crevassed facial lines—as a site for “reading” the human condition of poverty.^[16] For Riis, the importance of his photography was not simply that the living environment of poor workers was dangerous and unhygienic, it was that his audience would work towards the alleviation of these conditions. It is worth remembering as well that Riis, though seemingly sincere in his concern for the suffering of New York City’s working class, was allowed access to these spaces primarily through a close relationship with law enforcement (he had worked as a police reporter for a decade prior), and his interest in photographic documentation dovetailed neatly with the rapidly developing practice of police surveillance.^[17] Riis’s aim was to turn the slums into a visual spectacle for a philanthropic middle class, and the moral degradation of urban poverty was, in his work, seen most clearly on the bodies of the poor.

“In Poverty Gap, West Twenty-Eighth St. An English Coal-Heaver’s Home,” Jacob Riis, How The Other Half Lives, circa 1890.

By the 1930s, as the Great Depression made it increasingly difficult to ignore widespread suffering among the American working class, the federal government had begun to take a serious interest in social documentary photography. The most productive result of this attention was a public photography project conceived under the auspices of the Resettlement Administration (which quickly became the Farm Security Administration), managed by the economist and amateur photographer Roy Stryker. Stryker, a true believer in the potential of social documentary photography to create public support for New Deal social welfare programs, contracted a number of professional photographers and sent them on journalistic “assignments,” where they were given a paycheck and some freedom in selecting their subjects.^[18] Like Riis, the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers demonstrated a broad preference for human subjects, although Ben Shahn and Arthur Rothstein, among others, produced a number of compelling photographs of ramshackle living quarters and degraded structural foundations. Some of the most enduring images of the Great Depression were products of the FSA program: Dorothea Lange’s portrait of farmworker Florence O. Thompson—a photograph often referred to as “Migrant Mother”—is perhaps its most memorable product. In the photograph, Thompson’s gaze is set on something distant, far past the camera; the lacework of wrinkles along her forehead and around her eyes suggests that her lifestyle has aged her beyond her years; her children (we presume) hide their faces entirely. The documentary value of the photograph was not in its ability to capture something specific about the conditions of poverty; indeed, research has shown that Lange’s minimal description of Thompson’s work and circumstances was somewhat inaccurate.^[19] Rather, the value of the image was in its ability to foster empathy for the subject, to force the audience to connect a visible human face to the experience of destitution, and to transform this subjective empathy into support for the social welfare efforts of the federal government. Stryker himself called Lange’s portrait of Thompson “the picture,” and regarded it as the most successful photograph of the entire project.^[20] Thompson, for her part, told a reporter in 1978, “I wish she hadn’t taken my picture.”^[21]

Compare: “Destitute pea pickers in California,” Dorothea Lange, 1936 (the “Migrant Mother” photograph); “Migrant agricultural worker’s family,” Dorothea Lange, 1936, same subjects.

Social documentary photographers concerned with poverty have come to acknowledge a fundamental tension in their own project: if the ethos of the form demands that the audience see poverty as a problem of individual human suffering, then how does the photographer capture poverty, as manifested on the human subject, without rendering that subject pathetic or pitiable? Riis, and to some extent the FSA photographers, viewed the people they photographed as cautionary objects for a middle-class audience. The purpose of documenting their plight was to inspire a sensibility that poverty robs the poor of their dignity.

But, to their credit, later practitioners in the field have taken other paths. Milton Rogovin’s work, in particular his Lower West Side series,represents an important intervention in the form.^[22] In 1972, Rogovin, a left-leaning optometrist who picked up photography after being effectively blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities fifteen years prior, began photographing residents of Buffalo, New York’s Lower West Side, which at the time had the highest rate of unemployment in the city.^[23] Over a twenty-year period, Rogovin returned to photograph the same places, the same families. While no less given to portraiture than his predecessors, at the core of Rogovin’s work is a sense of dignity and autonomy in his subjects, and an understanding that social documentary photography could serve the interests of the poor without pitying or pathologizing them. While contemporary artists often recognize the “pitiable poor” as an avoidable trope, the degree to which activist photographers negotiate this problem successfully is often uneven, as common debates about “ruin porn” attest, and the role of the human subject in social documentary photography of the poor remains fraught.^[24]

Compare: Untitled FSA photograph, Theodor Jung, 1936; Untitled, from Lower West Side series, Milton Rogovin, 1972.

“Street View” as a formal intervention

How, then, can GSV technology intervene on this fundamental representational problem in social documentary photography? Doug Rickard’s A New American Picture shows one potential avenue. Along with Jon Rafman, Rickard was one of the forerunners of GSV art, and A New American Picture represents one of the earliest attempts to illuminate the problem of poverty, in particular, through the use of GSV and the artistic arrangement of its content. According to Rickard, the “project started with a focus on African American communities to see what they looked like on the heels of our history,” but he soon expanded his project away from “African American communities” and into “broken areas as a whole.”^[25]

The social documentary impulse in Rickard’s art is only broadly directed at an activist purpose; rather than subjective empathy, the images as a whole tend to inspire a melancholy distance from the subject. This is not to say that the images themselves are uninteresting, however. In one particularly haunting shot, “Okeechobee, FL,” the blurred face of a child stares directly into the camera, the backdrop a grid of off-white prefabricated houses. In “Atlanta, GA,” a similarly-inscrutable child bikes past a pair of boarded-up houses, the oversaturated blue of the sky muting the already-dull hues of the built landscape. The low-resolution quality of these photographs, itself an artifact from GSV’s earliest technology, amplifies the not-quite-real sensation Rickard intentionally evokes.

The presence of people in these images serves less to facilitate an emotive connection to the audience and more to suggest their complete alienation. But we see poverty not in the human subject as much as we read it in the mise-en-scène: the prefabricated houses, the upturned bicycles, even the featureless pit of sand underneath the child’s feet. In A New American Picture, poverty lives in the inanimate landscape; the spectral figures that haunt it are human, we know, but their featurelessness prevents identification and, by extension, empathy.

Atlanta, GA, A New American Picture, Doug Rickard, 2012.

Okeechobee, FL, A New American Picture, Doug Rickard, 2012.

While Rickard’s work is largely concerned with “finding” otherwise art-gallery quality photographs through GSV, Justin Blinder’s Vacated offers a more conceptually sophisticated approach to the representational problem of American poverty. Vacated draws from GSV imagery from New York City, and, in Blinder’s words, “reflect[s] the complexities of social impact and urban change in gentrifying neighborhoods.”^[26] Blinder uses an array of manipulation techniques—cross-fades as well as .gif animations—to juxtapose different GSV iterations of the same scene, demonstrating change over time in a single image.^[27]

Initially commissioned by the arts organization More Art to show “how New York City had changed under the twelve-year Bloomberg Administration,” Blinder found his sites through searching a New York City Department of Planning database for vacant properties and reverse-engineered the historical image data from GSV.^[28] Google had not initially let its audience view older imagery of any given place; within a year of the project’s release, however, Google added a “Time Machine” feature that allows the user to easily view the material that Blinder had needed to extract from GSV manually.^[29] The social commentary in Blinder’s project comes through quite clearly: gentrification modifies the urban landscape in ways that necessarily destroy the built environment and, by extension, the visual structure of community. Each image captures a transformation, but in each case it evokes a sense of destruction rather than rejuvenation.

But Vacated’s intentional focus on buildings and structures underscores a fundamental and largely inescapable aspect of art through GSV: the medium itself is a tool for the documentation of land—and land, mediated by capital, is property. The element in Blinder’s images that changes is not the visible human relationships to their environment, it is simply the environment itself. We see in one image the grotesque form of a half-built glass-plated obelisk rising over a street, but the relationship being visibly reconfigured is one of property rather than of people. Or, perhaps, we know that urban development initiatives and real estate contractors are groups of people–but instead of seeing them, we see the visible effects of their negotiations. Vacated highlights the visual and spatial transformations of gentrification, but it cannot connect these transformations to the social lives of those affected through the image alone. The architectural historian Marta Gutman, who contributed an essay for Vacated’s exhibition at the MOMA in 2013, felt similarly: in contrast to the immense human suffering of being evicted or otherwise forced from one’s home, “the cache of photographs, captured by Google Street View, can only hint at the loss.” “Do I fault Blinder for being incomplete?” she continued. “He is recording violence, even if he won’t admit it, and his record is useful. It’s up to all of us to act.”^[30]

Untitled, Vacated, Justin Blinder, 2013.

Like Vacated, Alex Alsup’s ongoing GooBing Detroit project attempts to show the process of urban decay through time-lapse techniques. By taking the same shot of the same scene years apart, GooBing Detroit highlights the gradual decay of built spaces in Detroit. Alsup’s hook is clever, drawing on the fact that GSV imagery for Detroit largely began in 2008, in the early months of the Great Recession, and continues into the present. Some of Alsup’s images are visually arresting, and his use of in-frame captioning adds an element of starkness to the story his assembled images seem to tell.

One representative example, “Mackay Street, Detroit,” begins in 2009, focused on a row of four detached houses, one of which seems to be under construction. Three of these houses have front-facing porches, relatively manicured lawns, and embody in nearly every respect the archetypal single-family suburban house regularly associated with the ideal life of the American suburbs. By 2011, the unfinished house has been obscured entirely by overgrown shrubbery; in 2013, beneath an overcast sky, three out of four houses are in obvious disrepair, the lawns resemble a wilderness, and even the sidewalk is cracked as if by tectonic forces. The final shot, from 2015, carries the sense of the calm after the storm–but the damage has been done, and even the final remaining house, now thoroughly uninhabitable, has lost most of its roof. The temporal aspect of GooBing Detroit offers, in this sense, the ability to infer a narrative simply through visual/environmental cues.

