Ph.D. candidate Jenny Lendrum earns dissertation award

The Sociology department congratulate Ph.D. candidate, Jenny Lendrum!

Ph.D. candidate Jenny Lendrum was recently awarded the 2018 Summer Dissertation Award from the Wayne State University Graduate School, which supports a summer-long period of full-time dissertation research.

The competitive Summer Dissertation Award is granted on an annual basis and is open only to advanced Ph.D. students.

In addition to the Summer Dissertation Award, Jenny's research has also received media attention at the local level from outlets such as Michigan Public Radio and the Detroit News; and at the national level from outlets like Bloomberg Business and National Public Radio.

Jenny's dissertation: Reconceptualizing getting by: the role of the neighborhood and social networks in Detroit.

"The purpose of this ethnography is to explore the changing social and economic landscape of one neighborhood of Detroit. The neighborhood becomes a case study by which we can begin to better understand the effects of spatial inequalities and intergenerational poverty resulting from austerity policies and omnipresent consequences of deindustrialization, urban disinvestment, and abandonment.

This research explores hidden economic activities and survival strategies utilized by residents in one Detroit neighborhood, Dtown. Residents of the neighborhood share their unique lived realities that reveal the ubiquity of alternative economies and the role of the city and neighborhood. Building proximate relationships through heterogeneous social networks becomes a lifeline of interconnectedness for exchange and survival strategies - to get by.

Relying on ethnographic data collected between 2014 - 2017 (participant observations, mapping, and 75 formal interviews), I report how families are surviving largely without cash, sharing their perceptions and everyday experiences. This dissertation is centered around the following research question: What does the informal economy look like in the context of urban America?

Thus, the study exposes strategies used to get by in an impoverished urban neighborhood like this one in Detroit. One goal of this study is to identify (less ephemeral, more sustainable) modes of activities and exchanges in similar neighborhoods."