Undergrad Wins Inaugural P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale Research Grant
Undergraduate Daniela Hernandez has received the inaugural P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale Undergraduate Summer Research Grant in Social Policy for Children and Families.
Hernandez will use the support to produce a short documentary film looking at the impact of gentrification on three Latinx immigrant families who have lived in Chicago’s Bucktown neighborhood for three generations, and whose children attended Thomas Drummond Montessori Magnet School.
Her project, called “All in a Day’s Work Years in the Making Transforming Schools, (Re)Making,” will examine the role schools play in remaking urban space “in favor of whiteness” through interviews with local residents.
“Ultimately, my project will document the way gentrification has impacted 3 families’ experiences as racialized subjects in a neighborhood and its public school within an active process of removal and survival,” she wrote in her proposal.
Hernandez will use testimonios, or oral histories, a methodology traditionally used within Chicanx academic scholarship to outline experiences of marginalization through race, class, and education via oral and visual forms of expression.
“As white, middle class singles and families moved into the area, public schools have become key battlegrounds for community resistance,” she wrote in her proposal, referencing Eve Ewing’s work Ghosts in the Schoolyard. “Yet, scholars are only starting to explore connections between school resistance in the last decade.”
As a member of one of the few remaining Latinx families in Bucktown, Hernandez has direct, and immediate, contacts with families in the area. She plans to outline the students’ and families’ racialized experiences before, during, and after gentrification of Bucktown, and connect these experiences to their relationship to Drummond as families and former students.
Hernandez attended Drummond from 2002 until 2010, when she and her siblings transferred out. Before coming to Northwestern, she attended Nobel Street College Prep, a Chicago Public Charter school.
As part of her project, Hernandez will take the class “Filming in Pandemic Times” by Professor Eliva Mendoza, her faculty sponsor. “Her particular focus on racialization, space, schools, and students and families of color will shed light on the intimate experiences and nuanced practices of displacement,” Mendoza said.
The new Lindsay Chase-Lansdale research grant supports research in any discipline that examines societal issues that affect families and the development of children and youth, especially those who are economically disadvantaged. The grant provides a $3,500 stipend to cover living expenses for eight weeks of full-time independent research under the supervision of a faculty advisor.
Chase-Lansdale, a developmental psychologist, is the Frances Willard Professor of Human Development and Social Policy in the School of Education and Social Policy and faculty fellow at the Institute of Policy Research. She served in the Office of the Provost from 2013-2020, as vice provost for academics and earlier as associate provost for faculty.
Recently, Chase-Lansdale was named as vice chair of the Harvard Board of Overseers executive committee. Elected as an Overseer in 2016, Chase-Lansdale will serve in the board’s top leadership roles for the final year of her six-year term.
She is an expert on the interface between research and social policy for children and families. Her work addresses family and program strengths that lead to children's and parents’ positive social and educational outcomes in the context of economic hardship.