Yet the project at large feels somewhat hollow and lifeless—which may, itself, be the emotive intent of the work. By dwelling on the material debris of the foreclosure crisis, Alsup’s work runs the risk of sidelining the human experience from the visual record. GooBing Detroit has a clear preference for residential properties, but it is up to the audience to imagine the process through which each house became vacant, became a ruin, and became an empty field. Alsup, to his credit, seems aware of the limits of GSV as a visual medium, and supplementary textual material on the project’s website leads to a more comprehensive accounting of the social problem of foreclosure. But the visual material of GooBing Detroit nonetheless privileges residential property as the photographic subject, rather than the residents themselves. The ultimate result is a series of stark, depressing images that fail to evoke a sense of human empathy because the human subject is absent almost entirely from the scene.

Mackay Street, Detroit, Alex Alsup, GooBing Detroit, 2019.

Hazelridge Street, northeast Detroit, 2009-2018, GooBing Detroit , Alex Alsup, 2019.

If the fundamental question underlying all these projects is whether the technology of GSV enables a new way of visualizing poverty, then the answer is a resounding yes. It absolutely does. But the ability to simply see poverty—and other social and economic issues—in novel and compelling ways is of ultimately limited utility.^[31]

The GSV camera obscures as much as it reveals. Where early practitioners of social documentary photography saw the shocking spectacle of the urban slums or the hardscrabble lives of indigent “Okie” farmworkers, they conceived of the core foundation of the social problem at hand as one of human suffering. The visibility of human pain was often the point. Conversely, GSV algorithmically obscures the human form and any of its identifying features. We cannot see suffering on the faces of the poor, so we read it instead in the land upon which they live. Using corporate surveillance software designed to document land and property as a medium compounds this problem, even when artists like Blinder or Alsup try to turn the software against itself. To whatever extent the social documentary form depends on developing empathy for human misery, GSV redirects this human relation to the lifeless visual form of property. It is from this visual representation of property that the audience must extract some meaningful reflection not just on poverty, but on social relations more generally–and the economic system which determines them.

The impossibility of transformative art under capitalism is by no means a new complaint among socially conscious artists, and it is what lurks underneath the representational problem of art with GSV.^[32] Inasmuch as these GSV artistic projects redirect human empathy towards property, property itself is embedded within the system of capital simultaneously obscured and revealed by the form of GSV software. In his book Photography After Capitalism, the art historian Ben Burbridge offers a close reading of Jon Rafman’s aforementioned 9 Eyes project. Burbridge envisions “mass photography” such as GSV as the sort of “participatory, egalitarian, and inclusive experiences of making, using, and accessing photography” which “signal precisely the principles according to which society could and should be restructured.”^[33] It is a lofty dream. The free, easy, and massive public access to GSV even suggests that it might be attainable. But what Rickard, Blinder, and Alsup’s work reveals, unfortunately, is that GSV’s innate emphasis on land and property over the identifiable human subject runs contrary to this ideal, and that the social documentary form demands engagement with common humanity that no corporate surveillance software, as yet, can offer.

Bibliography

Anguelov, Dragomir, Carole Dulong, Daniel Filip, Christian Frueh, Stephane Lafon, Richard Lyon, Abhijit Ogale, Luc Vincent, and Josh Weaver. “Google Street View: Capturing the World at Street Level.” Computer, June 2010.

Associated Press. “‘Can’t Get a Penny’: Famed Photo’s Subject Feels She’s Exploited.” Los Angeles Times. November 18, 1978, sec. B1.

Blinder, Justin. “Absence in Context: Recontextualizing Civic Data, Critical Cartographies, and Gentrification in New York City.” Ubiquity: The Journal of Pervasive Media 4, no. 1 (2015): 23–37.

Brown, Abbie, and Tim Green. “Virtual Reality: Low-Cost Tools and Resources for the Classroom.” TechTrends 60 (2016): 517–19.

Burbridge, Ben. Photography After Capitalism. London: Goldsmiths, 2020.

Cain Miller, Claire, and Kevin O’Brien. “Germany’s Complicated Relationship With Google Street View.” Blog. Bits: Business, Innovation, Technology, Society (blog), April 23, 2013. https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/23/germanys-complicated-relationship-with-google-street-view/.

Chau, Stephen. “Introducing… Street View!” Blog. Google Maps Blog (blog), May 29, 2007. https://maps.googleblog.com/2007/05/introducing-street-view.html.

Curtis, James. “Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, and the Culture of the Great Depression.” Winterthur Portfolio 21, no. 1 (1986): 1–20.

Danby, Susan, Christina Davidson, Stuart Ekberg, Helen Breathnach, and Karen Thorpe. “‘Let’s See If You Can See Me’: Making Connections with Google Earth in a Preschool Classroom.” Children’s Geographies 16, no. 2 (2016): 141–57.

Finnegan, Cara. Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 2004.

Fulton, Christopher, ed. The Social Documentary Photography of Milton Rogovin. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2019.

Gandal, Keith. The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Gansky, Andrew. “‘Ruin Porn’ and the Ambivalence of Decline: Andrew Moore’s Photographs of Detroit.” Photography and Culture 7, no. 2 (2015): 119–39.

Gutman, Marta. “Vacated (Justin Blinder).” Design and Violence (exhibition), January 21, 2015. https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/designandviolence/vacated-justin-blinder/.

Jacobs, Frank. “Why Germany Is a Blank Spot on Google’s Street View.” Big Think, September 26, 2019. https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/germany-street-view.

Lyons, Siobhan, ed. Ruin Porn and the Obsession with Decay. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018.

Metz, Holly. “Milton Rogovin: Seeing the Forgotten Ones.” Labor History 38, no. 4 (1997): 508–24.

Natanson, Nicholas. The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992.

Power, Martin, Patricia Neville, Eoin Devereux, Amanda Haynes, and Cliona Barnes. “‘Why Bother Seeing the World for Real?’: Google Street View and the Representation of a Stigmatised Neighbourhood.” New Media & Society 15, no. 7 (2012): 1022–40.

Proctor, Nancy. “The Google Art Project: A New Generation of Museums on the Web?” Curator: The Museum Journal 54, no. 2 (2012): 215–21.

Rafman, Jon. “IMG MGMT: The Nine Eyes of Google Street View.” Art F City, August 12, 2009. http://artfcity.com/2009/08/12/img-mgmt-the-nine-eyes-of-google-street-view/.

Sandweiss, Martha. “Image and Artifact: The Photograph as Evidence in the Digital Age.” Journal of American History 94, no. 1 (2007): 193–202.

Shankland, Stephen. “Google Begins Blurring Faces in Street View.” CNET, May 13, 2008, Online edition. https://www.cnet.com/news/google-begins-blurring-faces-in-street-view/.

Stange, Maren. Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America 1890-1950. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Strangleman, Tim. “‘Smokestack Nostalgia,’ ‘Ruin Porn,’ or Working-Class Obituary: The Role and Meaning of Deindustrial Representation.” International Labor and Working-Class History 84 (2013): 23–37.

Stryker, Roy, and Nancy Wood. In This Proud Land: America, 1935-1943, as Seen in the FSA Photographs. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973.

Thielmann, Tristan. “Linked Photography: A Praxeological Analysis of Augmented Reality Navigation in the Early Twentieth Century.” Blog. Beiträge, April 5, 2016. http://www.mobilemedia.uni-siegen.de/2016/04/05/linked-photography/.

Trachtenberg, Alan. Reading American Photographs: Images As History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans. New York: Hill & Wang, 1989.

Wakabayashi, Daisuke. “Google Tops Market Cap Of $1 Trillion.” New York Times, January 17, 2020, New York edition, sec. B.

Warren, Spring. “Screen Captures: Americans on Google Street, an Interview with Artist Doug Rickard.” Boom: A Journal of California 2, no. 4 (2012): 18–26.

Wolinski, Paul. “Fully Automated Luxury Composition.” Journal of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music 7, no. 2 (2017): 8–15.

^[1] Stephen Chau, “Introducing… Street View!,” Blog, Google Maps Blog (blog), May 29, 2007, https://maps.googleblog.com/2007/05/introducing-street-view.html.

^[2] For a more comprehensive discussion of the technology behind GSV, see Dragomir Anguelov et al., “Google Street View: Capturing the World at Street Level,” Computer, June 2010.

^[3] Competitor software also exists, but this essay largely focuses on Google’s proprietary software as it is by far the most recognizable and most comprehensive of such programs.

^[4] Nancy Proctor, “The Google Art Project: A New Generation of Museums on the Web?,” Curator: The Museum Journal 54, no. 2 (2012): 215–21. For pedagogical applications, see, e.g., Abbie Brown and Tim Green, “Virtual Reality: Low-Cost Tools and Resources for the Classroom,” TechTrends 60 (2016): 517–19 or Susan Danby et al., “‘Let’s See If You Can See Me’: Making Connections with Google Earth in a Preschool Classroom,” Children’s Geographies 16, no. 2 (2016): 141–57.

^[5] Stephen Shankland, “Google Begins Blurring Faces in Street View,” CNET, May 13, 2008, Online edition, https://www.cnet.com/news/google-begins-blurring-faces-in-street-view/.

