Glossary

Built Environment: The term built environment refers to the human-made surroundings that provide the setting for human activity, ranging in scale from buildings and parks or green space to neighborhoods and cities that can often include their supporting infrastructure, such as water supply or energy networks. Source: Science Direct

Centered Whiteness: This is any situation, but particularly conversations and decisions, in which the dominant white racial perspective is adopted as the default, as the norm, as objective when, in fact, the norm is a subjective position held by members of the dominant and/or majority white racial group. Anti-racist work in myriad contexts seeks to identify and understand these dominant, centered subjectivities—and, importantly, their effects in how systems are designed and implemented—and to acknowledge and include perspectives from outside the center, from the margins, that is, from marginalized groups.

Contact Zones: “Social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power”  (Pratt). For our purposes, think of contact zones as places or spaces of all sizes where people with different backgrounds, roles, interests, and levels of power must coexist, even if temporarily.

Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Ways of Reading, edited by David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005.

Formal Mechanisms (for coexisting in a contact zone): Established laws, policies, regulations, etc.

“Heart & Soul” Attributes: These are places, spaces, and ways of being that give a community its unique character. Think of these as those attributes that community members would want to preserve in the face of inevitable change.

You may remember that this concept emanates from the work of the Orton Family Foundation.

Informal Mechanisms (for coexisting in a contact zone): Shared understandings, social norms, and unspoken “rules” that govern human interactions.

Metaphor: 1. a figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance, as in “A mighty fortress is our God.” Compare mixed metaphor, simile.

2. something used, or regarded as being used, to represent something else; emblem; symbol.

         Here are some examples from COR 104 students:

         My bedroom is a park.

         My home is the spa.

         Finney Quad is a colosseum.

Ossipee is the feral cat that hunts the squirrels in the yard.

Natural Environment: For the purpose of this assignment, think of natural features that communities either work with or work around, such as mountains, hills, creeks, lakes, oceans, forests, etc.

Social Capital: As described by Putnam, features of social organization in a community, such as networks, norms, and social trust, that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit.

Putnam, Robert D. “Chapter One: Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.” New York Times, 25 June 2000.