Recent issi_fwp items

Radio, Sound, Time: The Occupation of Alcatraz Through an Indigenous Sound Studies Framework

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

While a large and growing body of literature has investigated the relationship between music and social movements in the U.S., few scholars focus on the role that radio and music played during the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz by the Indians of All Tribes. Analyzing thirty-nine episodes from the Pacifica archive of Radio Free Alcatraz, alongside interviews conducted with organizers, participants, and performers associated with the occupation, as well as field work at contemporary Sunrise Gatherings on Alcatraz Island, this paper examines the relationship between radio, sound, music, humor, and political activism emanating from the 1969 occupation. I argue that the sounds of Alcatraz—including the radio broadcasts—carry the lessons of the past into the present and future and assert sonic sovereignty. This sonic continuity serves as both a memory and a guide for future Indigenous movements, challenging settler-colonial norms by maintaining a connection to land, ancestors,...

Urban Oil Afterlives: Reckoning with Risk and Responsibility in the Los Angeles City Oil Field

Mon, 9 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

For over a century, Los Angeles (LA) has been the site for the extraction, refining, and consumption of vast quantities of petroleum. Yet as active drilling wanes, as land becomes increasingly scarce, and as affordable housing shortages reach record levels, cities must confront the legacies of oil production. In Vista Hermosa, a neighborhood a mile north of downtown LA, residents have sought to decommission hundreds of wells in one oil reservoir, the “LA City Field.” According to residents, the wells buried alongside their homes, schools, and parks are dangerous despite not producing oil for decades. Law co-produces urban infrastructures like oil wells, and with those infrastructures, new kinds of uncertainty and risk. This article analyzes the foundational role of law in creating this legacy of deserted urban oil wells; the work of residents to make visible Vista Hermosa’s petroleum past; and the effects of rapid real estate development in the neighborhood.

Predicting Suicidal Ideation among Native American High Schoolers in California

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Suicide is the leading cause of non-accidental death for Native American young people ages 15-24 years old. Concerningly, suicide rates have continued to rise over the past decade despite a myriad of prevention efforts. This shortcoming has urged some scholars to (re)examine key theoretical constructs to better direct suicide prevention efforts in tribal communities. Using Indigenous Wholistic Theory, an algorithmic approach was employed to identify a broader set of factors that may influence suicidal ideation among Native American high schoolers in California (n = 2,609). Lasso penalized regression was used to select the most accurate predictors of suicidal ideation. Ten out of the 17 input predictors were significant including: depressive symptoms; school-based victimization; sexual and gender minority status; lifetime use of alcohol, vapes, and cannabis; breakfast consumption; access to alcohol and other drugs; and parent education level. The study found that a combination...

Trapped in Our Origin Stories: Interrogating the Ideologies of ESL Citizenship Classrooms

Wed, 21 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines the ideological conceptions of language and literacy practices in an adult, English as a Second Language (ESL) citizenship class for naturalization. Naturalization refers to the process for obtaining U.S citizenship undergone by lawful permanent residents after meeting extensive federal requirements. I situate neoliberalism within settler-colonial, anti-Black logics, and I define neoliberal citizens through language and economic ideologies. By privileging ESL citizenship students’ perspectives, this paper shows how the ESL citizenship classroom, like others, continues to embrace reductive notions of functionality through English-only instruction. I trace how students take up these neoliberal ideologies through performative belonging and performative othering as well as the ways students deviate from these values and the possibilities therein.

Neighborhood Institutions and Well-being: Youth Perspectives from East Oakland

Thu, 25 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A growing body of literature suggests that the neighborhoods that young people live in have a substantial influence on their lives. As part of this work, researchers have begun to investigate the relationship between young people and local neighborhood institutions such as schools, libraries, grocery stores and youth centers. Engagement with these local institutions has been observed to strengthen youth well-being. Often, this area of research relies on the perspectives of adults and neglects youth experience. This is problematic, given that young people have a great deal of choice and autonomy when selecting neighborhood institutions to engage. Thus, this phenomenological qualitative pilot study highlights youth voice and lived experiences to explore which neighborhood institutions are important to young people and begins to unpack the ways institutional engagement influences well-being. I conducted semi-structured interviews with ten young people between the ages of 14 and 20...

Age-friendly as Tranquilo Ambiente: How Socio-Cultural Perspectives Shape the Lived Environment of Latinx Older Adults

Thu, 4 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Background and Objectives

Researchers have increasingly considered the importance of age-friendly communities to improve the health and well-being of older adults. Studies have primarily focused on the built environment, such as community infrastructure, older adult behavior, and environmental expectations. Less is known about the role of cultural characteristics in shaping perceptions of age-friendly environments, especially among racial and ethnic minorities.

Research Design and Methods

Using an ethnographic methodological approach, including participant observation in a Latinx community near New York City and 72 semi-structured interviews, this study examines how older Latinxs characterize age-friendly communities.

Results

Latinx older adults described their community as age-friendly by way of the concept Tranquilo Ambiente, translated as calm or peaceful...

The Paradox of Colorblind: Private Nonprofit Hospital Community Benefit Investments and the Social Determinants of Health

Tue, 2 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Nonprofit hospitals are required to provide “community benefits,” although this term and the associated levels of spending are not clearly defined. Over 75% of private nonprofit hospital community benefits are allocated to providing medical services for those who cannot afford care, and fewer investments are made to address structural and social determinants of health (SDOH). In particular, this spending is rarely used to redress racial inequities that shape health. In addition to spending on charity care and medical services, some private nonprofit hospitals invest in non-medical strategies to improve health outcomes. In California, private nonprofit hospitals report $12 billion in annual community benefits that include spending on non-medical strategies intended to improve health promoting conditions for vulnerable populations. This comparative case study analyzes data from organizational documents, interviews, and media communications to examine how hospital community investments...

Envisioning “Loving Care” in Impermanent Healing Spaces: Sacred and Political Organizing Towards Decolonial Health/Care in Oakland, California

Fri, 15 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This paper explores a self-determined space of health and healing centering ancestral, traditional, and Indigenous medicine and spiritual practices. While ancestral, traditional, and Indigenous (ATI) medicine overlaps with what is conventionally recognized as “alternative” medicine, what sets ATI apart in this work is the political orientation of the Oakland-based Healing Clinic Collective (HCC) and its network of ATI practitioners. Their political orientation and motivation for community organizing begins from practicing and promoting ATI healing modalities to address the impact of interrelated generational experiences shaped by institutional legacies of colonization vis a vis racial capitalism, eurocentrism, and white supremacy. I use a transdisciplinary and decolonial framework to analyze the HCC’s “ceremonial organizing” model and show how the HCC clinic space offers expansive conceptions of what counts as health, healing, and care at the level of community health. I also...

Beyond the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Social Death and the Relationship Between School and Incarceration

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The school-to-prison pipeline is perhaps the most well-known current framework for understanding the relationships between school and incarceration, but the prolific use of this pipeline metaphor is problematic. It tends to omit or obfuscate more complex understandings of the hows and whys adolescents end up incarcerated. Challenging the school-to-prison pipeline narrative is an important precursor to examining the complex factors that lead to and perpetuate youth incarceration, as well as developing solutions for addressing it. This paper first critiques the school-to-prison pipeline narrative. It then offers a way to reimagine how we can think of adolescent criminalization in terms of another metaphor, that of social death, which refers to the systematic criminalization and dehumanization of entire groups of people. Based on an interview study with twenty-nine adults who were first incarcerated as adolescents, this paper uses case studies of three Black and three Latino male...