^[6] Claire Cain Miller and Kevin O’Brien, “Germany’s Complicated Relationship With Google Street View,” Blog, Bits: Business, Innovation, Technology, Society (blog), April 23, 2013, https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/23/germanys-complicated-relationship-with-google-street-view/. For a more current discussion of GSV in Germany, see Frank Jacobs, “Why Germany Is a Blank Spot on Google’s Street View,” Big Think, September 26, 2019, https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/germany-street-view.

^[7] See, e.g., Martin Power et al., “‘Why Bother Seeing the World for Real?’: Google Street View and the Representation of a Stigmatised Neighbourhood,” New Media & Society 15, no. 7 (2012): 1022–40.

^[8] Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Google Tops Market Cap Of $1 Trillion,” New York Times, January 17, 2020, New York edition, sec. B.

^[9] This quotation comes from the marketing copy on the GSV landing page at https://www.google.com/streetview/.

^[10] Jon Rafman, 9 Eyes, online photo-series, 2008-present (ongoing), https://9-eyes.com/. Quotation from Jon Rafman, “IMG MGMT: The Nine Eyes of Google Street View,” Art F City, August 12, 2009, http://artfcity.com/2009/08/12/img-mgmt-the-nine-eyes-of-google-street-view/.

^[11] Michael Wolf, Fuck You, online photo-series, 2010, http://photomichaelwolf.com/#fuck-you/1. Published in book format as Michael Wolf, FY (Berlin: Peperoni Books, 2010).

^[12] Tim Tetzner, If The Eyes Can’t Touch (Blurred Modernism), photo-series, 2018, http://www.timtetzner.com/files/Scharaun_BlurredModernism.pdf.

^[13] Jacqui Kenny, The Agoraphobic Traveller, online photo-series, 2016-present (ongoing), https://www.theagoraphobictraveller.com/.

^[14] Kenny’s website lists a forthcoming book version of The Agoraphobic Traveler in 2021. Google featured Kenny’s work in the “Stories” section of their website: https://about.google/intl/ALL_us/stories/agoraphobic-traveller/.

^[15] Maren Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America 1890-1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 26.

^[16] “Reading,” in this sense, suggests a certain critical relation to photography detailed in Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images As History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill & Wang, 1989).

^[17] Keith Gandal, The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 11-12.

^[18] For more on the FSA photography project, see Cara Finnegan, Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 2004) and Nicholas Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992).

^[19] Martha Sandweiss, “Image and Artifact: The Photograph as Evidence in the Digital Age,” Journal of American History 94, no. 1 (2007): 195-196.

^[20] Roy Stryker and Nancy Wood, In This Proud Land: America, 1935-1943, as Seen in the FSA Photographs (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 19, quoted in James Curtis, “Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, and the Culture of the Great Depression,” Winterthur Portfolio 21, no. 1 (1986), 1.

^[21] Associated Press, “‘Can’t Get a Penny’: Famed Photo’s Subject Feels She’s Exploited,” Los Angeles Times, November 18, 1978, sec. B1.

^[22] For a more comprehensive historical treatment of Rogovin, see Christopher Fulton, ed., The Social Documentary Photography of Milton Rogovin (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2019).

^[23] Holly Metz, “Milton Rogovin: Seeing the Forgotten Ones,” Labor History 38, no. 4 (1997), 509-511.

^[24] For a discussion of “ruin porn,” see Andrew Gansky, “‘Ruin Porn’ and the Ambivalence of Decline: Andrew Moore’s Photographs of Detroit,” Photography and Culture 7, no. 2 (2015): 119–39; Siobhan Lyons, ed., Ruin Porn and the Obsession with Decay (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018); or Tim Strangleman, “‘Smokestack Nostalgia,’ ‘Ruin Porn,’ or Working-Class Obituary: The Role and Meaning of Deindustrial Representation,” International Labor and Working-Class History 84 (2013): 23–37.

^[25] Spring Warren, “Screen Captures: Americans on Google Street, an Interview with Artist Doug Rickard,” Boom: A Journal of California 2, no. 4 (2012), 18-19.

^[26] Justin Blinder, “Absence in Context: Recontextualizing Civic Data, Critical Cartographies, and Gentrification in New York City.,” Ubiquity: The Journal of Pervasive Media 4, no. 1 (2015), 34.

^[27] For an example of crossfading and .gif animation, see, respectively, the first and second attached images from Vacated.

^[28] Blinder, “Absence in Context,” 30.

^[29] Ibid, 101.

^[30] Gutman, Marta. “Vacated (Justin Blinder).” Essay in Design and Violence (exhibition), January 21, 2015. https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/designandviolence/vacated-justin-blinder/.

^[31] The notion of panoptic street-level photography predates GSV, but the notion of using this method to document poverty is wholly novel. Rand McNally “Photo-Auto Guides” offer an early twentieth century example of a similar project. This topic remains underexplored; see Tristan Thielmann, “Linked Photography: A Praxeological Analysis of Augmented Reality Navigation in the Early Twentieth Century,” Beiträge (blog), April 5, 2016, http://www.mobilemedia.uni-siegen.de/2016/04/05/linked-photography/.

^[32] For commentary outside the realm of visual arts, consider Paul Wolinski, “Fully Automated Luxury Composition,” Journal of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music 7, no. 2 (2017): 8–15. Wolinski, an experimental musician as well as a scholar of popular music, considers whether algorithmically-generated music can “resist the pressures of capitalism.”

^[33] Ben Burbridge, Photography After Capitalism (London: Goldsmiths, 2020), 19.

Tags 20th Century, 21st Century, Photography, Urban Environments

Golden Age Hollywood

Film Noir and the Great Depression

Post author By nthomas37
Post date March 5, 2021

By Ryan Fallon

When the Stock Market crashed in 1929, and subsequently led to the greatest economic collapse in American history, it did so in the midst of a steady climb of audience admissions for a burgeoning movie industry at the beginning of the 1930s. In addition to the financial turmoil that America was now steeped in, the advent of sound in motion pictures and the disappearance of silent films that had been universally popular in the 1920s led to a slowdown in admissions. However, beginning in 1934, admissions to films began to steadily climb again, and continued to do so throughout the rest of the decade and into the wartime years. Despite the widespread financial ruin the Depression had inflicted upon the country, American audiences returned to the movies in the mid-1930s in search of the escapism that cinema offered, primarily in the form of comedy films, westerns and musicals.

Amidst the Depression-era blossoming of American cinema, both as an industry and an artform, a new genre formed: film noir. Recognized now for its aesthetic features, such as minimal lighting and use of darkness and shadows, as well as its depictions of the more nefarious aspects of American society, film noir has come to be associated with America’s postwar socio-political anxieties. Inner-city crime, atomic-age paranoia, the Communist threat, urban decay, postwar suburbanization, drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness and the criminal underworld became staples of the noir films that came to define the genre from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, as depicted in films like The Killers (1946), The Big Sleep (1946), Criss Cross (1949), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Touch of Evil (1958) and Shock Corridor (1963).

However, while film noir can be seen as both an exorcism of the collective trauma sustained during and after World War II and a reflection of the country’s paranoid psyche at the onset of the Cold War, the roots of these films can be traced back almost two decades prior, where, as film historian Eddie Mueller states, the noir genre was born in response to the economic turmoil of the early 1930s: “Frankly, I think the Depression was a bigger influence [on film noir] than World War II…the writers that influenced the more adult content and attitude found in film noir created their essential work in the thirties.”

With the economic suffering that moviegoing audiences experienced in the wake of the Depression, elements of early film noir, or what historian Joel Dinerstein calls “emergent noir”, became more pervasive in American cinema from the early 1930s until the mid-1940s. proceeding chronologically, this essay examines how these early films reflected the fears and social anxieties of American audiences amidst the country’s economic downfall, as well as breaking down what these films had to say about the crisis of capitalism during the Depression era.

The genesis of the noir genre began in the pre-code years of the early 1930s (1930-1934) with the production of “gangster” films. Released directly after the 1929 Crash and at the onset of the Depression, gangster films like Little Caesar (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), The Secret Six (1931), Quick Millions (1931), City Streets (1931), Scarface (1932), I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) and Picture Snatcher (1933) were instrumental in establishing the criminal “protagonist” that operated in society without a moral code.

The gangsters in these films occupied two different roles in the early crime cinema of the 1930s. Firstly, gangsters were interpreted by moviegoing audiences as stand-ins for corporate capitalists that had been to blame for America’s financial freefall. Within this context, audiences equated criminal gangdom with the gross overindulgence and corporate corruption inherent in capitalism, and in doing so, associated the idea of the businessman with that of a violent criminal. Often portrayed by Paul Muni, Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, the capitalist/gangster subtext was further compounded by the depictions of characters describing their criminal syndicates as “businesses” and “organizations” that used crime to turn “profits”, often ending with the gangster’s grisly demise, which was seen by audiences as a come-uppance for banks and financial institutions that had allowed for the crash to happen.

However, as the gangster films progressed in the early 1930s, a second role which the gangster occupied developed: the anti-authoritarian revenge character. Seen by audiences as a justified, vigilante figure, rather than a capitalist thug, Joel Dinerstein writes that this change in character provided “a revenge narrative…it provided a vicarious outlet for those who felt cheated of their savings, hopes, and future, without sacrificing the myth of upward social mobility.” It is in these films that the noir trope of the alienated, morally ambiguous protagonist, that would come to be a staple of the postwar noirs, was established. The anti-authoritarian attitude of the gangsters in the early 1930s crime films was also critical to the molding of this new noir character, one who acted in desperation and used violence as “the cinematic language of resistance” and “emerged as an inquiry into a fallen national mythos” in the wake of the failure of American industrial capitalism.

