Urban Engagement is incredibly lucky to have a wide range of experts helping us out this year! Whether through research information or speaking presentations, we are honored to have the guidance of so many intelligent, important people in their fields.
Katherine Kennedy / Education Day Speaker
Katherine Kennedy serves as the Director of the Howard Thurman Center at Boston University. Ms. Kennedy has been at Boston University for 20 years. She received a Bachelor’s degree from Pepperdine University and a Graduate Certificate from the ColumbiaUniversity Graduate School of Journalism’s Michelle Clark Fellowship. Prior to joining the Division of Student Affairs, she was a major gift fundraiser for the Office of Development and Alumni Relations. She is a former newspaper journalist who was a member of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize winning news team at The Boston Globe that covered desegregation in Boston. For relaxation, Kennedy enjoys traveling, book collecting, and gourmet cooking. A wine enthusiast, she is a member of Divas Uncorked, a 9 member African American women’s ‘wine education’ group whose continual quest is to demystify the world of wine for women and people of color by breaking down the intimidating image of the wine world. Ms. Kennedy also serves as advisor to several cultural student groups on campus.
Ruha Benjamin, Ph.D.
Ruha Benjamin is assistant professor of Sociology and African American studies at Boston University and author of People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford University Press 2013). She received her BA in Sociology and Anthropology from Spelman College and her MA and PhD from UC Berkeley. Prior to joining the Boston University faculty, she was a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics. Prof. Benjamin is currently an American Council of Learned Societies faculty fellow and a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government Science, Technology, and Society Program, where she is working on a project that explores how life sciences shape and are shaped by society by investigating the interaction between folk ethnoracial taxonomies, government classifications, and population genomics in India, Mexico, and South Africa. To learn more, visit http://www.ruhabenjamin.com
Japonica Brown-Saracino, Ph.D.
Japonica Brown-Saracino is an ethnographer who specializes in urban and community sociology, cultural sociology, and the study of race, ethnicity, and sexuality. In 2004, City and Community, the peer-reviewed academic journal published on behalf of the Community and Urban Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association, published her article, “Social Preservationists and the Quest for Authentic Community,” which draws on her study of four gentrifying communities (two small New England towns and two Chicago neighborhoods) and introduces her concept of “social preservation”. She further explores social preservation and gentrification in her book, A Neighborhood That Never Changes: Gentrification, Social Preservation, and the Search for Authenticity (The Fieldwork Encounters and Discoveries Series of the University of Chicago Press, 2009), which received the 2010 – 2011 Urban Affairs Association Best Book Award. In 2010 Routledge’s Metropolis and Modern Life Series published a second book, The Gentrification Debates, which is composed of excerpts from defining book chapters and articles on gentrification published over the last forty-five years. With co-authors Brown-Saracino has written on the practice of ethnography, newspaper coverage of gentrification, and on social movements, sexuality, and culture. She is currently completing a comparative ethnography of four small U.S. cities with growing or emerging populations of lesbian, bisexual, and queer women. An article from the study, “From the Lesbian Ghetto to Ambient Community: The Perceived Costs and Benefits of Integration for Community,” appeared in the August, 2011 issue of Social Problems. Brown-Saracino serves as secretary/treasurer of the Community and Urban Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association and as co-book review editor for City & Community. She regularly teaches Urban Sociology and Boston’s People and Neighborhoods through the Sociology department at Boston University.
Generation Citizen / Education Day Speakers
Biography coming soon.
Sergeant Michael O’Hara, Allston Police Department
Biography coming soon.
FYSOP 24: Urban Engagement 