The first event of the Winter quarter will be a kick-off gathering on Tuesday, January 22, 2013 in Social Sciences 401, where we will be having our meetings this quarter. Pizza will be served. We had an event like this last quarter, where students and faculty could discuss the directions they’d the workshop go, and we thought it was productive, so we’re doing it again. We’ll be starting presentations in the weeks to come, so look for a winter quarter schedule from us sometime early next week.In the meantime, if you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.

Jeffrey Parker (jnparker@uchicago.edu), Sociology Ph.D student, co-coordinator

Amy Khare (akhare@uchicago.edu), SSA Ph.D student, co-coordinator

Please join us in welcoming LaShandra P. Sullivan (PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology). 

Thursday, April 19

12:00-1:20
SS 122 from 12:00-1:20

Protest Camps and Agroindustrial Rurality-Urbanity in Brazil

Prior to democratization in 1988, Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1988) used explicit authoritarian violence to limit the terms for politics and economic organization.  In alliance with large landholders, the government favored a capital-intensive agro-industrial model in the countryside that displaced millions of rural inhabitants in favor of export-oriented monocrop production. In Mato Grosso do Sul particularly, the production of cattle, soy, and especially sugarcane for ethanol fuel drove massive urbanization and proletarianization. Today, former peasants and subsequent generations return to rural areas as day laborers, commuting back and forth from city peripheries to work for the agro-industrial firms that now dominate the countryside. My paper focuses on the land reform protest camps of indigenous Gurani people that dot rural roadsides and “occupy” plantations in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. The camps are a political tactic to gain state recognition of indigenous land rights.  Protest camps consist of people that have moved out of (or circulate between) cities, reservations, and rural work sites. Consisting of ramshackle, make-shift dwellings, these camps present another kind of return to the countryside, one in which people seek to reclaim the countryside as a site of political struggle. I argue that, importantly, these camps do not challenge the legitimacy of the state itself. Instead they both appear to breach politics-as-usual and conform with a form of politics in which “insurgency” operates within the frame for mainstream political action.  However, the camps become viewed as an offensive, potentially mortal threat to the political and economic order by undermining the seemingly settled organization of space.

Monday, January, 9 2012
12:00-1:20 in SS 302 *

Neighborhood effects on low-income families:

Long-term results from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment

The question of whether, how and why neighborhood environments influence the life chances of individuals and families has been of long-standing interest to social scientists. The main empirical challenge to answering this question arises from the fact that families typically have at least some degree of choice over where they live, which creates difficulties disentangling the effects of neighborhood environments from those of hard-to-measure individual and family level attributes associated with both residential location and other outcomes of interest. This talk will report on the new long-term findings from the HUD Moving to Opportunity (MTO) residential mobility experiment, which starting in 1994 randomly assigned public housing families the chance to use a housing voucher to move to a less distressed neighborhood. Outcomes come from in-person data collection in the domains of physical and mental health, employment, schooling, and delinquency, measured 10-15 years after random assignment.

* Please note earlier time and room change. 

Elizabeth Jefferis Terrien is a PhD student in Sociology.

Cultural Conditions of City Park Use

Cultural differences within communities have different policy implications for cities. This comparative case study of two neighborhoods in Los Angeles and two in Chicago, selected on the basis of their observed divergent dog ownership practices, is used to develop a grounded theory about dogs as cultural indicators and urban community identifiers.  Humans have cohabitated with domesticated dogs for millennia yet it is one of the most under-studied relationships in the social sciences.  Original research and analysis of over 100 in-depth interviews, 200 hours of site observation in the community and local parks, photographs, and periodicals theorizes about individual dog-caretaker relationships and situates them within a community of dog caretakers in urban neighborhoods, and then further situates them within the larger municipal authorities of the LA Department of Recreation and Parks, Chicago Park District, LA Animal Services, Chicago Animal Care and Control, political leaders, and police.  Misunderstandings of the relationships between recent Latino immigrants, African Americans, the homeless, and upper middle class owners and their dogs illustrate the impact of beliefs and feelings about dogs on modern urban life.

Amy Khare is a PhD student in the School of Social Service Administration.

Participation, deliberation, and decision-making: The dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in mixed-income developments

(Co-authored with Dr. Robert Chaskin and Dr. Mark Joseph)

Abstract: This paper explores the mechanisms, processes, and dynamics of participation and deliberation in three newly created, heterogeneous mixed-income communities being built on the footprint of former public housing developments in Chicago.  Our findings reflect enduring dilemmas about the challenge of democratic participation and representation for low-income citizens in the context of public housing reform efforts. Fundamental tension exists between two orientations to organizing participation, one that privileges “mainstreaming” public housing resident participation into market and civil society, and another that suggests the continuing need for separate mechanisms that maximize public housing resident representation.  In this paper, we frame the theoretical debates over the potential for establishing effective mechanisms to promote deliberative democracy at a neighborhood-level. We then explore how participatory mechanisms are viewed by key stakeholders, provide an overview of the participatory landscape, and examine how the organization of opportunities for deliberation and emerging patterns of participation shape dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in these contexts.  Based on these findings, we suggest implications for policy and governance initiatives aimed at promoting deliberative democracy at a neighborhood-level.

