Browsing by Author "Hyatt, Susan B."

Now showing 1 - 10 of 17
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Black Lives Matter and the Public Rediscovery of Structural Racism
    (2021) Hyatt, Susan B.; Anthropology, School of Liberal Arts
    Asset-Based Community Development promises to empower local communities while failing to address racialized disparities. We must look to broad-based social movements such as Black Lives Matter if we wish to create a genuinely more equitable and anti-racist world
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Black Women as the Critical Link Between Traditional Institutions and Minoritized Communities
    (2024-12) Murphy, Stacia N.; Scheurich, James Joseph; Hyatt, Susan B.; Steensland, Brian; Haberski, Raymond J.
    Poverty plagues many U.S. urban communities, particularly Black and brown populations. Gaps in wealth accumulation continue to widen between whites and Blacks, and neighborhoods are increasingly segregated by race and income with Black and brown populations more frequently living in concentrated poverty. Unfortunately, these factors combine to negatively influence other quality of life outcomes such as economic mobility, food security, health disparities and medical costs, infant and maternal health, life spans, education, discriminatory policing practices, and environmental health issues, factors that have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, development continues to play an integral role in the way that urban cities attempt to solve their problems. In Indianapolis, the primary practitioners of urban development are housed within several key intuitions, and ultimately, typically held by white men or women, who make economic decisions that shape the lives of Indianapolis residents. Unfortunately, these institutions are often disconnected from populations at the margins and, thus, community engagement is the mechanism through which institutions attempt to connect with these communities. Consequently, it is common to see individuals who look like the populations that institutions want to serve in these positions. These individuals can be thought of as bridges between these communities and the institutions in which they work. Utilizing Black Feminist Thought (BFT) and Critical Race Theory (CRT), this study explores the lived experiences, knowledges, and practices associated with the role of bridge between institutions and community with a focus solely on Black women in these roles. Through textual analysis of transcribed interviews based in grounded theory with some mix of deductive and inductive coding, this study will help us better understand local perspectives about community engagement specifically and urban development more generally.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    "Cuando Actuamos, Actuamos Juntos": Understanding the Intersections of Religion, Activism, and Citizenship within the Latino Community in Indianapolis
    (2014) Logan, Ryan Iffland; Vogt, Wendy A.; Hyatt, Susan B.; Dickerson-Putman, Jeanette
    Undocumented immigration from Latin America is a heated and divisive topic in United States' politics. Politicians in Washington, D.C. are debating new legislation which would provide a pathway to citizenship for some 11 million undocumented immigrants. While several federal immigration reform bills were debated in the early 2000s, each one failed in either the House of Representatives or in the Senate. The Indianapolis Congregation Action Network (IndyCAN), a grassroots activist group in Indianapolis, is organizing the Latino community through faith and shared political goals. Undocumented Latino immigrants are utilizing IndyCAN as a method to influence progressive policy change. However, anti-immigrant groups challenge these efforts by attempting to define who can be considered an "American" and are attempting to block legislation due to their negative perceptions of Latinos. Debates about citizenship have racial discourses and reveal the embeddedness of race and ethnicity. Despite this, many Latino immigrants are forging their own identities in the United States and are engaging in a political system that refuses to grant them a legal status. Through an enactment of activism called la fe en acción [faith in action], these immigrants ground their political organizing with IndyCAN and attempt to appeal to the religious faith of politicians. I explore issues of race, political engagement, and religion in the lives of Indianapolis’ Latino community. In this case study, I demonstrate that IndyCAN is acting as a vehicle through which undocumented Latino immigrants are engaging in the political process. This political involvement occurs through religious strategies that seem apolitical yet are implicitly an enactment of activism. Ultimately, I reveal how undocumented Latino immigrants in Indianapolis are impacting the political process regardless of their legal status.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Leaving the bridge, passing the shelters : understanding homeless activism through the utilization of spaces within the Central Public Library and the IUPUI Library in Indianapolis
    (2014) Karim; Hyatt, Susan B.; Zimmerman, Larry J., 1947-; Dickerson-Putman, Jeanette
    By definition, homelessness refers to general understanding of people without a home or a roof over their heads. As consequences of a number of factors, homelessness has become a serious problem especially in cities throughout the United States. Homeless people are usually most visible on the streets and in settings like shelters due to the fact that their presences and activities in public spaces are considered illegal or at least “unwanted” by city officials and by members of the public. In response to this issue, activists throughout the country have worked tiresly on behalf of homeless people to demand policy changes, an effort that resulted in the passage of the homeless bill of rights in three states, namely Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Illinois. As I discovered through my fieldwork, in Indiana, the homeless, themselves, are currently lobbying for passage of a similar measure. Locating my fieldwork on homelessness in Indianapolis in two sites, the Indianapolis Marion County Public Library (the Central Library) and the IUPUI Library, I examine the use of library buildings as alternative temporary shelters and spaces where the homeless can organize for political change. As an Indonesian ethnographer, I utilized an ethnographic approach, which helped me to reveal “Western values” and “American culture” as they play out in the context of homelessness. In this thesis, I show that there is a multi-sited configuration made up of issues, agents, institutions, and policy processes that converge in the context of the use of library buildings by the homeless. Finally, I conclude that public libraries and university libraries as well can play a more important role beyond their original functions by undertaking tangible actions, efforts, engagements, and interventions to act as allies to the homeless, who are among their most steadfast constituencies. By utilizing public university library facilities, the homeless are also finding their voices to call for justice, for better treatment, and for policies that can help ameliorate the hardship and disadvantages of homelessness.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    NAPTOWN RISES: HAS A SPORTS STRATEGY REAWAKENED A SLEEPING CITY?