“Made for Your Benefit”: Prohibition, Protection, and Refusal on Tohono O’odham, 1912-1933

Fri, 23 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In this paper I examine the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ campaign to suppress liquor-use in Tohono O’odham, a federally recognized tribe whose homelands include southern Arizona, in the early 20^th century. Finding purchase in scholarship on Indian-citizenship and governmental power, I adumbrate the BIA’s liquor suppression program as it invoked the language of protection while actively seeking to police, punish, and incarcerate Native people. I argue that “protection” and criminalization were not only interrelated and coordinated, but also part and parcel of the BIA’s project to incorporate Native people as would-be citizens and political agents.

Based on archival research and organized chronologically, this paper touches upon Arizona state prohibition (1915) and national prohibition (1920). It reveals the racialized and paternalistic logics of the BIA that led to the late creation of the Papago reservation (1916), and it examines the ways that the BIA’s...

Enclosure-Occupations: Contested Productions of Green Space & the Paradoxes within Oakland, California’s Green City

Mon, 12 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Burger Boogaloo is an annual rock concert that has taken place in Mosswood Park since 2013. Every year a portion of the park is gated and closed off to the general public. Events like Burger Boogaloo are representative of a growing entertainment industry using public parks to cater to a new influx of wealthy residents in Oakland and beyond. At the same time, Mosswood Park has struggled with homeless encampments which impact park use; it is emblematic of a city and state experiencing an increase in unsheltered (homeless) residents as a result of a housing crisis. Based on observations, interviews, public meetings, and municipal documents, this work examines how residents are negotiating the realities and the pitfalls of Oakland’s transition to becoming a green city and its implementation of an urban environmental/sustainable agenda during an accompanying volatile gentrification process. This study focuses on a small but highly used green space that is crucial to the local community...

Pediatric Cancer, Racial Formation, and the Existential Weight of Anti-Blackness

Wed, 8 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This paper is based on an ethnographic case study drawn from 16 months of fieldwork with families and young people going through cancer diagnosis and treatment in Oakland, California. The paper explores the intersection of cancer patienthood and racial formation, emphasizing the entanglement of biogenetic and sociogenetic processes. The paper shows how, as cancer-inflicted bodies move through the world, they are subjected to sociohistorically produced racial classifications that can be deployed in destructive, humiliating, and stress-inducing ways. Yet racialization can also occur in a more affirming, supportive, and resistant register—for example, through participation in community-based cancer advocacy efforts. The paper emphasizes three points of intersection between cancer patienthood and racial formation: 1) the racialization of oncologically transformed bodies; 2) the racialization of attempts to raise cancer awareness; and 3) the racialization of the expression of negative...

The Neoliberalization of Latino Men and Boys: Power and Resistance in a School-based Mentorship Program

Fri, 3 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A growing number of school district and community programs are seeking to remedy the achievement gap experienced by Latino boys through Latino male mentorship programs. Indicative of neoliberal shifts in Latinx education, these programs often involve public-private partnerships and assume a damaged Latino boy in need of technocratic and innovative solutions, rather than structural changes. Through an ethnographic case study of one Latino male mentorship program in an urban school district in California, this study explores the ways the administrative power of Latino male programming constructs the ideal Latino male subject through neoliberal values of individualism, excellence and earning potential, and pushes boys to be the future hetero-patriarchs of their community. Furthermore, based on in-depth interviews with the mentors and boys of the program, as well as one year of participant observations, this paper uncovers the ways these discourses are lived, embodied, and/or resisted...

Surveying the Reservoir: Public Records and the Archival Logics of the Oroville Dam

Thu, 19 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Heavy flooding and forced emergency evacuations of over 180,000 local residents in February 2017 drew national attention to California’s aging and structurally damaged Oroville Dam. As a centerpiece of California’s six-hundred-mile State Water Project, the Oroville Dam plays a significant role in water allocation throughout the state. While recent media coverage highlights how infrastructural damage and bureaucratic delays to the dam’s federal relicensing process have cast a shadow of uncertainty over the dam’s future, considerably less has been said about the controversies surrounding the Oroville Dam’s planning and construction, and how that history continues to shape and impact the present. A particularly neglected aspect is the dam’s continued role in disrupting the lifeways of California’s indigenous Konkow Maidu communities and displacing Konkow Maidu people from a significant portion of their ancestral territory. By engaging in a historical analysis of the Oroville Dam’s...

Race and Class in the News: How the Media Portrays Gentrification

Mon, 23 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Whether it is affordable housing, health insurance, or crime, how a social problem is associated with race and class contributes to how the general public and policymakers respond to it. The media both informs and reinforces readers’ perceptions about what happens when social processes like gentrification take place, who is affected, and whether this type of change is positive or negative. Media representations can thus influence public perception, policy framing, and local policies around urban development. This paper uses articles published between 1990 and 2014 in two San Francisco newspapers to document how the process of gentrification is described. Using text analysis and qualitative coding, I find that race and class pervade reporting on gentrification in San Francisco. Gentrification was presented as a process by which the middle-class and whites move into predominantly black and low-income neighborhoods, even though the process of gentrification in San Francisco...

Scaling a “Bite-Sized Implementation Strategy”: Promoting Educational Equity and Social Justice through a Farm to School Food Program

Tue, 28 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

While the farm to school movement has been growing since the 1990s, it was officially incorporated into federal child nutrition programs through the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFKA) of 2010. In 2013, the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) received a $100K farm to school grant via the HHFKA to pilot “California Thursdays” (CT). CT was developed through a partnership between the Center for Ecoliteracy (CEL) and OUSD to increase students’ access to local, fresh, and healthy school meals procured entirely from California. As of January 2017, through the efforts of and leadership provided by CEL, CT has been implemented across 84 districts in California, which together serve over one-third of the one billion school meals distributed in the state each year. CT is an excellent demonstration of the agency of local level actors to respond with innovative action to implement federal policy. The network of CT schools is using farm to school food programs to address a primary goal...

Engaging in Security Work: Selective Disclosure in Friendships of Korean and Mexican Undocumented Young Adults

Mon, 6 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

While much of the literature on undocumented immigrants has focused on employment and education outcomes, we know little about the effects of their precarious legal status on interpersonal relationships. Based on interviews with 50 Korean and Mexican undocumented young adults, I find that, regardless of ethnoracial background, undocumented immigrants approach relationships cautiously, engaging in "security work" to protect themselves and their loved ones. Security work is a negotiated process of interpersonal interaction and status disclosure consisting of specific relational conditions to maximize affective and material security. First, shared immigrant background provides a baseline sense of comfort and safety. Respondents find symbolic belonging with those of immigrant descent, while exercising caution around anyone who is white. However, due to the stigma of undocumented status, both structural homophily and experiential homophily operate in determining disclosure patterns. Co-immigrant...