Please Note: This year’s last workshop will be held in PICK 016 instead of the regular Cobb 107!!

David Thore Gravesen is a PhD Student at the Department of Media, Cognition and Communication at the University of Copenhagen.

TITLE: Youth And Social Polarization: An urban sociological study of the life chances of Danish adolescents in 2010

ABSTRACT:

This paper is about a neighborhood study in Denmark – or to be more accurate; a three- neighborhoods study in Denmark. In this research project I look at three different neighborhoods in the city of Aarhus, the second largest city in Denmark. I use quantitative data1 as objective context variables, but consider my qualitative in-depth lifehistory interviews with 24 respondents from the three neighborhoods (8 respondents from each neighborhood) as my key empirical source. The three neighborhoods differ in key socio-economic characteristics such as income levels, educational levels, housing types and employment rates. One neighborhood is farely rich, one is considered poor and one is somewhere in between with internal variations on the selected variables.

On the basis of an empirically driven analysis, the paper argues, that young people’s educational and employment choices are affected by their experiences in their childhood neighborhoods. The key theoretical tool in this analysis is the concept of the habitus – the notion that new experiences are structured in accordance with past experiences.

I am in the process of writing my PhD-dissertation about neighborhood effects on young peoples educational choices and in this paper I will present some of the preliminary results from my work. To begin with, however, I will present my primary aims in the project, the so-called research questions and let the reader in on matters regarding my research design – that is the methods used in the research process and how those comply with the epistemological basis in the project.

Rick Moore is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Chicago.

TITLE: “Formal Cooperation Among Urban Congregations: The Council of Hyde Park Churches 1911-1933”

ABSTRACT:

The existence of religious coalitions calls into question some of the assumptions underlying how we study congregations, especially the common analytical focus on single independent congregations as the appropriate unit of analysis.  Religious coalitions, i.e. formal organizations comprised of religious organizations from diverse religious traditions, have been a feature of the American religious landscape throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries yet remain virtually ignored by sociologists.  A case study of a Protestant religious coalition in Chicago from 1911-1933 illustrates the impact of coalitions and their behavior.  This coalition worked to coordinate congregations’ activities on both a practical and symbolic level, served as an information clearing house and undertook multiple projects aimed at improving the group’s urban environment.  The effect of the coalition on members’ activities complicates sociology’s existing models of urban religious organization and suggests that researchers should be more attuned to the coordinated behavior of diverse religious groups.

Please join us in welcoming our distinguished guest speaker Erik Swyngedouw on on Wednesday April 20th, 3PM-4.15PM in Cobb 107.

Professor Erik Swyngedouw is Professor in Geography at the University of Manchester. Over the past two decades, he has published several books and over a hundred research papers in leading journals in the broader fields of political economy, political ecology, and urban theory and culture. His aim is to bring politically explicit yet theoretically and empirically grounded research that contributes to the practice of constructing a more genuinely humanising geography.

Major publications include Social Power and the Urbanisation of Water: Flows of Power. (2004) and Swyngedouw E, P Cooke, F Moulaert, O Weinstein, P Wells. Towards Global Localization. London: University College Press (1992). Edited books include Swyngedouw, E., F. Moulaert and A. Rodriguez. The Globalized City. Oxford: Oxford University Press, (2003), Swyngedouw, E., N. Heynen, M. Kaika. In the Nature of Cities. Routledge, (2006) and Swyngedouw, E, F Moulaert, F Martinelli and S Gonzalez. Can Neighbourhoods Save the City?. London: Routledge (2010).

At the City, Society and Space workshop, Professor Swyngedouw will present on:

“CITY or POLIS? Antinomies of the Post-Political and Post-Democratic City”

The extended abstract can be found here: Swyngedouw_Extended Abstract

Please join us in welcoming our distinguished guest speaker Harvey Molotch on Wednesday April 6th, 12PM-1.15PM in Stuart 101.

Harvey Molotch is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and Sociology at New York University. His areas of interest include urban development and political economy; the sociology of architecture, design, and consumption; environmental degradation; mechanisms of interactional inequalities. Major publications include Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (1987) and Where Stuff Comes From: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars, Computers and Many Other Things Come to Be as They Are (2003).

At the City, Society and Space workshop, Professor Molotch will present on:

“Default to Decency: Subways, Airports, and Other Sites of Ambiguous Danger”

ABSTRACT:

Paying close attention to both physical artifact and states of anxiety, Harvey Molotch examines how citizens and workers, in accomplishing their routine activities, help secure urban environments. He recommends, in light of contrasting efforts by authorities, specific (and material) policies that would provide more benign outcomes.