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Wednesday October 15th, 4:30-5:50 pm, Chad Broughton, Senior Lecturer in the Harris School of Public Policy Presents: “Padre Mike and the Rise of Reynosa, Tamaulipas”
Please join us for our first presentation of the year next Wednesday, October 15th in SS 401. Chad Broughton, Senior Lecturer in Public Policy Studies at Chicago, will be presenting his paper ‘Padre Mike and the Rise of Reynosa, Tamaulipas’.The abstract for the presentation is below and two chapters from his book Boom, Bust, Exodus: The Rust Belt, the Maquilas, and a Tale of Two Cities are attached. To facilitate constructive feedback, we ask that you try and read these before the talk. Food will be provided, we hope to see you there!
Abstract for Padre Mike and the Rise of Reynosa, Tamaulipas:
This article chronicles the rise of Reynosa, Tamaulipas, a border city on the fringes of American consciousness, and yet where much of the hemisphere’s stuff is made. The border boomtown—just across the Rio Grande from its sister city McAllen, Texas—is the consummate neoliberal city, a global production center where northern capital meets southern labor in the maquiladora. Texan Mike Allen, a priest-turned-power broker, almost single-handedly propelled this sleepy petroleum town into a frenetic, sprawling city that bustles with hard-laboring migrants and throbs with the energy of commerce, legal and illegal. Dubbed “Nafta Man” by Time for his savvy bilingual and bicultural deal-making, the story of Mike Allen and his organization, the McAllen Economic Development Corporation, offers a window into the dynamics of burgeoning second-tier cities that are absorbing the rural displaced. This account, based on historical and ethnographic research, explores the making and ethos of the brave new urban world at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Thursday May 8th, 4-5:20 pm, Alexandra Murphy, postdoctoral fellow at the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan Present: “When the Sidewalks End: Poverty in an African-American Suburb”
Hello all,
Please join us TODAY, May 8th (SS 302, 4:00-5:20pm) to hear Alexandra Murphy, postdoctoral fellow at the National Poverty Center at The University of Michigan, present her talk ‘When the Sidewalks End’. An abstract for the presentation and a short bio can be found below.
Food will be provided. Persons requiring special assistance or accommodation should contact btuohy@uchicago.edu. We hope to see you there!
Abstract:
The geography of poverty in the U.S. has changed dramatically. For the first time in American history, the suburbs are now home to the greatest share of people living in poverty. To date, we know little about the everyday lives of low income suburban residents or the community context in which they live. To fill this gap,Murphy moved into a Pittsburgh suburb experiencing rising poverty where she conducted 3.5 years of fieldwork among residents, community organizations, and the local government. Her talk “When the Sidewalks End” draws upon this fieldwork to examine how the social lives of low income residents are shaped by a built environment designed for middle class people with cars. She uses cuts to public transportation to illustrate a new form of isolation experienced by low income residents of the suburb and discusses the implications of this isolation for residents, the community, policy, and theories of social isolation that dominate studies of the urban poor.
Bio:
Alexandra K. Murphy is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan. She received her PhD in Sociology and Social Policy from Princeton University in 2012. Murphy’s research interests include ethnographic methods, urban sociology, poverty and inequality, race, organizations, and social policy. For the last few yearsMurphy has been drawing upon fieldwork methods to examine the everyday lives of poor people living in the suburbs as well as the organizational and political context of the suburbs in which they live. This work has resulted in articles published in City & Community, Sociological Forum, Social Science Quarterly, and The ANNALS. CurrentlyMurphy is drawing upon this fieldwork to write When the Sidewalks End: Poverty in an American Suburb (under contract with Oxford University Press). The book is based on three and a half years living in and studying one Pittsburgh suburb where poverty has been rising. This work has been featured in media outlets like The New York Times, Atlantic Cities,and Pittsburgh Tribune Review. Murphy is also co-editor, with Mitchell Duneier and Philip Kasinitz, of The Urban Ethnography Reader (Oxford University Press 2014).