The implementation of the Hays Code in 1934 ended the gangster film boom in the mid-1930s. The Hays Code sought to censor depictions of overt violence and sexuality, and censors feared that the depiction of the criminal antihero who resorts to organized crime to take from capitalists would serve as too much of a role model to a nation that, in the wake of the crash and Depression, had already turned on conservative political values, as described by Hanson Philip as “…a new disgust for leadership, it was business leaders, and especially the bankers and stock speculators, a group notable for their conservatism, who early in the 1930s caught the main force of the nation’s ire.”

This public hostility towards bankers and businessmen also coincided with a robust labor movement, one that sought to organize support for industrial unionization and mass participation in strikes and protests during the 1930s. The crime films produced during the Depression-era gave credence to the audience’s notions of resistance, especially to the political powers that had destroyed the economy. The Popular Front movement that became synonymous with labor-rights and strikes was intertwined with a blossoming creative movement in art culture, in what Michael Denning calls “The Cultural Front.” Although by the late 1930s the gangster film had been phased out, the core themes and elements, namely the anti-authoritarian attitude towards power and the protagonist without a moral code, were manifested in a new iteration of crime film: the prewar “emergent” or early noir.

These early noirs capitalized on the notions of social and economic despair that the gangster film had previously established. Despite the influence gangster films had on the eventual formation of film noir, as they aren’t typically aren’t considered “noir” films. The early noir films of the late 1930s and early 1940s appropriated the themes of desolation and criminality and shifted the focus from the gangsters of the organized underworld and onto the alienated everyman, suggesting that engaging in criminal acts in the face of economic desperation was not exclusive to the flashy mobsters of the pre-code era. These noir films such as They Drove by Night (1940) and High Sierra (1941) recast the criminal protagonist not as a murderous mobster, but instead as a conventional citizen forced into crime by necessity. According to Winfield Fluck in Crime, Guilt and Subjectivity in Film Noir:

Both gangster film and film noir deal with crime. However, there is one major difference. In film noir, the crime is no longer committed by a “professional” criminal but by an “ordinary” citizen who is drawn- or appears to have been drawn- into crime by accident or some strange, unforeseen combination of factors.

This new Depression-era protagonist in early film noir is often depicted as isolated and hardened, often working class, and usually resentful of the corrupt nature of authoritative entities. Though these protagonists operate without a moral code, they are presented to the audience as sympathetic figures that yearn for upward economic mobility. This is best exemplified by the characters portrayed by Humphrey Bogart from the late 1930s-1940s, most notably in They Drove by Night, in which George Raft and Bogart play overworked, poverty-stricken truck drivers desperate for money. In assessing the social and political subtext of the broken protagonist, film essayist Andrea Mattacheo writes that the aim of early noir was to

…make the nation feel understood through a shared imagination of failure, radical and disturbing images in which defeat, and breakdown were not represented as sins to make amends for; an imagination in which losers weren’t to be stigmatized but to be understood, since they were just men and women defeated by an unfair system. Like the great part of the American people after 1929.

The characters featured personas and qualities rooted in Depression-era social phenomena that novelist Sherwood Anderson called the “pervasive sense of failure in the wake of the loss of ‘dignified work.’” However, as Mattacheo also points out, these films did not limit their depictions of economic turmoil to the impoverished. Films like Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) and its follow-up The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) are stories of weKalthy characters that appear as isolated and alienated as the drifters and criminals typically portrayed in film noir. Prior to the production of Citizen Kane, Welles had emerged from the progressive Cultural Front movement of the 1930s with his Federal Theatre Project (FTP).

In the 80 years since its release, Citizen Kane has been heralded not only a landmark artistic and cinematic achievement, but also as perhaps the most complete example of pre-war noir, with its nod to the German Expressionist-inspired dark shadows and minimal lighting, which had been absent in the early gangster films and slowly phased into noir in the late 1930s. Both Kane and Ambersons showcase characters that occupy the same world of Depression era despair and economic turmoil seen in earlier Depression films. Kane presents the story of Charles Foster Kane, a stand-in for the real-life business tycoon William Randolph Hearst, whose emotional downfall amidst his fortune spoke to the notions of loss and isolation felt by prewar moviegoing audiences. Similarly, Ambersons deals with the familial pitfalls of the Ambersons, whose vast fortune dwindles at the dawn of the automobile era.

As the early noir period moved in the 1940s, the last subgenre of early noir was formed: the hard-boiled private detective film. This genre was based on the works of 1930s crime writers like Raymond Chandler (Farewell, My Lovely, The Big Sleep, The High Window) and James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce) and best exemplified by films like The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Glass Key (1942), Murder, My Sweet (1944) and Double Indemnity (1944). Although postwar detectives were generally depicted as being one class above their clients, the detectives of the prewar and wartime years exuded a Depression-era working class sensibility, as seen in The Maltese Falcon and Murder, My Sweet. Here, the private detectives share the same alienation and post-Depression dismay for society that the working-class criminals embodied in the films of the late 1930s. They see the detective world as a dark “business,” one that pits them against criminal capitalists (such as the Cairo and Gutman characters who are searching for the Falcon in The Maltese Falcon), as well as corrupt authoritative entities (The police officers in Murder, My Sweet). In the works of Raymond Chandler that were adapted for the screen in the early 1940s, the antagonists are presented as upper-class, often wealthy and entirely corrupt and authoritative, channeling the resentment towards depictions of the wealthy that had been so prevalent immediately after the stock market crash. By the end of World War II, noir films had begun to assume the political and social contexts that would become synonymous with the Atomic age and anti-communist ideology. The economic factors that had shaped the noir genre in the 1930s and early 1940s had slowly dissipated from noir cinema, as America’s wartime economy boom had put millions back to work and the labor consciousness of the 1930s was replaced by hostile anti-labor attitudes, instigated by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) attacks on unions in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Though the focus of noir films shifted from the Depression era themes to those of America’s Cold War climate, these films of the 1930s and 1940s provided a depiction of the economic and social fears that audiences expressed after the financial collapse, while also reflecting the public sentiment that America’s financial and political structure had failed the working-class population.

Works Cited

Broe, Dennis. “Class, Crime, and Film Noir: Labor, the Fugitive Outsider, and the Anti-Authoritarian Tradition.” Social Justice, vol. 30, no. 1 (91), 2003, pp. 22–41.

Broe, Dennis. Film Noir, American Workers and Postwar Hollywood. Univ. Press of Florida, 2010.

Butsch, Richard. “American Movie Audiences of the 1930s.” International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 59, 2001, pp. 106–120.

Callow, Simon. Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu. Penguin, 2006.

Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. Verso, 1996.

Dinerstein, Joel. “‘Emergent Noir’: Film Noir and the Great Depression in ‘High Sierra’ (1941) and ‘This Gun for Hire’ (1942).” Journal of American Studies, vol. 42, no. 3, 2008, pp. 415–448.

Fluck, Winfried. “Crime, Guilt, and Subjectivity in ‘Film Noir.’” American Studies, vol. 46, no. 3, 2001, pp. 379–408.

Gandini, Leonardo. “Crime as Business.” History of Economic Ideas, vol. 22, no. 3, 2014, pp. 159–165.

Hanson, Philip. “The Arc of National Confidence and the Birth of Film Noir, 1929—1941.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 42, no. 3, 2008, pp. 387–414.

Hare, William. Pulp Fiction to Film Noir: The Great Depression and the Development of a Genre. Kindle Edition, McFarland, 2012.

House, Rebecca R. “Night of the Soul: American Film Noir”. Studies in Popular Culture, vol. 9, no. 1, 1986, pp. 61–83.

Lott, Eric. “The Whiteness of Film Noir.” American Literary History, vol. 9, no. 3, 1997, pp. 542–566.

Mattacheo, Andrea. “Shadows of Forgotten Men. Film ‘Noir’ and the Great Depression’s Imagination: ‘Murder, My Sweet.’” History of Economic Ideas, vol. 22, no. 3, 2014, pp. 167–177.

Ross, Alex. “The Shadow: Orson Welles at a Hundred.” The New Yorker, 30 Nov. 2015.

Tags 20th Century, Film, Great Depression

Golden Age Hollywood

Representations of Wealth & Poverty in Depression-Era Hollywood

Post author By nthomas37
Post date March 5, 2021

By Nora Thomas

For this podcast, I spoke with Dr. Jacqueline Reich, a Communications professor at Fordham University specializing in Film History, Star Studies, and Italian and Italian-American Cinema. My survey of Depression-Era films included:

The Public Enemy (1931)

Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)

She Done Him Wrong (1933)

It Happened One Night (1934)

My Man Godfrey (1936)

Modern Times (1936)

Stella Dallas (1937)

Holiday (1938)

Depression-Era-Film Download

Works Cited:

Bergman, Andrew. We’re in the Money: Depression America and Its Films. New York: New York University Press, 1971.

Cohen, Harvey G. Who’s in the Money? : The Great Depression Musicals and Hollywood’s New Deal. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018.

Horak, Laura. “Modernity, Sexuality, Cinema: Early Twentieth Century Transformations,” in Modernities and Moderization in North America, ed. by Ilka Brasch and Ruth Mayer. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2019.

