PDF for Printing - Graduate School of Arts and Sciences - Columbia ...

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Citizen SociologistsDavid Stark, ArthurLehman Professorof Sociologyand InternationalAffairs, was in themidst of fieldworkstudying traders atthe World Financial Center on September11, 2001. On the day itself, he and DanielBeunza, a graduate student working withhim, decided to stay on campus to discussthe project instead of heading downtown.When the WFC was destroyed, Starkassumed their work had come to anindefinite end. He waited until tradingresumed six days later to call his contactat the company, now operating in NewJersey, and ask if everyone was all right.When Stark said he would call againafter time had passed, his contact quicklyreplied, “No, you won’t.” He insistedStark and Beunza resume their researchimmediately. He told Stark that theymust “witness what was going on in therecovery room in New Jersey. We werethe only social scientists working in [theWFC then], and he told me that it wasof historical importance.” Being invitedinto a community at such a time was “thehighest honor to an ethnographer.”The uniqueness of the situationyielded questions and observations Starkwould not have come across otherwise.In the end, his research with the tradersfocused on recovery as a form of innovationwithin an organization. “Recovery isa response to extreme uncertainty,” and itrequires a group of people to respond tochallenge in new ways. It quickly becameclear to Stark and his students that suchinnovation was not confined to organizationsalone. It could be studied in allof lower Manhattan. Stark recalls oneevening in October 2001 when he and hiswife and fellow social scientist MoniqueGirard hosted a dinner with students,and Girard declared that the “time forgiving blood was over. We were socialscientists, and we needed to use our workto do something for the city.” It was a callto arms. Several students halted work ontheir dissertations and Stark and his wifeset aside projects in order to study theresponse and recovery efforts in the city.Stark remembers thinking, “We are here.There are important lessons to learn, andwe have to do this. It was an extension ofour understanding of what it meant to bea social scientist in New York at that time.We had to respond ourselves and takeresponsibility as citizens.”Their research focused on forms of,in Stark’s words, “public assemblies”—such as not-for-profit organizations, largecompanies, select professions, and publicdemonstrations—operating in downtown‘You can’t move around suffering. You have to move throughit. You have to acknowledge it before you can analyze it.’” Inretrospect, Clark is glad to have brought the NYU psychologistteam to the Narrative and Memory Project in its laterdevelopment. After a year of recording stories, the work hadbegun to wear on the interviewers and the offer of free therapysessions became a necessary resource. “It was a relief to me tohave someone to call if something happened in the field that Ineeded to talk about.”Despite its emotional impact, Seeley believes trauma studyis helpful to her work as an anthropologist and psychotherapist.“People’s subjectivities are important. It is very dangerouswhen we only look at disasters in a distanced or clinical way.I don’t think you have to take the emotion out of academicwork. Instead, we need to find ways to put emotion back in sowe can better understand what happens to those who experiencetraumatic events and to those who study them.” However,there is a balance between being open to emotion andtaking in too much. Seeley now teaches a course on trauma.While she encourages students not to shy away from traumastudy, she also warns that students with trauma in their backgroundshould take care if they decide to remain in the class.Like Seeley, Clark feels that emotion is necessary for theintegrity of research. It is not possible to separate oneself fromthe emotion of the work, and one should not wish to do so. “Apart of oral history is to not make that divorce. We will alwaysrespect the suffering of people and at the same time be able tostand back and use our brains to analyze.”Time is also beneficial. “It takes time to make meaning,”explains Clark. “Oral history is a process, not a product.” TheSeptember 11, 2001 oral history archives have been openfor more than a year. They have been used by students andresearchers, but their existence has remained relatively quiet.This may change after they are officially opened and Clark andLink back to contents page26 Superscript
