Gwen Prowse
COMMUNITY SAFETY
Interviewed by Miriam Neptune, BLAIS Interim Co-Dean and Director of Teaching, Learning, and Digital Scholarship
Gwen Prowse is a joint PhD candidate in the Departments of Political Science and African American Studies at Yale University. The focus of her research is grassroots mobilization in majority-Black cities. Her approach is multi-method and aims to involve community members in every step of the research process. She is also a co-PI (with Vesla Weaver and Tracey Meares) for the Portals Policing Project, which examines how police-citizen interactions shape political knowledge and political discourse in majority-Black communities in the United States.
About Gwen's project:
In the Portals Policing Project, we use new technology and civic infrastructure, Portals, to initiate conversations about policing in communities where these forms of state action are concentrated. The Portals Policing Project amassed over 850 conversations across 14 neighborhoods in six cities – the most extensive collection of first-hand accounts of policing to date. By doing so, learn about the lived experience of U.S. democracy through bottom-up, experiential accounts. Watch a video.