Staging the Hackathon: Codeworlds and Code Work in México

Thu, 12 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork between 2013 and 2016, this paper investigates emerging forms of hacking and entrepreneurial development in Mexico. I show how research participants attend hackathons and hone their coding skills at co-working spaces in Mexico City and in Xalapa, as they hack away to build solidarity and find the “coding bliss,” the affective dimension one encounters when creating beautiful code. As hacker-entrepreneurs tease out the tensions between self-making and being-made, they fill an overarching neoliberal agenda with substance, meaning, and materiality. For young people in Mexico, “hacking” emerges as a way to make sense of their future livelihoods in a precarious state and economy, as a way to exist in a system where things just don’t seem to work, and as a way to let the “code work” intervene in narratives that have only delivered false hopes. As hackathons continue to proliferate across the globe, I conclude by examining how the underlying logics of...

More than Mental Disorder: Toward a Situated Understanding of Recidivism and Risk

Thu, 24 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Individuals with serious mental disorder diagnoses (SMD) are grossly overrepresented in jails and prisons, returning to custody more often and more quickly than their non-diagnosed counterparts. This paper delineates two distinct approaches to understanding how these individuals enter carceral revolving doors, one which views them as criminalized patients and one which views them as high risk/need offenders, arguing each is limited in its ability to explain how individuals with SMD come to be carcerally involved and presents results from a qualitative pilot study (n=24) to narrow this gap. The study inductively builds from the experiences of carcerally-involved individuals with SMD, asking: what are the events and circumstances precipitating arrest and how do they contribute to carceral involvement? The paper takes a first step toward an alternative, participant-informed framework for understanding the overrepresentation of individuals with SMD. Results indicate...

Unsettling Domesticity: Native Women Challenging U.S. Indian Policy in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1911-1931

Mon, 19 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines the ways Native women domestic workers negotiated and challenged – in subtle and overt ways – the Bay Area Outing Program. First, I examine federal Indian policy that paved the way for “outing” and illuminate the connections between outing, Allotment and Indian boarding schools. To this end, I historicize both the national and local forms of outing while revealing the gendered, settler colonial effects of this imposing domestic institution. To provide a point of comparison, I consider other forms of domestic service performed at the time, including those found in Americanization programs of the early twentieth century. Second, I elucidate the contours of the Bay Area Outing Program, describing its official operation and process while highlighting the policing and surveillance of Native women in the program. I then analyze Native women’s resistance in fighting for commensurate wages and fighting Indian child removal. My final section, informed by early 20^th-...

The Triple Bottom Line and Wastewater Planning in San Francisco: A Tool for Environmental Justice?

Tue, 28 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Wastewater planning adversely impacts disadvantaged communities in many U.S. cities. Utilities use Triple Bottom Line (TBL) tools to try to achieve sustainability goals, but these plans often fall short in their pursuit of social justice. This paper shows the process, potential, and limitations of a TBL approach for environmental justice using the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission’s wastewater plan as a case study. It finds that ongoing wariness about how planners use the TBL is merited: use of the tool does not necessarily lead to social justice. Yet actors did use the ideal of sustainability as a strategic opportunity to pursue equity goals.

Narratives of Interdependence and Independence: The Role of Social Class and Family Relationships in Where High-Achieving Students Apply to College

Thu, 22 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Research demonstrates that social class shapes where high-achieving students apply to college. Based on 45 in-depth interviews with high-achieving students in the Bay Area, I find that higher-SES students are more likely to apply to out-of-state public and private universities, especially liberal arts and Ivy League colleges. I argue that the upbringing and experiences associated with students’ social classes shape their narratives regarding how much autonomy or constraints they perceive in making decisions about their choices of college. In discussing their upbringing and their future, higher-SES students present a narrative of independence about what they have done to prepare themselves for college and where to apply. In contrast, lower-SES students speak of experiences and considerations that reflect a narrative of interdependence between themselves and their parents that is grounded in the mutual concern they have for one another as the prospect of college looms. As a result,...

Unity out of Adversity: Non-Profit Organizations’ Collaborative Strategies to Serve Immigrants in Bay Area Suburbs

Mon, 15 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In recent years, the geography of poverty has significantly shifted from an urban to a suburban setting, and the populations living in the poorer suburbs are increasingly racially diverse, including many who are first generation immigrants. However, within suburban communities, non-profit organizations (NPOs) combatting poverty are working from an infrastructure that is less robust than that of large cities. The weaker NPO infrastructure in suburbs is particularly troubling given that NPOs are now largely responsible for the delivery of social services, including immigration legal aid for a growing foreign-born population. The combination of these trends raises the questions: How does funding and staff capacity differ across urban and suburban legal aid NPOs? How do differences in social service infrastructure influence the strategies legal aid NPOs use to accomplish their mission? I examine this question through interviews with staff at legal aid NPOs and multi-service...

Making Public Participation Meaningful: Assessing Twenty-Five Years of Community Strategies for Environmental Justice in Kettleman City, CA

Wed, 20 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

For the past 45 years, state and federal laws have required government agencies to include the public in the permitting process of facilities that could have a potentially negative impact on human health. Although public participation is a legal requirement, not all participation processes are created equally. Meaningful public participation is more than a legal requirement; it is a way for community residents to engage with government agencies to ensure a fair and inclusive process. While the requirement of public participation is in itself a change for communities once marginalized from permitting decisions, many residents are unable to participate meaningfully.

Here the rural and unincorporated community of Kettleman City, California, is used as a case study for examining community strategies for meaningful participation in permitting decisions. This study relies on planning and legal documents, participant observations of recent public meetings, and in-depth...

Defining Racial Equity in Chicago’s Segregated Schools: The Complicated Legacy of Desegregation Reform for Urban Education Policy

Mon, 25 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The bold strategies of urban education reform over the past twenty years appear to most scholars and commentators as an abrupt political revolution, breaking from the established status quo of public education governance by embracing privatization, school choice, and the test-based accountability of schools and educators. Focusing on the high-profile case of the Chicago Public Schools, this paper interrogates this historical narrative by investigating less explicit moments of policy innovation that preceded the contemporary period of sweeping legislative reform. In Chicago, and across the nation, certain programs and policy reforms currently associated with school choice were first established in the name of racial desegregation. This institutional and discursive analysis of Chicago’s Student Desegregation Plan of the 1980’s asks how the initial expansion of choice-oriented programs both anticipates the policy logics and framework of contemporary neoliberal reform and paves the...

Dancing the Carceral Creep: The Anti-Domestic Violence Movement and the Paradoxical Pursuit of Criminalization, 1973 - 1986

Tue, 13 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The criminalization of violence against women over the past forty years represents both social movement success and the paradoxical alignment of feminism with increasingly punitive carceral policies. This historical analysis of the shifting social movement field during its formative years from 1973 to 1986 refutes dominant social movement paradigms for understanding social movement cooptation and demobilization. The research interrogates the processes and mechanisms of contestation between social movement and the criminal justice system and, more broadly, relationships between civil society and the state. A closer focus at the historical construction of the anti-domestic violence social movement field during this period reveals the ways that the very dynamics of contestatory success generate the conditions for an expanding carceral state, eventually resulting in blurred boundaries between civil society and the state and the domination of the field by criminal justice institutions...

