Community

My community work has always run parallel to my academic interests rather than separate from them. The same questions that drive my research (how social structures shape individual action, how institutions either support or constrain the people inside them) show up just as clearly in a zoning meeting, or a cycling practice with Special Olympics athletes, as they do in a longitudinal dataset.

Working with a historically marginalized neighborhood in Texas, fighting displacement through rapid, unplanned redevelopment (property values sometimes more than doubling, demolitions leaving hazards unremediated) I recognized early that data alone would not be sufficient and that arriving as an unknown outsider with professional credentials was as likely to generate suspicion as trust. Before meeting directly with residents, I worked through local community leaders and faith-based organizations who already had standing relationships in the neighborhood. They helped facilitate introductions and signaled that my involvement was in good faith. Over time those conversations shifted from guarded to collaborative. When the community pushed the issue to city council, I was asked to present in favor of the overlay. I declined, I wasn't a resident of that space, and I wasn't its voice. Instead, I advised and collaborated with those who were speaking on how to present the data, articulate the key points, and frame the implications clearly. Through combined and collective effort the neighborhood was successful in establishing protective zoning.

I also led small undergraduate research teams in sociology of law and sociology of community courses, where students explored how seemingly neutral municipal policy language has the capacity to dispossess individuals of individual resources, for instance, buildable land. Those projects were an extension of the same commitment: making the structural legible to people navigating it without institutional support.

In Fort Collins I've found a community that takes both its art and its civic life seriously. Advising the Fort Collins Visual Artists Coalition on survey design and data collection is a natural extension of my methodological work. The Mural Project offered something different, the logistical and financial work of keeping a creative community initiative alive. Earlier, in Texas, I spent five years coaching cyclists through Special Olympics and served as treasurer for the Down Syndrome Association of Brazos Valley. Those roles were less about expertise than about showing up consistently, which, as it turns out, is also what the research says matters most.