Sharot, Stephen. “Social class in female star personas and the cross-class romance formula in Depression-era America.” Screen. 2015, Vol. 56, No. 2., pp. 172-194.

Sharot, Stephen. “Wealth and/or Love: Class and Gender in the Cross-class Romance Films of the Great Depression.” Journal of American Studies. February 2013, Vol. 47, No. 1., pp. 89-108.

Shurlock, Geoffrey. “The Motion Picture Production Code,” in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Vol. 254, 1947. pp. 140-146.

Verba, Sidney and Kay Lehman Schlozman. “Unemployment, Class Consciousness, and Radical Politics: What Didn’t Happen in the Thirties.” The Journal of Politics. May 1977, Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 291-323.

Jacqueline Reich. Interview with the author. December 10th, 2020.

Tags Film, Gender, Great Depression

Contemporary Television

Depictions of the Working Class

Post author By nthomas37
Post date March 5, 2021

By Morgan Williams

Description:

In this video, I take a look at three post 2000’s shows that depict working class families and individuals. The shows analyzed include: The Middle which centers on a nuclear lower middle-class family that lives in a small suburb in Indiana, Shameless which centers on a family trying to survive in the Southside of Chicago with neither of their parents around, and The Chi which centers on multiple characters and families in the Southside of Chicago just trying to get by and make something of themselves. In this video, I discuss the overarching theme that these shows tell their viewers which is that the working class struggles hard but also works hard to get out from behind. With the use of clips from the shows and interviews, I support my argument about what TV tells us about the working class.

References:

DeAnn Heline – a TV writer of Roseanne and writer/creator of The Middle

Jim Jennewein – a TV/Film writer and professor at Fordham UniversityKendall, Diana Elizabeth. Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America. Rowman & Littlefield, 2011.

Tags 21st Century, Family, Gender, Television

Contemporary Television

Lesson Plan: Representations of Women in American TV Comedies

Post author By nthomas37
Post date February 18, 2021

Mary Elizabeth Lennon

Introduction

The following is a one-hour lesson plan for lower level undergraduate media and communications students. Students will hold discussions on women on TV, poverty and wealth, and how comedy exposes American beliefs about poor or rich women.

The lesson will ask students to view and analyze brief clips from four comedy/dramedy series: Shameless (2011-current), The Good Place (2016-2020), Atlanta (2016-current), and 2 Broke Girls (2011-2017). These shows have been immensely popular over the last five to ten years and have become part of the US cultural landscape.

Of the 38.1 million people living in poverty in 2018, 56 percent were women. While the poverty line is an imperfect indicator of poverty, as it neglects certain costs of living and geographical differences, it is nonetheless a place to begin forming a definition of poverty. “In 2018, the poverty line was set at an annual income of $13,064 for a single individual younger than age 65 and $25,465 for a family of four with two adults and two children.” The poverty line is a crucial factor in eligibility for many government assistance programs.

Despite the prevalence of American poverty, stereotypes of women are prevalent in American culture. Most notable perhaps is the trope of the welfare queen. This is an image popularized during the Reagan-era which stigmatized welfare recipients as African-American women, living easily off the government dole and breeding an excessive amount of children. While this woman is a myth, she is pervasive in American ideas of what poverty looks like. Students should note that while some of the women in the series they will analyze are poor, these poor women do work. They should also examine how women defy or challenge the stereotype of a lazy poor woman.

Additionally, the question of race should be a focus of these discussions. The welfare queen is typically coded as black, and poverty disproportionately affects women of color. Why, then, are so many of the characters on these comedy shows white? What about white poverty lends itself to comedy where black poverty does not? Popular shows that depict black poverty, and wealth for that matter– The Chi, Queen Sugar, Treme, The Wire, Empire– are all dramas.

While stereotypes about poor women are perhaps more harmful, they do exist for wealthy women as well. If the poor woman is the welfare queen, the rich woman is the ice queen. Wealthy women are often depicted as cold, calculating, emotionally stunted, and selfish. Students will see these stereotypes played out on screen, and should seek to articulate why, or if, they are effective methods of comedy.

It is important that the selected shows are comedies. They exaggerate and heighten ideas about wealth and poverty, but they also expose deeply held beliefs about the women who occupy those spaces. Rosie White writes that “the ‘rule-breaking, risk-taking, inversions and perversions’ at the heart of much comic performance can disturb the ground upon which our understandings of gender rest.” Students will determine what, if anything, these shows tell us about American perceptions of women.

Please see the notes at the end of this plan for a closer look at each clip. These notes provide background on each show/clip, timestamps, as well as an overview of the clips’ themes and possible guiding questions.

Learning Objectives

Students will:

Critique brief sections of American television comedies for key themes about gender, poverty and wealth
Classify the perceived roles that rich and poor women play in American society
Interpret how comedy exposes assumptions and beliefs about both impoverished and wealthy women
Distinguish why stereotypes of women—wealthy or poor—are considered material for comedy.

Pre-Class Assignment

Students should come to class ready to discuss the following articles:

Robin Bleiweis, Diana Boesch, and Alexandra Cawthorne Gaines, “The Basic Facts About Women in Poverty.” American Progress, August 3, 2020.
Frank Krutnik and Steve Neale, Popular Film and Television Comedy (London: Routledge, 1990) 10-25.
MacKenzie Scott, “116 Organizations Driving Change.” Medium, July 28, 2020.
Bryce Covert, “The Myth of the Welfare Queen.” The New Republic, July 2, 2019.
Students should also review Wikipedia or IMDB pages for each show to get context on the basic plot and characters.

Lesson Structure

Opening Discussion (15 minutes)

Goal: Students will articulate their own perceptions of wealth and poverty. Additionally, students will explain how the readings inform their understanding of the intersections of wealth, poverty, race, and gender, and how they are depicted in comedy.

Student participation will begin by asking students to share their thoughts on the readings. Students should share their reactions and takeaways from the material. If needed, possible discussion questions include:

What do you picture about when you think about poverty? How about wealth?
What do the readings say about the experiences of American women in poverty or wealth?
- What stood out to you about the statistics of women living in poverty? 31% of people in poverty are children, disproportionate percentages of women of color are in poverty, and a higher percentage of disabled and LGBT women endure poverty. Why are those realities important?
- What does the welfare queen myth say about our perceptions of poor women, especially women of color?
- MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Amazon CEO and world’s richest person Jeff Bezos, writes that “personal wealth is the product of a collective effort.” Do you agree? What responsibilities, if anything, do wealthy people owe society?
- How do Krutnik and Neale define comedy? What elements are needed for something to be funny? What does comedy mean to you? How could these themes, which are quite sobering, be considered funny? Does comedy make these things more digestible for you – why or why not?
What does society expect of poor or rich women? How might the media reflect this?

Clip Activity (20 minutes)

Goal: Students will analyze and critique these clips for the narrative and stylistic choices made by the show’s writers, creators, and characters. Students will evaluate how these choices depict wealth or poverty (and intersecting themes), and what commentary they are making.

Play clips for the students as a class (collectively, the clips run about 8 minutes total). Then, divide students into five equal groups to discuss. Each group should discuss one clip, respectively, for the remaining time of the section.

Students should consider the following questions together and take notes on their answers:

What are the socioeconomic statuses of the women in the clip? What do you see in the clips to support this?
What themes do you see in the clip (motherhood, labor, race, sexual harassment, philanthropy, etc.)?
What, if anything, makes these clips funny?
What do you think the showrunners want you to think about wealth and poverty after viewing the show?

Post-Activity Discussion (25 minutes)

Goal: Students will synthesize their group’s discussion for their classmates, who will respond.

Students should then come back together as a class. Each group will present, for about a minute each, their thoughts and takeaways about their clips. The rest of the class will respond and provide their own understandings or responses to the clip and the group’s presentation. Use the notes below for suggested questions or topics if conversations begin to lag. Reserve five minutes for each clip.

Post-Class Assignment

Goal: Students will reflect on the class discussion, readings, and clips. They will connect themes from the clips to broader ideas about media representation.

As an after-class assignment, students should write a 200-300 word response to the class discussion. If a class discussion board exists (Blackboard, etc.), written pieces should be posted there so that students can respond to each other. Otherwise, they should be submitted to the instructor.

In their responses, students will address one of the following questions:

How does comedy allow media to expose assumptions and beliefs about poor or rich women?
How are women represented in the selected clips? What tropes or stereotypes are used and why do you think the writers utilized them?
Does television have any responsibility to portray life in wealth or poverty “authentically”? What do you think was missing in these portrayals, if anything?

Notes

Shameless (Season 1, Ep. 1 3:08 – 4:34 and 4:48-5:21)

Introduction: Shameless is a dramedy series that follows a poor white family in the Southside of Chicago. The family is headed by 21-year-old Fiona, the eldest of six siblings, who presides in place of her absent parents.

Clip (1): This clip, from the pilot episode of the series, introduces the daily routines and struggles of the Gallagher family. The siblings discuss raising funds for their electric bill, childcare, and jobs over morning cereal with watered-down milk.

Clip (2): This clip sees Fiona at one of her many jobs, serving concessions at a Chicago sports stadium. The men Fiona serves make suggestive comments; she then overhears them make derogatory statements about “project girls”.