Between Two Worlds: Hmong Youth, Culture, and Socio-Structural Barriers to Integration

Wed, 16 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Studies on the children of post 1965 immigrants recognize that there are various paths to incorporation due to race and class barriers and suggest that a strong adherence to traditional immigrant culture and values helps contemporary immigrants achieve integration. These studies acknowledge that there is not a single core culture of American society into which these immigrants are assimilating. The concept of segmented assimilation has been used to suggest that the process of assimilation is not as linear, simple or inevitable as classical assimilation suggests. Despite its important contribution to the theoretical debates on immigrant integration, segmented assimilation continues to use a cultural argument, suggesting that immigrant culture can explain and account for immigrant integration. Regardless of whether immigrant culture is present to buffer and mediate youth behaviors, some youth still take a path toward downward assimilation due to race, class and gender barriers....

Social Justice Healing Practitioners: Testimonios of Transformative Praxis and Hope

Thu, 27 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Based on the testimonios of 16 social justice healing practitioners from the greater San Francisco Bay Area, this article examines the principles and practices guiding their healing praxis when working with urban youth of color, particularly of Chican@/Latin@ background. I identify social justice healing practitioners as community educators who center healing and social justice when engaging youth in transformative social change. As a methodological tool, testimonios provide great insights into the life experiences and reflexivity of these community educators. By explicitly making a commitment to restoring and renewing young people’s social well-being, as well as their own, these practitioners promote more holistic practices that are inclusive of young people’s mind, body, and spirit. Social justice healing practitioners seek to facilitate healing spaces that provide a context for young people to reconceptualize individual challenges as a politicized...

Constructions of Maltreatment: Child Exposure to Domestic Violence and Its Penalization in California Law

Tue, 3 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Social constructionists argue that human behaviors or conditions only become social problems when they are recognized, labeled, and action is taken against them by a group of people or society. While domestic violence or intimate partner violence has been recognized as a social problem since the 1970s, only recently has child exposure to domestic violence received similar recognition. Through review of changes made to California Law between 1995-2013, policy statements, and case law, this article examines how child exposure to domestic violence is recognized, labeled and acted upon in law, and argues that the recent penal response to child exposure to domestic violence in California Law signals a conceptual shift in what acts and omissions constitute child maltreatment and an expansion of the existing child protection legal framework.

Am I My Brother's Keeper?: The Contested Role of African American Churches in Community Development

Fri, 12 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In the age of mega-churches with sprawling campuses whose locations are determined by the presence of an abundance of land, not a historic connection to a particular community, many church leaders have a relatively expansive interpretation of their “community”, often coupled with an inward focus on their ministerial obligations. This perspective contrasts with the expectations of many community leaders that envision an outwardly focused, localized outreach model for churches. This tension is further complicated by the increasing size of churches and the emergence of a relatively new religious doctrine that emphasizes individual efforts and material gain, possibly leading churches to adopt even more insular activities, pulling them further away from the model desired by many community leaders. While local communities may be in more need of the assistance of area churches, churches are increasingly not in need of them. Through a series of interviews, participant observation, and...

The Threat from Within: American Jews, the State of Israel, and Intermarriage

Fri, 31 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This paper investigates how dominant American Jewish organizations seek to construct a collective Jewish identity that focuses on and advocates for the state of Israel. While the state of Israel has long been at the center of Jewish collective identity, there has been increasing fragmentation among American Jews with regard to Israel over the last several years. It is within this shifting, unstable dynamic that the dominant Jewish organizations cultivate Jewish collectivity, explicitly constructing American Jews’ attachment to Israel as inextricable from collective Jewish identity. For this reason, data for this paper comes primarily from ethnographic research on the representation of Israel in normative Jewish spaces in the Bay Area. Dominant Jewish organizations, the membership of which constitutes the elite leadership of American Jews, view the loss of Israel-centered collective identity among American Jews as posing an existential threat to Israel, and they link the loss of...

Asian Youth and Race-Making in an Urban School: The Institution and its Power

Tue, 26 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Drawing from interview and participant observation data collected during an ethnographic study of Asian students and race in a multiracial urban school, I examine the school’s role in the racial construction and academic and social positioning of Asian students vis-à-vis Black and Latino students. I analyze the subjective categories and racial paradigms through which adult members of the school community understood minority students as normatively differentiated racial subjects. I also examine the school’s role in giving material structure to racial categories through formal and informal practices that reinforced racial stereotypes, social divisions, and academic disparities. Overwhelmingly, I found that teachers and staff simultaneously utilized a color-blind discourse that denied the significance of race in shaping school life and advanced dual tropes of the Asian model minority and Black and Brown oppositional and/or deficient minority. Despite purporting ideals of color-blind...

Mass Transit Workers, Urban Publics, and the Politics of Time in San Francisco

Wed, 30 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

San Francisco’s public transportation system is the slowest major urban transit system in the United States and has one of the worst on-time performance rates. This paper examines how these problems with time—slowness and lateness—are constructed in public discourse and mobilized in labor disputes with the drivers who operate the transit system. Demands for faster moving and more timely transit lead to the implementation and enforcement of impossible-to-meet schedules, and political economic logics configure fault for the time problems in the work practices and work ethics of the transit drivers. Disputes about the transit system’s slow speeds and lateness intensify political opposition between public workers and the publics they serve, and reveal shifting conceptions of the public good. I argue that morally infused understandings of time and timeliness enable a neoliberal remaking of the transit system, its workers, and its publics.

The 'Bitch Tape': How Male Batterers Find The Woman in the State

Wed, 11 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Women’s experiences have been the nucleus of domestic violence literature, discourse, and policy, and have shaped the therapeutic and/or punitive measures that are characteristic of domestic violence prevention – measures that research has shown are largely ineffective in curbing violence. Consequently, we still know relatively little about why men batter, and how they make sense of the negative “batterer” credential that corresponds with their offense. The few studies that explore batterer behavior are primarily psychological, reducing their violence to individual pathology that can be “treated” in therapy. Accordingly, non-psychological studies are characterized by evaluations of the utility, effectiveness, and/or therapeutic techniques of Batterer Intervention Programs, thus missing thesociologicalroots of batterer behavior. Drawing from in-depth interviews with 15 male batterers, my research shows that these men make sense of the offenses of which they have been accused in...

Municipal Parks: An Environmental Justice Analysis of Conditions and Use in the San Francisco East Bay

Tue, 27 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Municipal parks with similar design features are found in cities and towns throughout the United States. As public commons, they reveal a great deal about social values, norms, and power. This study utilizes an environmental justice framework and a modified System for Observing Play and Recreation in Communities method to evaluate park conditions and usage. Forty-seven parks, most less than seven acres in size, located in census tracts reporting populations at or above the California averages for Asian, African American, or American Indian residents in the cities of Richmond, Berkeley, and Oakland, California were visited at various times throughout the day and week. Observations confirmed previous studies that found predominantly sedentary uses with limited variety. Among adult and teen park users, there were fewer women than men, which also corresponded with previous studies in other cities. Most parks had low levels of use considering the population density of the surrounding...

The Power and Promise of Culture in Economic Development: Drawing on Language for Healing, Nation Building, Sovereignty, and Development Practices in the Hoopa Nation

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines language, language programs, and language projects to explore their power and potential for informing, guiding, and improving economic development efforts in the Hoopa Nation of Northern California. Studies have shown that when economic development projects conflict with cultural norms and values, they have either limited success, struggle to remain viable, or simply fail. Despite the crucial role that culture plays in economic development on reservations, scholars have developed neither the theory nor the research to help tribes, practitioners, foundation staff, and policymakers understand and manage the relationship between culture and economic development in order to pursue culturally sustainable projects. This article attempts to fill this gap by offering a new approach for understanding the key role of culture, as well as the power and potential of culture for shaping viable and broadly supported development projects and practices. This study examines...

