Below you can find the City, Society and Space Workshop schedule for the Spring 2011 Quarter:

April 6th (12PM-1.15PM, Stuart 101)

Harvey Molotch, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis/Sociology, New York University

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

April 20th (3PM-4.15PM, Cobb 107)

Erik Swyngedouw, Professor of Geography, University of Manchester

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

May 4th (3PM-4.15PM, Cobb 107)

Rick Moore, PhD student, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago

“Urban Religious Coalitions Re-examined: The Council of Hyde Park Churches 1911-1930”

May 18th (3PM-4.15PM, Cobb 107)

Naomi Bartz, PhD Candidate, Department of Human Development, University of Chicago

“The New Stigma of Public Housing Residents: Responding to Challenges to Social Image in Mixed Income Developments.”

June 1st (3PM-4.15PM, Cobb 107)

David Gravesen, PhD Student, PhD student, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen

“Youth and social polarization: An urban sociological study of the life chances of Danish adolescents in 2010”

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Please note that the regular meeting time this quarter will be from 3PM till 4.15PM (Cobb 107).

If you have any additional questions, please contact the student coordinator, Thomas Swerts (tswerts@uchicago.edu).

Eleonora Elguezabal is a PhD candidate in sociology, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales / Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris.

TITLE: “The Production of Urban Boundaries: Naming Conflicts, Property Management and the Division of Labor in the New Luxury and Secured Buildings in Buenos Aires”

ABSTRACT: This presentation is based on my research for my PhD dissertation at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France. My PhD dissertation explores the construction of urban boundaries at the crossroad of different social worlds. It discusses the dual-city theories by a double strategy: 1/Doing fieldwork in some places that symbolize the socially homogeneous upper-class constructed communities of equals, chiefly in fortified buildings in Buenos Aires (close to the American gated communities); 2/Approaching these places by focusing the fieldwork on their employees and their work -in order to study their relation to the urban and social space and to their employers, and also the way these buildings run. The aim of my research is to analyze the construction of urban boundaries and to reintroduce an approach in terms of domination in the study of an object that is most usually seen in terms of exclusion. My methodology is mainly ethnographical, completed by statistics and library methods. I will focus my presentation on the first part of my dissertation, which deals with the social construction of these fortified buildings in Buenos Aires as particular and distinctive objects or institutions. This construction of difference is a subject of dispute at the crossroad of different social worlds: architecture and urban politics, the hierarchy of residential models in the residential space, building management and unions. The aim of this first part is to draw up a symbolic plan of the city using these categorization conflicts as a source. By doing this, I show how the critical positions (especially the dominant scholarly approach) as well as the legitimizing positions towards these buildings tend to identify spatial with social boundaries, but the limits of the category distinguishing these buildings (called “torres” or “complejos”) are flexible according to the position of different actors and the result of the conflicts about them.

Julia Burdick-Will is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Chicago.

TITLE: “Violence and the Chicago Public Schools.”

ABSTRACT:

Recent research on neighborhoods and educational attainment suggests that exposure to frequent and unpredictable violence may be an important mechanism through which neighborhood residence influences adolescent academic achievement. Parents in unsafe neighborhoods are more likely to use restrictive and authoritarian parenting techniques that are associated with lower achievement and students experiencing fear and stress may be less able to concentrate in the classroom and more likely to act out.  At the same time, living in a violent neighborhood may reduce interpersonal and institutional trust in a way undermines students’ relationships with their peers and teachers, thereby reducing their emotional engagement in the schooling process. This presentation uses geographically detailed crime data along with administrative and survey data from the Consortium for Chicago School Research to estimate the average impact of short-term (semester to semester) changes in neighborhood violence on high school student academic outcomes as well as heterogeneity in that effect across different types of students, schools, neighborhoods.

Dear workshop attendees,

Starting next week, we will meet in Cobb 102 (12PM-1.15PM) instead of Stuart 101. Cobb 102 will be our new meeting place for the rest of the Winter quarter.

You can find details about Cobb Lecture Hall here: http://maps.uchicago.edu/mainquad/cobbhall.html

Below you can find the Winter schedule of the City, Society and Space Workshop. Like last quarter, we will meet on alternate Wednesdays (beginning on January 12th) from 12.00-13.15PM in Stuart 101.

More details on the presentations will be updated soon on this website soon.

January 12, 2011

Thomas Swerts, PhD student, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago

“Documenting non-citizen citizenship: The political participation of undocumented immigrants in Brussels and Chicago.”

January 26, 2011

Amanda Agan, Sarah Cattan, Christian Goldammer, and Gabriel Ulyssea, Department of Economics, University of Chicago

“Using MTO to open the black box of neighborhood effects.”

February 9, 2011

Neil Brenner, Professor of Sociology and Metropolitan Studies, Department of Sociology / Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University

“The urbanization question, or, the field formerly known as urban studies.”

February 23, 2011

Julia Burdick-Will, PhD student, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago

“Violence and the Chicago Public Schools.”

March 9, 2011

Eleonora Elguezabal, PhD candidate in sociology, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales / Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris

“The Production of Urban Boundaries: Naming Conflicts, Property Management and the Division of Labor in the New Luxury and Secured Buildings in Buenos Aires”

Please note that our regular session will be replaced by the following job talk. This presentation will not take place in Stuart 101, but inSS 305 (12PM-1PM).

