Rob Koulish Web Page
photos: http://gallery.mac.c
Research, Teaching & Community Interests
I am an interdisciplinary and experiential political scientist, urban community activist, micro radio enthusiast and blogger.
I am also about to embark on a new professional endeavor as Associate Professor and Program Head of the new Law and Society Program at Philadelphia University.
Previously I was a college professor at Goucher College, where I explored the city of Baltimore through community-based teaching, learning and action research. You can read about my approach to community learning in an article I co-wrote with Marlynn May. The projects I was involved with included planning, starting, and supporting a local community school, after school programs, and a summer rites of passage program for young African-American boys 11-14. I also produced and cowrote a documentary about the danger of having a parole and probation office across from a local public elementary school.
I am also cofounder of a youth-based media and education collaborative called co-lab, and a micro-radio coalition called Baltimore Community Radio Coalition (BCRC), Inc. Co-lab houses local nonprofit organizations, and incubates nonprofit projects about youth, education and media. BCRC installs radio transmitters and antennas at local schools and non profits as well as a bare bones radio studio at the sites. All these projects aim to create and amplify community voices, neighborhood by neighborhood.
The bigger picture for me is that my community-based activities give me a chance to examine and participate in contested public spaces. My research has been eclectic but always comes back to the contested space that impedes the every day activities of marginalized people. In 2000-2001, I was lead investigator for a research project I designed in Hungary (2000-2001). I examined Roma (aka Gypsy) minority rights and self governance. My research was housed at the Budapest University Economic Sciences (BUES) and at the NGO Partners Hungary.
Before that I conducted research at the US-Mexican Border with immigrant victims of human rights abuses and political asylum applicants. I wrote a law review article in the NYU Review Law & Social Change documenting asylum applicant’s struggle against a byzantine immigration system. To help round out the immigration theme, I also wrote a book chapter about citizenship service-learning where immigrants teach college students about citizenship. Finally, I recently penned three recent pieces about the privatization of immigration control, in the Baltimore Sun, the online Monthly Review (zine), and a more extensive article focusing on privatization and the plenary powers and state action doctrines awaits publication in the Journal of Refugee and Migration Issues (JRMI).
My current research expands upon my interest in contested public space to focus on the privatization of public space and commercialization of public life. At the moment, I am examining the role that commercial speech plays in undermining and transforming public space.