Spatial Politics in Metropolitan Miami, 1980-1992: Cuban American Crisis, Community Development and Empowerment

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In this paper I examine the urban history of Cuban American empowerment in metropolitan Miami from 1980 to 1992 through the concept of “spatial politics” – the use of space by urban communities to claim government control. By combining archival research, GIS mappings, visual documentation, and interviews with retired metropolitan planners and community development specialists, I consider how Cuban Americans engaged in performative, discursive, electoral, planning-oriented, and allied activities over three stages – crisis, community development, and empowerment – which resulted in the transformation of Miami’s political status quo. Metropolitan planners contributed to this spatial politics by producing demographic data that facilitated the development of a Cuban American community development system, which in turn engaged public policy, economic development and housing. These provisions led to the concentration of ethnic bloc voting and the election of Cuban American leadership...

Education in Disguise: Sanctioning Sexuality in Elementary School Halloween Celebrations

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Given the pervasive silence that surrounds sexuality in elementary schools,Halloween provides a rare opportunity to explore its tangible manifestations. Schools sanction overt displays of sexuality and transgressions of certain school norms on this day. A time of celebration, it is perceived as a festive event for children, innocent and fun. Yet, because Halloween is the one school day where sexuality is on display, sexuality literally becomes a spectacle. Halloween serves as a magnifying glass to examine the operation of sexuality in the institution of elementary schools, illuminating a nexus of attendant relationships—social, economic, political, and cultural. These relationships lie buried beneath the veneer of fun and play that is popularly imagined as integral to the holiday. Drawing from ethnographic data collected over the 2010-2011 school year, I explore how processes of citizen creation through schooling are abetted by the U.S. consumer market, which strategically targets...

From Combat to College: Student Veterans in Academic 'Contact Zones'

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In the current all-volunteer U.S. military, many low-income recruits enlist primarily for educational benefits. Yet many veterans encounter serious difficulties in transitions to civilian schools and do not graduate. While extensive research explores methods of military training and the effects of military service on socio-economic outcomes for veterans, little has been written about ways disjunctures between military and civilian pedagogies and culture shape veterans in civilian school settings. Using Lave’s analysis of situated learning and Pratt’s notion of ‘contact zones,’ this paper explores identities and practices of U.S. veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as they re-enter community colleges and university classrooms.In-depth interviews, classroom observation and analysis of everyday discourse of veteran support organizations show disjunctures between soldiers’ lived reality and the discursive constructions of ‘warrior/hero’, ‘baby-killer’ and ‘student.’ As they...

Local Political Context and the Puzzle of Asian American Under-participation in Electoral Politics

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In spite of having relatively high levels of educational and occupational attainment and income, and having the highest rates of naturalization among immigrant populations, Asian Americans have the lowest rates of electoral participation of any racialized group in the United States. This paradoxical combination defies both traditional political science theories of political engagement, which emphasize socioeconomic determinants of participation, and conventional sociological theories of assimilation, which view political integration as occurring in step with socioeconomic integration. In this paper, I argue that local-level political-contextual conditions are an important contributor to Asian American under-participation in electoral politics. In particular, I reveal that while there are substantial differences in the net size of the Asian-white voter registration gap across states, even more dramatic differences exist across counties within the same state. I further demonstrate...

Explaining Support for Radical Right Parties in New Democracies: The Limits of Structural Determinants and the Potentiality of Civil Society

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Europe has undergone a “Right turn” in politics over the last three decades, as evidenced by the continued success of radical right parties in Western European countries. Early studies of Western European radical right parties examined country level sociostructural factors for explaining variation in electoral support of radical right parties, but studies left unanswered if the same aggregate level factors are sufficient for explaining different levels of support that radical right parties secure outside of Western Europe. This paper builds upon the early studies of Western European radical right parties to examine whether structural factors – low economic growth, high unemployment, and high ethnic heterogeneity – are associated with high electoral support for radical right parties in the Central Eastern European EU member states from 1990 to 2010. The findings show that these factors are associated with support for radical right parties in some countries but not others. The paper...

Contested Nationalism: Ethnic Identity and State Power in the Republic of Vietnam, 1954-1963

Tue, 3 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The conventional scholarship depicts noncommunist nationalism in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam, 1954-1963) as weak or inauthentic, especially when compared to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV, or North Vietnam). But such arguments assume that Vietnamese nationalism was singular and unitary. This essay reinterprets wartime nationalism by proposing the concept of contested nationalism. Specifically, it examines how the Republican government combined anticommunism with Vietnamese cultural identity in its cultural policy. Geography education, new cultural institutions, and historical preservation helped promoted the RVN as the exclusive embodiment of Vietnamese culture and challenged the DRV’s legitimacy.

Explaining Support for Punitive Crime Policy: Race, Social Context, and Voting Behavior

Mon, 5 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

By treating criminal justice ballot propositions as race-implicit policies that disproportionately harm racial minorities, this article explores the hypothesis that a change in social context increases support for punitive criminal justice policies. To do so, it draws on insights from two related specifications of Social Identity Theory: Racial Threat Hypothesis and Contact Theory. The analysis offers two methodological innovations: first, it uses longitudinal rather than cross-sectional data to more precisely capture the effect of individuals’ experience; second, it draws upon a broader conceptualization of social context that includes not only racial composition of a county, but SES and education. The primary finding is that change in income and education levels by race/ethnicity and county-level political affiliation are significant predictors of support for race-implicit policies. The article concludes with a proposal for a mid-range theory of political behavior that takes...

Black Moms and “White Motherhood Society”: African-American Middle-Class Mothers’ Perspectives on Work, Family and Identity

Fri, 7 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

African-American middle-class mothers have historically been structurally, culturally, and economically excluded from the practices related to hegemonic frameworks of mothering and parenting that have been described and critiqued by family and work life scholars. Collectively these frameworks make three theoretical assumptions: 1) mothers are principally responsible for raising children, 2) working outside of the home conflicts with being a mother and 3) middle-class mothers share beliefs about how to best raise children. Based on interviews with sixty African-American middle-class mothers, I highlight how the experience of mothering is influenced by racially situated identities, ideologies and practices. My findings challenge the view of motherhood as an exclusive endeavor and highlight that working is intrinsically linked to what it means to be a mother in the African-American community. These beliefs about mothering are also accompanied by psychological and tangible...

Redevelopment and the Politics of Place in Bayview-Hunters Point

Tue, 2 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Bayview-Hunters Point, a neighborhood in southeastern San Francisco, has played a central role in San Francisco’s urban growth and its tradition of progressive social movements, and it has occupied a key site within broader regional and global geographies of people and power. In the 1960s, as the area became a predominantly African-American neighborhood, dominant representations increasingly depicted Bayview-Hunters Point as separate and distinct from the rest of the city, usually articulated through cultural or racial differences. These representations emerged even as Bayview-Hunters Point residents began building strong political organizations that struggled with city agencies to improve the neighborhood. Today’s redevelopment discourse builds on these older racialized ideas of Bayview-Hunters Point through the notion that the area needs to be culturally or socially integrated with the rest of the city. This discourse affects the redevelopment process in terms of what kinds...