TITLE: “Evolution of Racial and Ethnic Segregation: Pace and Place of Neighborhood Change”

Michael Bader is a scholar in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society

Scholars program at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan in the summer of 2009. In his research, he investigates why people live where they live, what they think about the places they live, and the consequences of living where they live. Answering these questions in urban areas is particularly interesting because of their potential to help explain the persistent racial inequality that we witness across metropolitan areas and to understand how housing policies and gentrification might affect these persistent inequalities. A significant part of his research has also involved developing methodological tools to help determine residential preferences, measure the reliability of data collection methods, and use spatial patterns to help measure characteristics of residents’ neighborhoods.

William Sites is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. His fields of interest include urban studies, community organization, politics, movements and social theory.

Rebecca Vonderlack-Navarro is a PhD Candidate in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago.

TITLE: “Tipping the Scale, Centering the City: Bi-National State Projects, Chicago’s Mexican Hometown Associations, and the 2006 Marches for U.S. Immigrant Rights”

ABSTRACT:

First-generation Mexican immigrant hometown associations (HTAs) in Chicago played a leadership role in the city’s 2006 marches for immigrant rights.  Employing a bi-national historical framework focused on the complex relationship between states and social movements, we have argued elsewhere (Sites and Vonderlack-Navarro, in process) that the recent involvement of these traditionally Mexico-focused HTAs in U.S.-oriented mobilization is best understood as the result of an evolving history of organizational responses to political projects undertaken by various state actors on both sides of the Mexico-U.S. border.  Building on this work, this paper takes up questions of scale and urban politics, examining how the broad range of state projects relevant to an understanding of HTA-related mobilization (such as the Mexican government’s longstanding diaspora-reincorporation efforts, the U.S. national-policy debates over immigration reform, and the recent Illinois state-governmental programs that court Mexican HTAs as attractive voting blocs) might be understood in relation to processes of state rescaling and urban governance that have accompanied neoliberal restructurings in both Mexico and the United States.  Although, like many other observers, we recognize the pivotal role of the Sensenbrenner legislation (U.S. House of Representatives bill 4437) in spurring the 2006 marches, we argue that a longer-term conferral of political legitimacy upon the Chicago HTA federations by state projects at multiple scales enabled the threat posed by Sensenbrenner to become a catalyst (rather than a deterrent) to popular mobilization.  We also suggest that a major consequence of the 2006 marches – the accelerated U.S. political incorporation of Chicago’s Mexican emigrant/immigrant community – can be understood as a significant “tipping” of scale, one in which urban-centered coalition-building and U.S. state/local interest-group politics have become the organizations’ newly privileged field of engagement.

Virginia Parks is an Associate Professor at the School of Social Service Administration.

Her fields of special interest include urban geography, urban labor markets, immigration, racial and gender inequality, residential segregation, and community organizing and development. She teaches courses at SSA in policy formulation and implementation and in community organizing and development

TITLE: “Trajectories of Wal-Mart Site Fight Campaigns: Making Sense of Regulatory Strategies from Below”

ABSTRACT: In response to growing wage inequality and stagnation of the federal minimum wage, why have social movement actors organized at the urban scale around different regulatory “solutions,” ranging from a variety of public living wage ordinances to privately negotiated community benefits agreements?  I develop a framework that explains regulatory and policy innovation among social movement actors as a tactic to maximize bargaining power by constraining or expanding the scope of conflict.  This approach emphasizes the scope of conflict, as conceived by Schattschneider, as a continuum bounded by opposing tendencies toward the privatization or socialization of conflict.  Using a comparative case study of community-labor economic justice campaigns (initiated by Wal-Mart site fights) in Los Angeles and Chicago, I show how this framework explains the emergence of seemingly disparate public and private regulatory innovations as organizing tactics to win collective benefits for union and non-union workers.  Though social movement actors frequently seek to expand the scope of conflict to offset their relative powerlessness, I show how they can sometimes maximize bargaining leverage by constraining, or privatizing, the scope of conflict in the short term.

The Workshop on City, Society and Space is back! Like last year, we will meet on alternate Wednesdays (beginning exceptionally on October 13) from 12.00-13.15PM in STUART 101.

Below, you can find the 2010 Fall schedule. More information on the presenters etcetera will be updated soon.

In case you would have any additional questions about the workshop, please contact the student coordinator of the workshop, Thomas Swerts at:  tswerts@uchicago.edu.

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FALL SCHEDULE 2010

Wednesday, October 13^, 2010

“Trajectories of Wal-Mart Site Fight Campaigns: Making Sense of Regulatory Strategies from Below”

Professor Virginia Parks, Associate Professor, School of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago

Wednesday, October 20^, 2010

“Making it Out Here; Understanding Mobility in a Suburban Affordable Housing Program”

Len Albright, PhD student, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

“Taxonomy Matters: Workers Centers and Conditions of Work in the Neoliberal City”

Jacob Leswniewski, PhD student, School of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

“Tipping the Scale, Centering the City: Bi-National State Projects, Chicago’s Mexican Hometown Associations, and the 2006 Marches for U.S. Immigrant Rights”

Professor William Sites, Associate Professor, School of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago

Rebecca Vonderlack-Navarro, PhD student, School of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

“The Policy Approach of Mixed-Income Development in Chicago and Vancouver – A Comparative Analysis.”

Naomi Bartz, PhD student, Department of Comparative Human Development,  University of Chicago