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2012-04-13) Godanis, Stephen; Thang, Lian; Hyatt, Susan B.
    Downtown Indianapolis is witnessing a dramatic resurgence. For Indian-apolis, a chance to host the 2012 Super Bowl is not only an honor, but an opportunity to rebrand itself as a “big league city” with Midwestern charm. From the building of Lucas Oil Stadium, to the expansion of the existing con-vention center and the recently completed Georgia Street corridor, to subsi-dizing the building of a soaring hotel, Indianapolis has bent itself backwards to be ‘cool’ and ‘sporty.’ Few neighborhoods boast the development that has become common downtown. This dependency on sports as a means for eco-nomic development blurs the distinction between public and private space. For our research, we target the “mile-square” as ground-zero for analyzing and observing how a sport strategy has transformed the once called “India-no-place” to “Super City.” We collected a considerable amount of information through literature reviews, site visits, mapping (ArcGIS), field trips, and in-terviews. In this poster presentation, we study how the vernacular landscape of Indianapolis has changed due to the reliance on sports as an economic development strategy. We also discuss the role of public-private partner-ships in the making of downtown development as well as the development of districts to appeal to the new ‘creative’ class. We hope that our presentation will shed light on the complex relationship between recent events and down-town redevelopment.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The neighborhood of Saturdays : memories of a multi-ethnic community on Indianapolis' south side
    (Dog Ear Publishing, 2012) Hyatt, Susan B.; Linder, Benjamin J.; Baurley, Margaret
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Race and the Water: Swimming, Sewers, and Structural Violence in African America
    (University of New Mexico Press, 2020) Mullins, Paul R.; Huskins, Kyle; Hyatt, Susan B.; Anthropology, School of Liberal Arts
    Violence is rampant in today’s society. From state-sanctioned violence and the brutality of war and genocide to interpersonal fighting and the ways in which social lives are structured and symbolized by and through violence, people enact terrible things on other human beings almost every day. In Archaeologies of Violence and Privilege, archaeologists Christopher N. Matthews and Bradley D. Phillippi bring together a collection of authors who document the ways in which past social formations rested on violent acts and reproduced violent social and cultural structures. The contributors present a series of archaeological case studies that range from the mercury mines of colonial Huancavelica (AD 1564–1824) to the polluted waterways of Indianapolis, Indiana, at the turn of the twentieth century—a problem that disproportionally impacted African American neighborhoods. The individual chapters in this volume collectively argue that positions of power and privilege are fully dependent on forms of violence for their existence and sustenance.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Redefining Women's Work: Female Entrepreneurs on the South Side of Indianapolis, 1880-1920
    (2019) DeMatteo, Stephanie Marie; Mullins, Paul R.; Hyatt, Susan B.; Wilson, Jeremy J.
    Research on the roles of women in the past commonly focuses on either the demure or the radical. This study of female entrepreneurs shows an area in which women occupied a more central position in their communities. Female entrepreneurs were able to possess a certain degree of independence without being viewed, or viewing themselves, as rebellious. This thesis focuses exclusively on the women who owned businesses on a two-block length of one street, South Meridian, in Indianapolis, over a forty-year period. Even with this limited focus, there is substantial variation in the motivations of the women. Some entered in to business with the support of their wealthy families, while others were obligated to work to support their families. The stories of these women can be revealed through their presence in official documents, city directories, and newspapers of the time. In addition to the individual stories of female entrepreneurs, these sources provide information about who the businesswomen of the time were as a group. The majority were born in the United States and among that group most were born in the state of Indiana. The most common businesses owned by women were millinery shops, dress shops, and boarding houses. Other demographic characteristics, such as age, marital status, and time in business, do not form a pattern across the group. These sources also show how women compared to men who were in business in the same location over the same period. Most of the female entrepreneurs of the South Side of Indianapolis around the turn of the century worked in fields that could fit under the heading of “women’s work,” but this categorization ignores the intricacies of their positions as business people. These women were not solely providing a service or producing a good, similar to what they would be expected to do in the home as wives, mothers, or daughters. They were also responsible for the other aspects of business ownership, including finding and maintaining premises, purchasing products and materials, and managing finances. It is these details that, for example, set apart the owner of a dress shop from a woman making clothes for her family.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Rediscovering the Neighborhood of Saturdays
    (2019-12) Hyatt, Susan B.; Anthropology, School of Liberal Arts
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Research Partnerships: Undertaking and Understanding Collaborative Ethnography in Indianapolis
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2010-04-09) Hyatt, Susan B.; Branstrator, Daniel; Baurley, Margaret; Dagon, Molly; Yarian, Stephanie
    Students will present a range of collaborative research projects they have undertaken in consultation with neighborhood and community-based organizations in Indianapolis. They will address the benefits, challenges and limitations that collaborative research has posed for them, as ethnographers-in-training