Naomi Schiller’s public humanities project, “On the Line: Land Use, Food Access, Climate Justice and Organizing in New York City” aims to document the ongoing battles over land, coastlines, housing, and access to food in a city facing multiple overlapping crisis.
In Line: Facilitating Conversation and Listening on Sixth Street Community Center’s Weekly Food Distribution Line
Naomi Schiller (Brooklyn College & The Graduate Center, CUNY, Department of Anthropology) is working with Jen Chantrtanapichate, Program Director at Sixth Street Community Center (SSCC), and interpreters Chloe Lin and Ziyi Li to support SSCC’s emergency food distribution program and engage community members in conversation about their experiences during this period of deepening food insecurity.
Sixth Street Community Center (SSCC) has been involved in community organizing around food, health, and the environment in the Lower East Side since 1978. Since the onset of the COVID crisis, Sixth Street Community Center has been involved in direct relief work, distributing boxes of food once a week.
As months have passed since the start of the pandemic, the line for food at Sixth Street has stretched longer, and with that, the waiting time and anxiety of those in line has grown. The stress of waiting has been exacerbated by inconsistent delivery schedules and the fluctuating number of food boxes delivered , leaving SSCC staff, volunteers, and community members uncertain about wait times and whether or not everyone in line will receive food. Tensions have emerged between people in line.
This project seeks to help facilitate logistics of the food distribution process and spark conversations among people waiting in line about their lives, needs, concerns, and hopes.
Citywide Organizing for Justice-Centered Land Use
This collaborative research project aims to document and make accessible histories and activist knowledge of land use organizing in communities across NYC, with a focus on changing waterfronts. The goal of the project is to help galvanize the general public around local land use issues and to support the growth of collective knowledge among organizers engaged in battles over zoning, displacement, and resilience infrastructure.
Naomi Schiller is working with research fellow, Vanessa Hill, an artist, writer, and organizer involved in anti-displacement organizing with Art Against Displacement and the Chinatown Working Group.
Naomi and Vanessa are joined by undergraduate Brooklyn College interns Onyx Clarke and Teresa Rodriguez, to help facilitate the collection, transcription, and archiving of peer-to-peer interviews among land use activists from across the city.
Combining approaches from multiple disciplines, including history, theater and performance, anthropology, and the digital humanities, this project will document and disseminate this knowledge through a series of public conversations anchored around an accessible oral history archive, a handbook for action, and a public exhibit.
Listen to Naomi Schiller discuss the problems with ULURP at a Land Use Town Hall organized by the Lower Manhattan Branch of Democratic Socialists of America in August 2020.
More About Naomi Schiller
Naomi Schiller is associate professor of anthropology at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. Naomi researches, writes, and teaches about urban politics, climate justice, visual and media anthropology, and the state in Latin America and the United States. She is author of Channeling the State: Community Media and Popular Politics in Venezuela (Duke University Press 2018). Her research also appears in American Ethnologist, Dialectical Anthropology, Transforming Anthropology, Latin American Perspectives, and Mass Communication and Society. Her current research focuses on community activism, social class, race, urban governance, coastal adaptation, and climate change in New York City.