Prof. Elijah Anderson, William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Sociology at Yale University to present at CSS Workshop Thursday, May 1st from 4-5:20 PM
Please join on Thursday May 1st, from 4-5:20 pm to discuss Prof. Elijah Anderson’s latest project,
“The Iconic Ghetto: A Reference Point for the New American Color Line.”
The talk will be held in Room 302 in the Social Sciences building, 1126 E. 59th St. Please contact Theresa Anasti at tanasti@uchicago.edu for an advance copy of the paper.
See below for Dr. Anderson’s bio:
Elijah Anderson is the William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Sociology at Yale University. He is widely considered one of the leading urban ethnographers in the United States. His publications include Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (1999), winner of the Komarovsky Award from the Eastern Sociological Society; Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community (1990), winner of the American Sociological Association’s Robert E. Park Award for the best published book in the area of Urban Sociology; and the classic sociological work, A Place on the Corner (1978; 2nd ed., 2003). Anderson’s most recent ethnographic work, The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life, was published by WW Norton in March 2012. Professor Anderson is the 2013 recipient of the prestigious Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award of the American Sociological Association. ProfessorAnderson’s research interests include inequality, race relations, urban ethnography, sociology of culture and crime, and social control.
Thursday, April 17th, from 4-5:20, Dr. Jessica Bishop-Royce, Methodologist at DePaul University, and Serpent Libertine Present: “Preliminary Results from the Erotic Labor Market Survey”
Hello all,
Please join us today, Thursday April 17th (4:00-5:20pm, SS 302) to hear Jessica Bishop-Royse, Senior Research Methodologist at DePaul University, and Serpent Libertine, sex worker activist, present their paper “Preliminary Results from the Erotic Market Labor Study”. A description of the project and a bio for our speaker is below.
Food will be provided. We hope to see you there!
Abstract:
Little is known about the extent of trafficking among persons involved in the exchange of sex for material gain. Media representations of erotic labor are inaccurate and sensationalistic, offering biased depictions of sex workers and their working conditions. While representations have been based on findings from methodologically weak research, they have been used to propagate narrow conceptualizations of sex work, sex workers, and their working conditions. Moreover, this attention has produced prohibitionist policies that increase the risk of negative outcomes for sex workers. We present findings from a pilot study that employs underutilized methodology to assess sex workers’ experiences with trafficking within the erotic labor market in the United States.
Jessica Bishop-Royse is the SSRC’s Senior Research Methodologist. She joined DePaul after completing a post-doctoral fellowship at the Florida State University College of Medicine. Her graduate work includes fieldwork in Malawi and internships/work experience with federal and state health agencies. She has also conducted program evaluations of county and state health programs. She earned her PhD in Sociology in 2010. Her dissertation examined the individual and community level characteristics associated with racial differences in cause-specific infant mortality. She has academic interest in: demography, health disparities, infant and maternal health, public health, methods, and statistics.
Serpent Libertine is a sex worker, activist, filmmaker, board member with Sex Workers Outreach Project-Chicago, former media team coordinator for the national sex worker organization Desiree Alliance, and created the sex worker-made media site Red Light District Chicago. She is part of the team behind the creation of the Adult Industry Truth and the Erotic Labor Market Survey.
Thursday, February 27th, from 3-4:20, Jeffrey Parker, PhD Student in Sociology, Presents: “Negotiating the space between avant-garde and ‘hip enough’: businesses and commercial gentrification in Wicker Park”
Please join us this upcoming Thursday, February 27th from 3:00-4:20pm in SS 401 to hear Jeffrey Parker, PhD Student in the Sociology Department at Chicago, present his paper “Negotiating the space between avant-garde and “hip enough”: businesses and commercial gentrification in Wicker Park”. Forest Gregg, PhD Student in the Sociology Department at Chicago, will be serving as the discussant.
Please note the time change for this week. We will be starting at 3:00pm.
