| Few studies examine women and youths' experiences living in housing projects. Even fewer studies examine residents' various interlocking struggles or document their strategies for survival in these spaces. My dissertation examines how women and youth are not isolated from the social consequences of deindustrialization, the concentration of urban poverty, racial segregation, gangs, drugs, or violence that surround their community. I analyze how housing project residents utilize and generate culture to make sense of their daily lives; to negotiate project poverty, criminalization, and violence; and ultimately, to survive in their urban environment. In order to understand the processes and conditions of urban project survival, I combine the methods of critical criminology, poverty studies, and justice studies with urban ethnography. Over a two-year period (January 2009 – June 2011), I employ multiple qualitative research methods including archival research, participant-observation, online networking, shadowing, conceptual community mapping, interviews, and focus groups. My analysis reveals the housing projects as a structurally disadvantaged, criminalized, and violent space, as well as a site of survival, consciousness, and resistance. It exposes poverty, criminalization, and violence as interactional processes that are simultaneously contested and reproduced in the housing projects. This research has potential for improving the lives of many residents and influencing effective policy. |