Intimacy, Manipulation, and the Maintenance of Social Boundaries at San Quentin Prison

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

San Quentin is an infamous prison in US history, the subject of myths, cautionary tales, and cable network specials. And yet ask the men living inside its walls, and they will insist San Quentin is the best place to do time in California. Beginning in the mid-1990s, San Quentin’s gates were opened to volunteers from the San Francisco Bay Area interested in providing educational and therapeutic programs. The implementation of these programs disrupted the routines and norms governing social relations within San Quentin and provided a rich window into the daily operation of the prison as it responds to pressure. In this paper, I identify and analyze three narratives which surface in the official discourse used by institutional actors to describe the prison environment and compare these narratives with observations of daily life behind San Quentin’s walls. Ultimately, I argue that in contrast to popular portrayals of prisons, which depict prisoners and officers as locked in depraved...

Marketing Whiteness: Geographies of Colorblind Liberalism

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines how liberal, upper middle-class homeowners in the San Francisco Bay Area racially define and defend their neighborhoods. Based on an ethnographic study of neighborhood organizing over a one-year period, I show how homeowners simultaneously protect their identity as non-racist, liberal and open and act to exclude racial “others” through a gendered logic of caring for community. They are able to do so, I argue, only because their neighborhood is segregated, allowing them to use geographical references as a stand-in for race. Thus they are able to simultaneously critique (sometimes quite vociferously) those who target particular racial groups, while unproblematically identifying problems such as violence and sexual predation with particular geographies—geographies that are highly racialized. A localized conception of inclusive citizenship, rooted in the defense and nurturance of children, allows these exclusionary actions to be justified as not only “not...

Hijacked Identities: Silicon Valley Pakistanis and Tactics of Belonging

Wed, 9 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

In this paper, I ask how Pakistanis have been interpreting and responding to the post-9/11 construction of Muslim identities, or more broadly, how a transnational community responds when it has been marked as hostile. Looking primarily at two Pakistani community organizations in the technology region known as Silicon Valley in Northern California, I seek to answer this question with evidence from document analysis, participant observation, and in-depth interviews. I argue that the bright boundaries that exclude Pakistanis from acceptance, and which categorize them as a suspicious other, have been a catalyst for community identity construction and management. If assimilation is the decline of an ethnic distinction and its corollary cultural and social differences, then the examination of the ways by which an excluded community seeks to belong can help expose the boundaries of membership that a state erects against immigrant communities. Through such an examination, I have...

After Foreclosure: The Displacement Crisis and the Social and Spatial Reproduction of Inequality

Thu, 9 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The current foreclosure crisis has led to large-scale displacement of former homeowners and their families. From 2005-2010, this crisis has produced a wave of displacement, which still shows little sign of slowing, and is predicted to continue until 2012. Research shows that those who have been the most heavily impacted by foreclosure are people of color, homeowners with low educational attainment, the elderly, and women homeowners. This paper engages the foreclosure and displacement literatures and discusses five pilot interviews to examine the ways in which households have been impacted, at the level of the individual and the household. While the popular press and academic literature have focused on the impacts of foreclosures on the financial and mortgage industries, the impacts of foreclosure and displacement on families and neighborhoods continue to be profound and are silently undermining stability and producing deep social uncertainty. The literature on displacement...

The Long Road from Babylon to Brentwood: Crisis and Restructuring in the San Francisco Bay Area

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Communities on the fringes of the American metropolis – exurbs, or exurbia – have recently garnered attention as the centers of the foreclosure crisis and its aftermath. On the one hand, this attention to the urban nature of the crisis is welcome, as the metamorphosis of the mortgage fiasco into a financial crisis cum global economic meltdown turned popular attention away from the urban roots of this calamity. But this emphasis on the exurbs as the site of crisis lends itself to the misconception that they are the sole source of crisis, rather than the restructuring of the metropolis as a whole. Using a mixture of ethnography, history and journalism, this paper weaves together the story of how the San Francisco Bay Area was restructured over the course of the past thirty years in a way that produced not only a new map of urban and exurban segregation, but the roots of the crisis itself. Working across multiple scales, it examines how three interwoven factors – demographics,...

“The Silence Itself is Enough of a Statement”: Unintended Consequences of Silence as an Awareness-Raising Strategy

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The strategy of silence for voice, as seen in the Day of Silence, deploys silence in order to draw attention to the ways in which an individual or group has been silenced and to establish possibilities for voice. The Day of Silence is a nation-wide day of action aimed at addressing anti-LGBTQ bias and harassment in schools. This ethnographic study of a high school gay-straight alliance (GSA) club examines the unintended consequences of silence as an awareness-raising strategy during events related to the Day of Silence and how students and teachers handle these consequences. Silence makes students more defenseless in the face of verbal harassment, makes it more difficult to engage in discussion with others of opposing views, and makes it more challenging for teachers to lead their classes and for students to learn. What remains unheard at MacArthur High are the institutional silences LGBTQ students experience when they find themselves not represented in the curricula and...

Putting Culture Back in Context: A Context Dependent Model of How Cultural Inputs, Toolkits, and Meanings Influence Action

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

In this article I outline a new framework for the sociological study of culture that relates three fundamental facets of human culture (inputs, toolkits, and meanings) to each other and suggests the contingencies under which each can influence action. Sociological theories of culture typically pitch these facets as opposing perspectives of “what culture is.” I argue that while each perspective answers a necessary part of the theoretical puzzle linking culture and action, existing models are not sufficient as standalone answers. Even the more theoretically nuanced attempts at integrating multiple elements of culture tend to argue that one particular aspect of culture provides the most powerful link to action a priori. The empirical inadequacies of each perspective as a stand-alone theory of “how culture affects action” are accounted for by the failure of theorists from each perspective to fully recognize and integrate the other elements of culture, as well as the concrete contingencies...

At the Day Labor Hiring Zone: The Politics of Immigrant Illegality and the Regulation Of Informal Labor

Wed, 7 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork and media analysis of anti-day laborer mobilizations, this paper explores the discourse surrounding the “problem of day laborers” which represents jornaleros as a sort of contaminant of street corners and the visible embodiment of immigrant illegality. I argue that such a discourse has lived material effects that translate into a myriad of constraints on day laborers’ relations of production and other aspects of their lives—ultimately limiting their ability to navigate different geographical and socio-economic scales. In this paper I present two different approaches for solving “the problem” posed by day laborers: 1) a punitive anti-immigrant tactic and 2) a more caring, progressive, pro-immigrant method. Contrary to many studies that argue that undocumented workers are in the shadows of the state, I interrogate different state-sponsored projects that seek to shape the conduct of illegal immigrants through practices of spatial discipline,...

The Urban "Half": Resituating the History of Urban Relocation and Public Education

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Through a “three pronged” termination policy, including the termination of tribal sovereignty, cultures and lands, the U.S. federal government sought to finally end the trust relationship it held with Native Americans. While both the termination of Native Nations and Public Law 280 assaulted the sovereignty of Native Nations, it was the relocation program that would finally force Native individuals to be active participants in the capitalist system. By the time the relocation program was brought to Oakland, California, in 1956, the city was undergoing drastic demographic and population shifts, which would have a major impact on the opportunities available to the relocation program participants. Like the reservations, the flatland neighborhoods of Oakland were both economically and politically controlled from the outside, rendering them a virtual colony of the larger city. Thus, rather than advance their economic or political status, as the actions of the Relocation Office...

