WSU Urban Studies Blog

Just before the weather turned cold, as the Urban Studies department was putting the WSU Community Garden to bed, students in the Research Seminar Capstone class joined the garden faithful from the IUI to plant 5 berry bushes.   The bushes were donated by Tree USA and the Worcester Tree Initiative, and students were helped by the state Department of Conservation and Recreation.  Dividing into groups, students learned the proper techniques for planting and, of course, turned it into a contest to see which could most quickly and correctly complete the task.  A couple of weeks later, these same students began to make their end-of-semester research project presentations.  All projects are interesting and show real promise.  Here are the first four:  Andrea Buffone is working on youth gangs in Worcester and the importance of early intervention; Megan Dealey is examining the increased need for regulation in a variety of areas ...

A recent marketing piece for the university's Career Services office quite coincidentally featured a picture of last year's Urban Studies graduates.  Check it out!  Meanwhile, current department students (and soon to be grads) were featured on one of the new WSU homepage pictures.  Check this one out, too!

Students in this year's Research Seminar, the department's capstone course, are hard at work on their semester papers. At present, they are presenting drafts to each other in writing workshops. Below is a lost of their abstracts, even though some have changed since their initial creation. We look forward to posting some of the completed papers on the CityLab website. Marta Baclawska The population at and below the poverty line is at high risk for obesity, especially women and children, however the prevalence for obesity has increased in all adults at all levels of income and education. There is a lack of research on how the media influences obesity altogether. Past research focuses on the potential effects on females of unrealistically thin images, while obesity is the far more substantial problem in Western society. There is a large economic industry on dieting, yet we continue to have a growing obesity epidemic with all the knowledge easily available on how to lea...

Louisville, KY, skyline at night Last week, Drs. Conroy and Campbell went to the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities Annual Conference in Louisville, Kentucky.  While there they offered a roundtable discussion session entitled "CityLabs & the Possibilities of Faculty-Student Research."  The roundtable came out of the department's current thinking about how to expand the operations of our Vincent "Jake" Powers CityLab by using it more as a research institute, archive, and the department's publishing wing.  This plan has been in the works for a while.  Earlier this year, for example, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette donated dozens of Worcester City and House Directories to CityLab.  Just this week, the university library donated some de-accessioned reference materials that are relevant to the study of Central Mass.  A list of these combined resources will be posted here soon.  Meanwhile, initiatives to coordinate a...