Notes and themes:

Both sisters are serving as parental figures. Fiona takes on the traditional role of mother: we see her starting laundry, dressing Carl (8), and arranging childcare for Liam (1). Debbie (9) literally takes on the role of father, signing a permission form for Ian (15).
Similarly, we see how poverty can mature or age girls. Debbie, at age 9, sips at her coffee and chastises Carl for not contributing to family expenses. Carl is able to get away with not paying up, while Debbie, having already calculated the remaining amount needed, reaches into her change purse. In the end of the scene, care of Liam falls to Debbie, who is charged with bringing him along to school with her.
Creativity in the face of impoverished living conditions: Fiona, as the matriarch of the family, is tasked with keeping a crumbling house running. We see her water down the milk to keep it lasting longer, prop a chair in front of the washing machine door to keep it closed and running, and cover shifts to make up the electric bill.
The struggle for childcare is highlighted in this scene. Fiona cannot both work and watch after Liam, and it is down to her to arrange alternative care. The solution comes in the form of Debbie—note that Ian and Lip’s (16) complications of school and work are sufficient to leave them out of the running, but Debbie’s schooling is not so.
Why are these images comedic? It is jarring to see a young girl sip coffee, lecture her equally young brother about “pulling his weight,” and haul her toddler brother off to elementary school. This scene, while light in tone, shows us the fast-paced, often chaotic nature of poverty.
Meanwhile, in the second clip, Fiona encounters sexual harassment at work. “The accommodation and food services industry, which includes restaurants, coffee shops, hotels, and other hospitality establishments, accounted for 14.2 percent of sexual harassment claims filed to the EEOC from 2005 to 2015.”
What makes sexual harassment so pervasive in low-wage service jobs? There may be something in the transience of the encounters, or the expectation of service. What makes these men feel entitled to Fiona’s attention?
This clip also demonstrates ideas about poverty and childbirth. These men are reinforcing the stereotype of poor women as excessively reproducing.
Overall, what does Shameless, or at least these clips, say about women in poverty? They are the default caretakers, vulnerable to sexualization, and looked down upon by men they are required to serve.
The Gallaghers are a white family, and most of the people in their orbit are also white. The South Side of Chicago is a predominantly African American area of the city. Why choose to focus on white poverty in a black neighborhood? Is there anything about white poverty that is inherently more susceptible to comedy?

The Good Place (Season 1, Ep. 12 6:27-8:23)

Introduction: The Good Place takes places in the afterlife: Eleanor Shellstrop, the show’s protagonist, finds herself in “the good place” after her death. Her place there, however, is a case of mistaken identity, as she was not “good” enough in life, according to the good and bad place “architects” to earn a place. Eleanor must figure out a way to remain there undetected to avoid being transferred to “the bad place”.

Clip: Having been detected as a fraud in the good place, Eleanor flees to a “medium place,” where she meets Mindy St. Claire. Mindy, who died in a moral gray area, spends eternity in a place that is neither good nor bad. In this clip, Mindy shares her story.

Notes and themes:

Is there anything inherently wrong with accumulating wealth? Why or why not?
Mindy, despite deciding to do “good” while alive, still focuses on herself after death, and encourages Eleanor to do the same. Why are wealthy women often portrayed as one-dimensionally selfish, arrogant, or rude? Do wealthy men fall under the same descriptors?
Mindy, before her death, comes to the conclusion that she ought to do something “good” with her life. Is there any kind of responsibility or obligation that wealthy people have? What is the appropriate use of wealth? Does philanthropy offset any societal ills caused by the accumulation of wealth?
Mindy, having lived a life consumed with drugs and money, was destined for “the bad place”. This lifestyle, then, is considered wrong, even damned. This one act of planned charity, however, shifted the rest of her eternal life— insinuating that the desire to do “good” with one’s money makes one’s soul more “worthy”. Do you think this is the case? What argument is the show making about morality? Or is the show poking fun at this black and white idea of morality in any way?
Mindy is preoccupied with cocaine and drug use. What differing ideas does American society have about drug use? What is “acceptable” drug use—and for whom?

Atlanta (Season 1, Ep. 6 5:05-6:58)

Introduction: Atlanta is a dramedy series that follows a young black man, Earnest “Earn,” as he attempts to build a rap career with his cousin and friends. Earn has a complicated relationship with his sometimes-girlfriend and mother of his child, Vanessa, “Van”. Van is a school teacher who struggles without financial support from Earn.

Clip: Van meets her friend Jayde for dinner. Jayde and Vanessa clash over their respective lifestyles, and argue over what makes a black woman’s life “valuable”.

Notes and themes:

Jayde tries to convince Van to stay out and go to a party with her – Van says she can’t due to obligations to her daughter and work. We see the contrast between Jayde and Van’s lifestyles – are we meant to see one as better than the other? In what ways?
Jayde dates professional athletes who provide for her rather than working on her own. Van seems to look down on this way of living. Is she justified in this? How does society view women who don’t work?
Jayde reminds Van that she used to make fun of girls like herself. Why do you think that is? By living as a single mother and not having a man to provide for her, has Van somehow let herself down?
Jayde warns Van that women, particularly black women, need to be “valuable”. What does this mean to you? What “services” must women provide to be considered “valuable”? Why do black women have to be considered valuable, instead allowed to just “be”?

2 Broke Girls (Season 1, ep. 1 13:06 – 14:53)

Introduction: 2 Broke Girls is about two young women, Max and Caroline, working at a Brooklyn diner and struggling to make ends meet. Max has always been working class, while Caroline lost her fortune due to her father’s Ponzi scheme.

Clip: Max arrives at her second job, where she nannies for a wealthy family. She chats with her employer, Peach.

Notes and themes:

Think about the difference in childcare in this clip compared to Shameless. Who is responsible for raising Peach’s twins? Why are wealthy women so often portrayed as distant, uninvolved mothers? Is the “gold standard” for motherhood located in the middle class? Why?
What does the vapid rich girl trope say about how we view wealthy women? Compare Peach to Max, her struggling employee, who seems to have more common sense—and an air of superiority. Is there anything inherently more valuable about being working class? Both Fiona and Max are struggling and tired, but admirable.
Peach tells Max that she is family. How does this idea make it easy for employees to be exploited? Note that Max’s duties in the house seem to go beyond childcare, but as a confidant and gofer for Peach. Peach cannot or will not do basic functions for herself: why are wealthy women either delicate or lazy?
Peach is clearly an exaggerated character, which in turn makes her comedic. What role does Max play as the “everyman”? What about her life makes her more grounded?

Tags 21st Century, Gender, Lesson Plan, Television

Visualizing Urban Poverty

Gentrification Lesson Plans

Post author By nthomas37
Post date February 18, 2021

Lesson Plan 1: Gentrification and Wealth Inequality

Lesson Plan 2: The Representation of Gentrification in New York City and in Harlem

By Katie Shine

Audience:

University Undergraduates

Course:

American History Introductory Course and/or Seminar

Timeline for Two Sequential Lessons:

2 lessons of 60 minutes each; 2 hours total

Format:

This document includes my suggestions for instructions, materials, and activities for two sequential lesson plans.

The first lesson plan addresses the understanding of wealth inequality and gentrification, particularly in New York City and in the neighborhood of Harlem. The second lesson plan allows students to apply their understanding of gentrification specifically to an analysis of media representations of gentrification.

To accommodate those instructors and students that are currently engaging in online classes, I placed notes throughout this document if the instructor would like to modify the class activities and materials for two virtual lessons.

Please note that a virtual lesson does require that the instructor is familiar with the basics of remote teaching with a digital platform, such as Zoom. Instructor ideally can: create a Zoom session; send an invitation link to the class prior to the lesson time; act as the host of a Zoom session and monitor students’ participation during the lesson; and create breakout sessions for groups of students during the lesson.

Essential Questions for Lessons:

Question for Lesson # 1: What is gentrification? What is wealth inequality?

Question for Lesson # 2: How has the process of gentrification been portrayed by different media sources, particularly online newspapers and magazines? What do the media’s different portrayals of gentrification potentially reveal about the representation of wealth inequality in terms of race and gender?

Context for Lessons For Instructors

Political commentators, local governmental officials, journalists, historians, and other scholars have frequently written about and analyzed gentrification in the U.S. in many history books, cultural criticism, and newspaper and journal articles. They have represented gentrification as either a positive or a negative force that has affected urban metropolises, such as New York City, especially in the decades from the 1970s to the 2010s. Mass media sources, particularly news and magazine articles, frequently characterize gentrification as a process that has a multitude of effects. The authors of these mass media sources write about the challenge that gentrification poses to both the socioeconomic status, mobility, and livelihoods of individual residents; and to the intra-community relationships, average income level, and/or racial and cultural diversity of the greater neighborhoods that these individuals have resided in for many years.

Despite substantial funds and significant governmental attention directed towards affordable housing solutions in New York City by its mayoral administrations in the previous three decades, affordable housing and the impact of gentrification on specific neighborhoods remains a concern for many residents. Many New Yorkers were displaced from their neighborhoods as rent and housing prices rose in neighborhoods across the city, such as in Harlem, and have struggled to access new affordable housing located near their workplaces and family members’ schools. Women of color are more likely to be adversely affected by gentrification. These lessons’ assigned readings and media sources both explain in further detail how women of color have been historically discriminated against when it concerns equitable access to opportunities for wealth and fair housing in New York City. These conditions often occurred against a background of macro-level processes such as real estate development, urban planning and profitable partnerships between local politicians and leaders in the real estate and business industries.