"How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?": The Gifts of the Deviant in Education, Society, and Epistemological (R)Evolution

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Despite the theoretical elegance and strong explanatory power of decolonial theory, its implications for pedagogy remain to be developed. Oriented by a question posed by Du Bois in 1897, “how does it feel to be a problem?,” I provide the reader with a history of both compulsory education and the juvenile justice system in the United States paying particular attention to the ways in which these systems have helped to (re)produce and re-form the deviant problem. I then examine how European projects of conquest and colonization have informed schooling practices throughout the world that naturalize relationships organized around domination and help to recreate deviant bodies. Finally, I present the reader with what several decolonial theorists have identified as the “decolonial gift,” namely emancipative orientations developed by collectivities positioned as problem people. In thinking through how this gift can serve as an ethical grounding for pedagogy, I offer suggestions...

Parenting in Poverty and the Politics of Commitment: Promoting Marriage for Poor Families through Relationship Education

Wed, 2 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The federal government has recently taken an unprecedented role in actively promoting marriage through social policies to address family instability and poverty in America. In 1996, Congress overhauled welfare policy to encourage work and marriage as routes to economic self-sufficiency for poor American families. This policy focus eventually led to the creation of the federal Healthy Marriage Initiative, a program that primarily funds relationship skills classes to promote marriage. Using ethnographic data from a community-based marriage education program for poor parents funded through a healthy marriage grant, I analyze how government-sponsored relationships skills classes intended to promote marriage tailor their messages for poor families. In doing so, this study addresses a broader sociological question: how does policy co-opt and transform ideas about love, family, and interpersonal commitment in the service of a particular political agenda? Moreover, how do parents accept,...

Social Movements and the Journalistic Field: A Multi-Institutional Approach to Tactical Dominance in the LGBT Movement

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Social movements typically consist of several diverse organizations, with each using subtly different tactics to advance a similar, but not equivalent, vision of social change. The landscape of powerful social institutions in which a movement is situated affects which tactics become dominant among these organizations (and thus, within the movement) and which tactics are sidelined, discredited, or not even considered. The mainstream media is one example of a social institution that may have such a constitutive effect on social movements. When the mainstream news media – conceptualized here as a journalistic field – produce more substantial coverage of a given movement tactic, they may increase the tactic’s legitimacy, permitting organizations that perform the tactic to occupy a more dominant position within the movement. In this paper, I analyze media coverage of LGBT movement activity in a sample of mainstream newspapers from 1985-2008 to examine whether, in its coverage...

Migrant Remittances and the Mexican State: An emergent transnational development model?

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

While economic migration from Mexico to the United States has a long history, the recent expansion of the remittance economy driven by migration is causing rapid transformation of both the built environment and society in rural Mexico. Many Hometown Associations (HTAs)—or clubs that represent a particular hometown in Mexico—collectively finance public buildings in small Mexican villages. Recognizing this major source of funding for development, the Mexican federal government created the Tres Por Uno (3x1) program in 2001. In this program, migrant remittances sent through clubs in the U.S. are multiplied by municipal, state, and federal Mexican funds for regional development. 3x1 and HTAs are strategically linked, as 3x1 both motivates migrant organization in the U.S. and incites the Mexican government to act on behalf of rural Mexico. On the surface, this relationship appears to be beneficial to both parties, as migrants receive support for building projects and the Mexican...

Hegemony, Ideology & Oppositional Consciousness: Undocumented Youth and the Personal-Political Struggle for Educational Justice

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Social movement practitioners have grappled for years with the role that ideology and consciousness play in bringing about social change. This article asks how lived experiences of institutional exclusion shape the political consciousness of undocumented Latino students. Through my ethnographic study of undocumented youth activists working on a mainstream legislative campaign, I posit that not only is oppositional consciousness a spectrum, as previous theorists have claimed, but it is also, in a Gramscian sense, forged out of the dialectic between ideas that are both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic. It is not the case that counter-hegemonic ideas win over, even temporarily, leading to oppositional consciousness. Rather, oppositional consciousness is forged through the constant negotiation between the two. This article draws on 18 months of fieldwork and is a critical inquiry into the possibilities and limitations of ideas and ideology in building social change.

The Performance of Property: Suburban Homeownership as a Claim to Citizenship for Filipinos in Daly City

Wed, 3 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Contrary to much of the literature on immigrant homeownership, I argue that the comparatively high rate of homeownership amongst Filipinos, coupled with their tendency to live in suburbs, can only be partially explained as an attempt to create and accumulate capital and assimilate within the dominant fabric of American culture. More often, Filipinos utilize homeownership as a way of performing citizenship and signaling their belonging in the U.S. nation. I argue that the idea of the “America Dream” and the liberal meanings constituting property ownership, produces a cultural logic through which Filipinos attempt to claim full-citizenship in the U.S. Through in-depth interviews of Filipino realtors and their clients operating and settling in the Californian suburb of Daly City, I describe how middle-class enactments, such as investments in the American Dream and the production and consumption of status, together reflect strategies that Filipinos utilize in order to navigate...

Out of the Shadows: Undocumented Latino College Students

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This paper analyzes how “undocumented” students make sense of school, schooling, and their social standing in the U.S. Based on two years of ethnographic research with 20 undocumented Mexican immigrant college students in California, this study examines the factors that have led these students to abandon their state of “social invisibility” and participate in higher education. The study finds that undocumented students decide to seek a higher education in an attempt to improve their chances for upward social mobility and incorporation into mainstream U.S society. They also see schools as safety zones and schooling as a mechanism of assimilation. This paper further explores how segmented assimilation theory can be utilized to understand the processes by which these students’ assimilate into mainstream U.S society. Lastly, the paper considers how assimilation theory can be expanded to better understand and depict the divergent paths of immigrant incorporation in the U.S.

Risky Business: Sex-work and Young Southeast Asian American Women in Oakland

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

This paper seeks to analyze why many young Southeast Asian American women in Oakland, California, are going into sex-work. I investigate the cultural and social factors that contribute to their popularity as sex-workers, as well as examine the existing structural problems that have led them to sex-work. I also begin to illuminate how these young Southeast Asian American women understand their own reasons for going into sex-work. The number of minors entering sex-work continues to increase, globally, nationally and locally, yet past and current literature tend to overlook the unique problems that exist at the local level that are tempting young women into sex-work. Research on young women and sex-work has identified sexual abuse, drug use and homelessness as risk factors that often lead minors into sex-work, but these risk factors do not apply to the population of young SEA American women in Oakland. Through studying this population who have been in or are at risk of entering...