Manhattan or involved in the recovery andreconstruction of the area. The researchdemonstrated that the process of reconstructionhad as much influence in reshapingthe public sphere in lower Manhattanas the final constructed product itself.Stark described the project as the “sociologyof collaborative production.”In spring 2002, Girard and Starkorganized a conference at Columbia withthe architecture studios and urban plannersthat were proposing plans to the cityto discuss publicly the development oflower Manhattan and what could be doneto redefine the downtown district. This ledto another study on the use of technologiesin social assemblies, and how PowerPointin particular was used as a tool for publicpersuasion at events such as the firstarchitectural competition for the designon the new World Trade Center site. Thisyear, Girard and Stark collaborated withReinhold Martin of the Graduate School ofArchitecture, Planning and Preservationon an exhibit highlighting their projectarchive. The exhibit opened September 12in Columbia’s Avery Hall.Stark does research on organizationsand their search for meaning and value.His time studying the response to September11th was unplanned and sometimeschallenging, but when he discusses it onecan sense that he feels honored by theopportunity. He got to see “democracy inaction and an outpouring of creativity thatcame from New Yorkers as they respondedto and recovered from the event.” Whenasked what he learned from his September11th work, Stark explains that the lesson hecarries with him is the positive impact thatparticipatory endeavors can have.Bearman release their new book this month. After the Fall: NewYorkers Remember September 2001 and the Years That Followed(The New Press) features nineteen stories from the projects.For some who have worked in the archives, the experienceof listening to interviews mirrors the experiences of theinterviewers who recorded them. Oral History M.A. alumnaEllen Klemme focused her thesis on the interviews of two firstresponderparamedics. Before coming to Columbia, Klemmewas an emergency medical technician, and as a student wasinterested in the role of memory in the work of a paramedic.Like the interviewers, she also had difficulty processinginformation without ingesting it. “Listening to the interviewswas very challenging. My head was simultaneously in 2001and in the present. [There were] moments…when I was pulledbetween 2001 and 2010 too quickly or when what the paramedicssaid stuck with me for too long and haunted me in myday-to-day life.” Overall, however, Klemme was not troubled bythis effect because it was true to the work. “The interviews arenot intended to create sound bites. They are human conversations.”jHistory is more than sound bites, and research is not withoutemotion. It can be driven by it, ultimately served by it. By notsteering away from emotion—their subjects’ or their own,Clark and Seeley approached the subject of 9/11 in an organicway, incorporating the complexities and contradictions thatmade up people’s experience of September 11th in New YorkCity. Their work complicates the national narrative of 9/11to the benefit of understanding more fully what happenedon that day and on the days that followed. Staying true tocomplexity increases understanding, and understanding is asimportant as remembering.Superscript 27Link back to contents page
Page 2: CONTENTS1 Message from the Dean2 De
Page 5 and 6: and Dendrochronologyby Kristin Bali
Page 7 and 8: Pederson, Courtesy of the Lower Man
Page 9 and 10: sity of the rings in the samples is
Page 11 and 12: and the Digital Ageinstitutions in
Page 13 and 14: One concern among doctoral students
Page 15 and 16: “It is perhaps not up to the stud
Page 18 and 19: Link back to contents page16 Supers
Page 20 and 21: What differed this year in Albany t
Page 22 and 23: When Intellect MeetsLink back to co
Page 25 and 26: the towers collapsed. Furthermore,
Page 27: periences. They had been working no
Page 31 and 32: “I became involved to give back t
Page 33 and 34: Alumni interested in connecting (or
Page 35 and 36: I’ve applied it to my work to dev
Page 37 and 38: How have you applied your degreewor
Page 39 and 40: After Tobacco: What Would Happen If
Page 41 and 42: DissertationsDepositedRecentlyAnthr
Page 43 and 44: IEOR: Operations ResearchYu Hang Ka
Page 45 and 46: Naira Musallam, Examining thepercei
Page 47 and 48: Professors IOANNIS MYLONOPOU-LOS, A
Page 49 and 50: The GSAS Alumni Association invites
Page 51: Superscript 49Link back to contents

PDF for Printing - Graduate School of Arts and Sciences - Columbia ...

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?