Journalists, historians, and other scholars have also referenced wealth inequality in their discussion of the representation of gentrification. As the media sources in the second lesson’s class activity indicate, journalists and writers have represented gentrification as either a beneficial force to reform a neighborhood and bring more economic opportunities to low-income or middle-class residents, or as a harmful process that permanently displaces these same long-standing residents, especially women of color, from their neighborhood. When long-standing residents are negatively affected by gentrification, they are more likely to have increased difficulties in accruing more wealth than their counterparts: the new, more affluent, incoming residents to the gentrifying neighborhood.

However, media sources often do not provide a concrete definition of the process of gentrification itself. The definition of gentrification is more likely to be oversimplified, vague and open to interpretation by the media outlet’s particular audience. This ambiguity has led journalists and other writers to present gentrification in a variety of misleading ways to the public.

When confronted with defining gentrification for academic purposes, students find it difficult to think about the process in terms of its explicit history. The instructor’s responsibilities for these two lessons include: assigning pre-class readings that analyze the historical context of gentrification and wealth inequality; guiding a class discussion that prompts students to critically analyze various media representations of gentrification; and helping students to consider the role that the discussion of gender and race serve in the representation of gentrification.

The following two sequential lesson plans will allow students to collaborate to consider a variety of perspectives regarding gentrification in New York City and particularly, in the neighborhoods of Central Harlem and West Harlem in northern Manhattan.

Note:

As a disclaimer, please keep in mind that some of the reading material and discussion questions may be sensitive for students. Some students may react to gentrification, and debates about race, gender, and economic dislocation in different ways. This particularly may apply to students that are either originally from New York City: or are living and/or studying currently in New York City. As an instructor, I suggest that you prepare for class discussions and student reactions accordingly. I encourage the instructor to consciously adjust the lesson plan, discussion questions, and monitoring of the lessons according to the instructor’s specific knowledge of their particular students’ learning and emotional needs.

The goals of these lessons are to: foster critical thinking, debate, analysis of historical events, and inclusion of students’ diverse views about gentrification and wealth inequality. I also suggest that the instructor consider collaborating with another teacher and/or administrator at their university. This could allow the instructor to acquire feedback and insight to deliver these lessons to the students in their particular university in an optimal manner.

Pre-Lesson Questions for Instructor:

What does the term gentrification mean to you as an instructor of students of American history? How would you define gentrification?
How would you define wealth inequality in terms that are comprehensible for your undergraduate students based upon what they have learned in the course thus far?

What are the historical macro-level processes that have propelled gentrification to change the living conditions of residents in New York City, especially in Harlem?
Why has gentrification affected certain communities and not others in New York City? Which groups of people, based on their gender and/or race, have been most affected by gentrification?
As an educator and historian, what impact has the discourse of gentrification, especially from various news outlets, had on your understanding of the process of gentrification and its potential beneficiaries?

Learning Objectives for Two Sequential Lessons

Students Will Be Able To:

1) Understand the definition of gentrification and apply that definition to the analysis of change in neighborhoods in northern Manhattan.

2) Apply the understanding of gentrification, with Harlem as an example, in their responses to the discussion questions and during participation in the group activities.

2) Compare and contrast the representations of gentrification between various media sources.

3) Use detailed examples, such as historical facts, theory, arguments or data, from the assigned readings to support their explanation of the changes in housing in New York City.

4) Evaluate a variety of media representations about gentrification in New York City and their implicit discussion of race and gender.

5) Synthesize their understanding of the material with a post-class assignment.

Instructions for Instructor: Preparation and Materials for Two Lessons

Pre-Class Reading Materials for Lesson # 1:

Instructor can view the full list of recommended assigned readings at the end of this section. Instructors should make every effort to ensure that the students can access these materials.

For each lesson, Instructor can assign students about 50 pages of reading material and up to 20 minutes of listening and/or visual material as a target goal for the class to review. The lists of assigned readings are recommendations based on the material’s content, the author’s level of analysis, and its relevance to the discussion questions and activities. There are also additional suggestions if the instructor would like to review more options.

Instructor can notify the students of the assigned readings in one of the following methods, ideally at least one week prior to the lesson:

1) Include the list of readings on the syllabus.

2) Email the students the list of assigned readings with the appropriate attachments or instructions to access the materials online.

3) Post the readings and their links and/or attachments in the course’s classroom tool that is visible to all students (i.e. Google Classroom).

Recommendations:

“Gentrification and the Increasing Significance of Racial Transition in New York City 1970-2010” by Stacey Sutton in Urban Affairs Review v. 56, iss. 1, pgs. 65-95 (January 2020)

Location: Online Academic Journal. Abstract available here.

Total Pages: 30

Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press (2019)

Read: Chapter 5 (“Unsophisticated Buyers”) or Chapter 6 (“The Urban Crisis Is Over-Long Live the Urban Crisis!“)

Location: E-Book and Print Book Available for Purchase.

Total Pages: 43 (Chapter 5) or 41 (Chapter 6)

Race Capital? Harlem as Setting and Symbol edited by Andrew M. Fearnley and Daniel Matlin. New York: Columbia University Press (2019)

Read: Introduction

Location: E-Book and Print Book Available for Purchase.

Total Pages: 25

Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State by Sam Stein. Verso Books (2019)

Read: Chapter 2 (“Planning Gentrification”)

Location: Link can be provided by Instructor prior to the lesson. Print Book Available For Purchase.

Total Pages: 43

“Thomas Piketty’s “‘Capital in the Twenty-first Century”’ Explained” by Mike Llewellyn. Ideas.Ted.com (October 2014)

Location: https://ideas.ted.com/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-twenty-first-century-explained/

Total Pages: Approximately a 10 minute read

“The Threat of Gentrification With Rezoning in East Harlem” by WNYC Radio with Jennifer Levy and Kat Meyers (January 2018)

Listening Time: Podcast of 16 minutes

Location: https://www.wnyc.org/story/legal-aid-society-enters-fight-affordable-housing-nyc/

Additional Suggestions:

“The Gentrification of Harlem?” by Richard Schaffer and Neil Smith. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 76, no. 3 (1986), pgs. 347-363

Location: Online Academic Journal. Available in select university libraries and on JSTOR.

Total Pages:16

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. New York: Vintage Books (1992)

Read: Introduction (pgs. 3-25)

Location: E-Book and Print Book Available for Purchase.

Total Pages: 22

Race Capital? Harlem as Setting and Symbol edited by Andrew M. Fearnley and Daniel Matlin. New York: Columbia University Press (2019)

Read: Ch. 11 (“Race, Class, and Gentrification in Harlem since 1980”)

Ch.12 (“When Harlem was in Vogue Magazine”); and Conclusion (“Harlem: an Afterword)

Location: E-Book and Print Book Available for Purchase

Total Pages: 43

Pre-Class Reading Materials for Lesson # 2:

Instructor can assign these media source readings and group assignments to the students before the start of Lesson # 2.

For a virtual lesson, Instructor can send an email providing the students with their group assignment and the corresponding assigned media sources that they will read for homework before Lesson # 2.

For an in-person lesson, Instructor can either email the media sources to the students or print the appropriate number of copies of media sources for each member of every group and hand out to the students at the end of Lesson # 1.

Class Activity: Suggested Groups and Assigned Sources

Group 1:

Benjamin Schwartz, “Gentrification and its Discontents” The Atlantic, June 2010

Beth J. Harpaz, “Harlem getting its first major hotel since 1967” NBC News, October 12, 201

Christopher Bonanos, “From Alligator Shoes to Whole Foods:Watching One Harlem Corner Over 28 Years” New York Magazine, July 13, 2017

Sam Roberts, “No Longer Majority Black, Harlem Is in Transition” The New York Times, January 5, 2010

Group 2:

Soni Sangha, “Gentrification in Washington Heights forcing out longtime mom and pop shops” Fox News, Published December 29, 2015, Last Update January 11, 2017

Michael Henry Adams, “The End of Black Harlem” The New York Times, May 27, 2016,

AND

New York Times Editorial Board, “How Gentrification is Changing the Face of Harlem” The New York Times, May 31, 2016

Talmon Joseph Smith, “We’ve Seen New York’s White Flight Before” The Atlantic, August 26 202

Group 3:

Richard L. Cravatts, “Gentrification is Good for the Poor and Everyone Else” American Thinker, August 1, 2007

Elizabeth Kim for WNYC Public Radio, “Rezoning and future of Harlem” , published October 10, 2019, by The Brian Lehrer Show, video, 7:00

AND

Jessica Gould, “The City’s Top Gentrifying Neighborhoods” , published May 9, 2016, WNYC News, video, 1;00,

Stacy M. Brown, “For People of Color, gentrification is more a curse than a blessing” New York Amsterdam News, February 19, 2020

Group 4:

Leani Garcia, “El Barrio Tours” Americas Quarterly, October 19, 2013,

Justin Davidson, “Is Gentrification All Bad?” New York Magazine, January 31, 2014

Denver Regine, “Ethnic Cleansing, aka gentrification, debate rages” New York Amsterdam News, June 21, 2018

Class Agenda For Lesson # 1:

Part 1: Opening Discussion

00:00-2:00

Instructor will introduce the lesson by stating the “Essential Question” for Lesson # 1 and providing excerpts from the “Context” section of the lesson plan if needed.

02:00-10:00

Instructor will open the conversation with these discussion question:

Based upon our reading of the assigned materials and knowledge obtained in the course thus far, how would you define wealth inequality? In American society, who is more likely to have difficulty accessing and maintaining wealth? Why is that?

Inform the students that they may use notes from their reading of Mike Llewellyn’s article about Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century.

