Researchers: Madelaine Cahuas (College of Liberal Arts, Department of Geography, Environment and Society) and Jessica Lopez Lyman (College of Liberal Arts, Department of Chicano and Latino Studies)

This study analyzes Latina/o/x displacement and access to affordable housing for families whose children attend two charter schools—Academia Cesar Chavez (Eastside St. Paul) and El Colegio High School (South Minneapolis). Since these schools’ mission and vision are dependent on centering Latina/o/x identity and culture, the potential gentrification of these neighborhoods could lead to decreased enrollments and severe consequences for the schools such as having to…

Researcher: Di Zhu (Geography, Environment and Society, College of Liberal Arts)

The geography of a community is not constrained by administrative boundaries. It is in essence, comprised of residents who routinely move around and interact with others, often beyond their local spatial context. One of the most challenging problems in community planning is understanding how fine-grained local regions are irregularly and dynamically organized by human movements. In partnership with MN Compass, Move Minnesota, and local planning agencies, this project will propose an integrated data-driven analytical framework to sense dynamic community structures within the Twin…

Announcement from CLA Commencement 2021 website. The virtual commencement is Sunday, May 16, 1 p.m. CDT.

Dr. Brittany Lewis is a well-respected community engaged qualitative scholar, thought leader, speaker, and author known for bringing those most often locked out of local decision-making processes to the action research table. Dr. Lewis is the Founder and CEO of Research in Action, an urban research, evaluation, community…

updated December 15, 2020

A team of University of Minnesota graduate students and Resilient Communities Project (RCP) Fellows was a finalist for this year’s MetroLab Student Cup. The Student Cup is intended to recognize exceptional student civic research projects, and create pathways for careers and partnerships in the civic research and innovation domain. The competition was sponsored by the MetroLab Network, an international collaborative of cities, counties, and universities focused on…

This project aims to better serve students in Minneapolis Public Schools who speak a minority language, which is currently 32% of district students. As is true of monolingual English-speaking students, a subset of these bilingual students experience significant language impairment. This negatively impacts their social and academic success. Because most standardized assessments used to identify students with language impairment are English-based, alternative approaches are needed to assess the language skills of students whose home language is not English. Thus, the current study will develop a new assessment approach that uses a test-teach-retest dynamic assessment format to assess…

Minnesota ranks third in the United States for crop production totaling $14.6 billion with nearly half of all lands dedicated to crops. Improving data availability for farmers, government agencies, and researchers will inform decisions in improving conservation practices and crop yields. This project will create and disseminate the first open map of Minnesota farm fields, and produce several examples to demonstrate to policy makers and stakeholders how the farm field data can be used to improve conservation practices and crop yields. We will use satellite imagery and rigorous, reproducible, and robust geocomputational methods running on supercomputers to delineate and map each field. The…

In recent years, policing has become an increasingly controversial and salient government service in the US. After several heavily publicized deaths of Black boys and men (and, later, Black women) during police encounters, some have rallied around the #BlackLivesMatter movement, while others have grown stauncher in their support for law enforcement. Yet scholars currently know little about this shift in the politics of policing. This study takes a mixed-methods approach, combining survey data, ethnographic observations, textual analysis, and qualitative interviews to understand police reform in Minneapolis, a city on the forefront of national progressive reforms, yet with a deeply…