Also, food (Pizza Capri!) will be provided. We hope to see you there!
Abstract: Gentrification literature has focused mostly on either growth machines pursuing profits or individual residents pursuing taste preferences, to the exclusion of the cultural intermediaries that connect these processes, particularly businesses. More recent research has begun to address this gap in the literature, but even those who focus on commercial gentrification tell only part of the story, neglecting the attitudes and decision-making of business-owners themselves and ignoring the diversity of businesses in gentrifying neighborhoods, instead focusing on a particular type—the independent store or boutique—identified with neighborhood change. This article attempts to contribute to this growing literature by exploring attitudes of business-owners themselves, and expanding the focus beyond just boutiques and independent businesses. Specifically, it uses the West Chicago neighborhood of Wicker Park to ask the question “Under what circumstances do business-owners and –managers come to embrace or repudiate gentrification in their neighborhood?” Business-owners and –managers support gentrification when they understand it primarily as an alternative to financial instability and repudiate gentrification when they understand it primarily as a disruptor of aesthetic stability. There is a common understanding of the neighborhood’s reputational hipness across respondents, but those who support gentrification tend to value this reputational hipness instrumentally (as something that could conceivably attract people to the neighborhood to shop), while those opposed to it tend to value it intrinsically (as something that makes the neighborhood worth being in).
Please contact Theresa Anasti at tanasti@uchicago.edu for an advance copy of the paper.
CSS Workshop CANCELLED Thursday, February 6th
Professor Greg Scott’s workshop for February 6th has been rescheduled for April 17th. Today’s workshop has been cancelled.
Burt Dit, Graduate Student in Sociology, presents “The Four Domains of Aggression and Violence” at City, Space and Society Workshop January 30th
Please join us on Thursday January 29th, in SS 401 from 4:00-5:20, to hear Burt Dit, advanced graduate student in sociology at the University of Chicago, present his paper: “The Four Domains of Aggression and Violence”.
Food and drink will be served.
Bethany Everett, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UIC to present at CSS workshop January 23rd
Please join us this Thursday, January 23rd (4:00-5:20pm, SS 401) to hear Bethany Everett, Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Illinois at Chicago, present her paper ‘Investigating Pathways to Teenage Pregnancy Among Sexual Minority Adolescents: Stigma Management and the Role of Place‘. Alida Bouris, assistant professor at the School of Social Service Administration, will serve as the discussant.
The abstract is below and her paper is attached. We hope to see you there!
Abstract:Previous research has found that sexual minority youth are more likely to report pregnancies during adolescence compared to their heterosexual counterparts. This paper investigates one mechanism linking sexual minority youth to increased teen pregnancy: attitudes about sex and pregnancy. Using Goffman’s Stigma Management Theory and Wave I of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (N=12,983) I employ latent class analysis and OLS regression to investigate both the role of the social environment (e.g. urban, percent college graduates in neighborhood, percent Republican voters) on sexual minority adolescents’ attitudes about sex and pregnancy. Sexual minority girls are more likely to report positive attitudes and diminished negative attitudes about teen pregnancy compared to heterosexual girls. Sexual minority boys report less positive attitudes about sex and pregnancy than heterosexual boys. The results also show that the social environment exerts a strong influence on attitudes about sex and pregnancy and moderates the relationship between sexual minority status and attitudes about sex and pregnancy.
Please contact Theresa Anasti at tanasti@uchicago.edu for an advance copy of the paper.
Jolyon Ticer-Wurr Presents “Linking Routines Beyond Dover: Overcrowding and the Consolidation of a White-Ethnic and Hispanic Mayoral Coalition”
Please join us on January 16th from 4:00-5:20 for the first CSS meeting of the quarter! PhD Candidate Jolyon Ticer-Wurr will present a dissertation chapter entitled: “Linking Routines Beyond Dover: Overcrowding and the Consolidation of a White-Ethnic and Hispanic Mayoral Coalition”.
The meeting will take place in SS 401. Food will be served.