Progress Notes: Week 13

  • Between weeks 8 and 14, each student should provide a weekly reflection (500 words) on the data you have collected to date.
    • What data did you collect?
    • What is your initial impression of the data?
    • How have the data you have collected this week changed/progressed your thinking about your research project?
    • What challenges did you encounter while collecting the data?
    • What are your next steps?

One thought on “Progress Notes: Week 13”

  1. I have decided to change my direction, twice again. Some of the reason I have been struggling with the project is because I was just studying perceptions of “urban space” which is very general. In realizing this, I decided to focus on NYC as an urban space. Other than moving to Maine to go to Bowdoin, I have never lived any where else but New York City. As a native New Yorker, I understand that the way I engage with the city is different from the ways in which a non-Native New Yorker engages with the city. Additionally, being away from the city has forced me to re-examine what public safety means. It was’nt until matriculating to Bowdoin that I understood that other people perceived where I grew up as “dangerous”.

    In recent years, there has been an increase of national news coverage of crime in metropolitan areas, primarily New York ( Ex: Coverage around bail reform, coverage around the increase in subway crimes, recent coverage on the subway shooting in Queens) I call it the “vilification” of New York – pointing to New York as a place where liberal policy making has “gone wrong”. However, according to the NYPD’s annual report, NYC reported 488 murders in 2021 and the city is on pace for 11% fewer in 2022.With the evidence presented, the decline in crime rate in major cities, how is new York still thought of as this villainous city?

    I am now claiming that these conceptions of public safety in the present are deeply tied to New York’s past image, but the persistence of these claims is rooted in white supremacy and the idea of New York and other urban spaces as the “untamed urban jungle” particularly amoungst white people (in the white imagination)

    Data I plan to use:

    Nexus Uni for newspaper articles, that I code as including “vilifying” language. Looking at major publications like the New York Times that millions of people read

    I will be pulling from the NYPD’s Annual Reports. Every year, the NYPD puts out reports on the cities crime rate and to support my claims about the downward trends in crime, I reference this data.

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