Allow at least 3-4 students to respond.

10:00-19:00

Instructor will commence the following activity by sharing this discussion question with the students:

How does our definition of wealth inequality shape how we define or evaluate gentrification?

Class Activity:

Instructor will place the students into groups of 2-3 students each or Zoom Breakout rooms (for a virtual lesson). Instructor should use their phone or another device to keep track of time for this activity.

For 1 minute, students will reflect on the question and individually write down their response.

For 3 minutes, students will briefly share their responses with their group members. Instructor will then bring the students back to the classroom or Zoom meeting.

For 5 minutes, the students will share with the rest of their class what their groups discussed. Instructor can extend the discussion here if it needs additional time.

19:00-25:00

Instructor will convene the class to discuss these questions:

If gentrification can be evaluated as a historical process, what are some of the historical factors that have contributed to gentrification in New York City that we can identify as a class? Do the forces that drive gentrification benefit only certain people, based on their income level, gender, and/or race? Or can gentrification benefit all New Yorkers?

Allow several students to give their brief responses to this question.

Transition: Inform the students that we will be now playing the role of historians to define gentrification. The goal is for the students to create a definition of the term as a process that they can experiment with for this lesson and the next lesson.

25:00-40:00

Class Activity Instructions:

Divide students into 4 or 5 in-person groups or Zoom breakout rooms (for a virtual lesson) to collaborate on a definition of gentrification.

Inform students that they will be assuming the mindset and role of a historian. Remind them to consider the historian’s intended audience and use of evidence to support their statements. Circulate the room in person or pop into Zoom Breakout rooms (for a virtual lesson) to answer questions and address any roadblocks.

If students are struggling with defining gentrification, the instructor can offer this definition by a social scientist from one of the suggested pre-class readings to get them started.

“The theft of space from labor and its conversion into spaces of profit”

(Ipsita Chatterjee in“Gentrification and the Increasing Significance of Racial Transition in New York City 1970-2010” by Stacey Sutton).

Give the students 7-8 minutes to come up with a definition, or at least a set of words and/or terms that are associated with gentrification.
Instructor will then ask 1 student from each group to write the definition, or a collection of words associated with gentrification, on the classroom board.
For a virtual lesson, Instructor can create a Google Doc and share it with the entire class. Students can post their definition or word association on the document.
Allow the students 7-8 minutes in total for each group spokesperson to share their definition.
Ask the students to write all of these definitions or word associations because the class will be revisiting these definitions later in the lessons.

Transition: Instructor will introduce a series of discussion questions that draw upon the assigned readings and incorporate the class’s definitions of gentrification.

Part 2: Discussion Questions

40:00-1:00:00

Instructor can ask 2 of these suggested discussion questions based upon the students’ comprehension of the topic and individual interests.

I suggest that Instructor asks Question #4 in order to transition the discussion to the next lesson about the media’s representation of gentrification.

What has physically been taken from gentrified neighborhoods? How can we describe the products, processes, profits, or other social or economic entities leaving the neighborhood?

In contrast, what types of products or processes are arriving in the neighborhood? What is the perceived value of these products or processes to current residents in comparison to possible future residents?

Who are the historical actors shaping gentrification in New York City? What is their identity in terms of their gender, race, access to wealth, and/or profession? Are there specific people who have historically benefitted from gentrification and accrued significant amounts of wealth as a result?

Based upon your assessment of the assigned readings, how did the media specifically work to influence the conversation surrounding gentrification? Were certain Americans, such as women of color, specifically mentioned regularly as either ideal or ill-suited homeowners?

In closing, Instructor will allow a few minutes to assess the students’ understanding of the concepts thus far and address their concerns or questions. Instructor can inform the students that the next lesson will address the representation of gentrification and that they will be placed in one of four groups. The students will receive their assigned group and three media sources to review shortly after this lesson.

Class Agenda for Lesson # 2:

Part 1: Extended Class Activity

00:00-05:00

Instructor will introduce the lesson by summarizing the students’ definitions of wealth inequality and gentrification from Lesson # 1; stating the “Essential Question” for Lesson # 2; and providing excerpts from the “Context” section of the lesson plan if needed.

Notes for Instructor for Extended Group Activity:

Learning Objective for Students: Utilize the information learned from the previous lesson and assigned media source readings to analyze the representation of gentrification in New York City.

For an in-person lesson, Instructor should give the students the two parts of the activity, Key Aspects and Discussion Questions, in written form. Instructors can write these on the board or print out copies of this information for all of the students.

For a virtual lesson, Instructor can share the Key Aspects and Discussion Questions in a shared Google Doc or in the Zoom Chat function. Instructors will need to create several breakout rooms for the groups. Instructor can provide the assigned media sources (that the students received prior to the lesson) in a shared Google Doc as well, just in case the students need a reference while they answer the Key Aspects and Discussion Questions.

Instructor should answer any questions and inform students that there is no “wrong” answer in this activity. They can answer the questions to the best of their abilities based upon their reading of the media sources prior to this lesson.

05:00-10:00

Activity Instructions for Students:

Instructor will deliver the following instructions.

“Prior to this lesson, I have assigned you to a group with a few assigned media sources to review. Each of these 4 groups is responsible for relying on their definitions of gentrification, wealth inequality, and knowledge from the assigned readings and previous lesson to complete two tasks. You will have 15 minutes in total to review and analyze the sources to complete two tasks.”

Tasks:

Delegate among your group to determine which group members will address the Key Aspects of your assigned sources. 1-2 people or so can present this information to the entire class.
Delegate among your group to determine which group members will address the Discussion Questions. They can respond to the questions with a few sentences or bullet points. 1-2 people or so can present this information to the entire class.

Key Aspects of the Source:

Content
Author, Publication, and Publication Date
Type of Source and Purpose of the Source
Tone and Perspective of the Author
Source’s Historical Significance

Possible Discussion Questions:

Who is the target audience for each of your assigned media sources?

Are there any conflicting messages about gentrification either within one source or between the two or three sources? Who do the authors suggest is being either positively or negatively affected by gentrification? Do they mention specific groups of New Yorkers, based on their race and/or gender? Why do you think that is?

Imagine that the authors are in dialogue with one another. What would they say to each other about gentrification? Would they agree or disagree on one issue in particular?

10:00-25:00

Students will work together in their four in-person groups or Zoom breakout rooms (for a virtual lesson) to complete the instructions as a team.

25:00-50:00

Instructor will convene the students either in-person or in the general Zoom meeting (for a virtual lesson) to check in with the students and answer any urgent questions before they present their findings.

Remind the students that all groups will have no more than 6-7 minutes to present their findings to the class. Inform the students that this is meant to be a challenging activity and their attempts to be concise and accurate are all appreciated!

Part 2: Closing Discussion Question and Post-Class Assessment

50:00-55:00

Instructor will convene the class to assess what they learned from the group activity and give students an opportunity to ask any urgent questions.

Instructor can follow up with these discussion questions:

Based upon our class readings and the group activity, how do newspapers, magazines and/or journals portray gentrification in New York City? How does the media specifically operate to develop ideas about neighborhoods? Did you notice any instances when the media employed certain representations, language, or images to emphasize a particular belief about communities based upon the residents’ socioeconomic status, race, or culture?

55:00-1:00:00

In closing, Instructor can choose 1 of the following discussion questions to ask the class.

How does your analysis of the assigned readings and/or the media sources affect how you, as a student of American history, evaluate gentrification? Do we want to keep or revise our historical definitions of gentrification from the previous lesson?

What responsibility do we have as both students of history and regular consumers of mass media information to present an accurate view of gentrification?

As historians, what do we need to keep in mind about the media’s portrayal of gentrification? Is it possible that even trustworthy media sources can deemphasize factual information to build certain ideas about a neighborhood, its residents and perceived culture?

Instructor ends the lesson and informs the students of availability to answer questions or concerns by email and/or during office hours.

Instructor informs the students that they will receive an email after this lesson with all of the media sources that each group received. Their reading of these sources is recommended.

Assessment Options after Lesson # 2:

Instructor can choose 1 option to assess the students evaluation of the material.

Option 1:

Instructor can assign one of the remaining final discussion questions to the class for their consideration. Students can pick 1 of the questions to explore in a brief response essay of 1-2 pages. Properly cited outside source material can be used to support the student’s response. Students can email the assignment to the professor no later than 2 days after Lesson # 2’s conclusion.

Option 2:

Instructor will send the students all of the media sources that each group received. Instructor will ask the student to choose another group’s assigned media sources (i.e. Group 2 if the student was in Group 1), read the materials, and analyze the sources for their audience, content, and context.

Students will then holistically evaluate both the media source group that they selected for this assignment and the media sources that they were originally assigned during the class activity.

Students will write a brief reflection response of 1-2 pages based on their evaluation of this larger set of media sources about gentrification. Students will email the assignment to the professor.

Optional: Instructor can provide students with 1 of the following discussion prompts to help them focus their written response for Option 2.

What overall message about gentrification are these sources sending to the reader? Who are the authors arguing that gentrification is helping and/or hurting?

Do the authors clearly define gentrification for their audience or is its meaning and impact on New York City and/or Harlem ambiguous?

Is there 1 media source that you selected that has an argument that persuades you most effectively? Why? What is the journalist specifically doing with the evidence, historical context, or visual presentation of the material? Does his or her argument about gentrification influence you to revise your own definition of gentrification, as an aspiring historian?

Tags 21st Century, Lesson Plan, Neoliberalism, New York City