From Industrial Garden to Food Desert: Unearthing the Root Structure of Urban Agriculture in Oakland, California

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

In this paper, I use a framework of urban political ecology to explore the rise of urban agriculture (UA) in Oakland, California. As part of a growing effort to reduce its “ecological footprint” and to guarantee access to nutritious food for the urban poor, the City of Oakland has recently embraced a goal of sourcing 30 percent of its food locally, a modest amount of which should come from UA. Many of these small gardens and farms are to be located in so-called “food deserts,” low-income areas far from supermarkets, in the Oakland flatlands in order to provide access to fresh food as well as ecological and culinary knowledge to participants and customers. Recent critiques of some food justice initiatives, including urban garden programs, have argued that such projects are neoliberal in nature, emphasizing entrepreneurialism and self-betterment while filling in gaps left by the rolling back of the state. In this paper, I argue that a macro-level structural analysis of Oakland’s...

Making Space for Urban Girls: A Politics of Geography and Gender

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

This paper presents a multi-year case study of an after-school literacy initiative at an inner city high school. In order to understand the lived experiences and practices of urban girls, this study explores how African American girls, in particular, navigate public and private spaces of their everyday worlds. Spatial limitations, institutional pressures, and teens’ subjectivities shaped an extracurricular literacy program, built on a theoretical framework of participatory research and youth-led digital media production. By considering the politics of after-school programming and the landscape of urban contexts, I problematize programs such as Girlspace, as well as complicate understandings of youth literacies, geography, and participatory research. This paper argues that for youth development programs to succeed, the complexity of socio-cultural and spatial realities facing urban girls-- as well as their perspectives-- must be understood.

Negotiating With Agency: Towards an Intersectional Understanding of Violence and Resilience in Young Southeast Asian Men

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Research regarding Southeast Asian youth violence often employs a risk and protective factors framework, portraying such behavior as a problem of maladaptation. However, violence also holds meaning for the youth who experience it. Cultural and gender theorists posit that violence is a tool young people use to construct their gender and racial identities. As adolescence is a key period of identity formation, understanding youths’ constructions of their gender and racial identities may inform more appropriate violence prevention strategies. As part of a research team, I conducted focus groups and semi-structured individual interviews with a diverse group (n=21) of young Southeast Asian men ages 13-17 recruited from a community clinic for Asian youth. Interviews elicited the role violence plays in their understanding of what it means for them to be both Southeast Asian and young men. Data were analyzed using a grounded theory approach. My findings document that violence...

Creating Social Change Through a Two-way Immersion Program: La Escuelita's Efforts to Foster Spanish/English Bilingualism

Wed, 4 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

A substantial academic literature suggests that public schools are failing to provide an effective educational program for language minority students. This paper presents an ethnographic study of an independent charter school, “La Escuelita,” which was built by educators and community members who sought alternative educational resources and programs for their Latino children. This study demonstrates how communities as a whole can use schools as foundations upon which to create meaningful social change. By using a Two-Way (Dual Language) Immersion program, which fosters and maintains students’ native languages while teaching students English, the school encouraged student and parent participation in cultural and political events that empowered the entire community and made learning a social activity.

The Program Officer: Negotiating the Politics of Philanthropy

Wed, 28 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

As a part of a larger study on the relationship between private philanthropy and farmworker organizing and community development across California’s Central Valley, this paper concentrates on the central role of the foundation program officer in negotiating the process of grant making. The work of the program officer is revealed as both containing and opening up spaces for addressing political and economic inequity. It is argued that the work of the foundation program officer often limits the approach of granted organizations through professional processes and program frameworks that make poor people responsible for their own betterment while excluding the economic relationships that created the situations the programs seek to ameliorate. Yet findings also point to the role of the program officer as one of significant risk taking and advocacy during non-movement times. Data was gathered through in-depth interviews with foundation program officers, consultants, and grantees,...

Childhood Obesity Among Children of Mexican Descent: A Binational Approach

Thu, 3 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The prevalence of childhood obesity has increased dramatically in the United States over the past 30 years, especially among children of Mexican origin. Children of Mexican origin are an especially high-risk group because of their increased risk for morbidities associated with obesity in adulthood, such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and uncontrolled hypertension compared to other racial and ethnic groups. This study takes a binational approach to understanding the health disparity in obesity among children of Mexican descent by examining the acculturation hypothesis as well as the factors associated with children’s weight status in Mexico. Two cross-sectional samples of 5-year-old children from California and Mexico were designed to compare predictors of obesity. The California sample included 287 children from a longitudinal birth cohort. Mexican children were 316 participants in a study designed to capture a sample similar to the California sample. Equivalent recruitment...

Stuck Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Explanations of Employment Change Among African American Women in the Postindustrial Era

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Although the opportunity structure for African Americans has improved since the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s and 1970s, African American female workers still predominantly occupy jobs offering low wages with no job security. This paper begins to examine the reasons for this stagnation by offering a comprehensive review of scholarship on the employment histories of African American women in the postindustrial era. Using Census data and other historical evidence, I argue that mainstream research on the structure of employment opportunities open to African American women is inadequate. Social-cultural sociologists have spent too much time blaming workers for their employment outcomes, while ignoring the historical and institutional factors that shape these outcomes. At the same time, structural approaches in this literature only hint at the important roles firms play in creating inequality and reducing mobility, and they stop short of exploring how these...

Perceived Social Status and Adolescent Health and Risk Behaviors: A Systematic Review

Thu, 4 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Although the inverse graded relationship between social class and infant, child, and adult health is well established, this gradient is inconsistent and understudied among adolescents. The empirical inquiry into health inequalities among adolescents is of particular significance because health in adulthood is strongly influenced by early life circumstances. Current research suggests that social stratification as reflected by subjective social status may be an important determinant of adolescents’ health independent of traditional objective social class indicators. The following article is a systematic review of the subjective social class-adolescent behavior and health relationship. It highlights the known dimensions of subjective social position and health, and the large gaps in the scientific understanding of the determinants of adolescent health. Suggested future research directions are discussed.

Looking Beyond the Blighted Surface: The Gaze of Redevelopment and the Immigrants' Milieu

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

This working paper traces a historical contestation between the immigrants’ milieu and the gaze of redevelopment. A central theme within that history has been the constant effort to target and implement revitalization programs in immigrant neighborhoods. As Central Business District (CBD) elites seek to capitalize on regenerative low-income areas, low-income immigrant neighborhoods have had to struggle for the maintenance and survival of their communities. These immigrant ethnic neighborhoods, however, possess a rich mixture of social, economic, political, and cultural capital (“the immigrants’ milieu”) which both attracts the “gaze” of redevelopment and offers potential resources for the neighborhoods’ survival. The contestation has greatly influenced the field of city planning during three time periods: the mid-19th century, as planning emerged as a profession; the 1960’s, as city planners embarked upon a new wave of urban renewal projects; and today, as cities revitalize...

From Public Housing to Regulated Public Environments: The Redevelopment of San Francisco’s Public Housing

Tue, 7 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Contemporary approaches to concentrated poverty assume intractable ghettos and a dying urban core. In the meantime, welfare reform and gentrification have given rise to new systems of poverty management and new spatial arrangements of poverty within U.S. metropolitan areas. The public housing revitalization program known as HOPE VI (Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere) provides an opportunity to explore these developments. In the ideal, HOPE VI solves the problem of dense, isolated, crime-ridden projects that house only the most poor by replacing them with new communities that are more attractive, more integrated with their surroundings, and more mixed—both in terms of income and race. This paper argues that HOPE VI is a program of urban redevelopment and poverty management that is firmly rooted in the ideology and goals of welfare reform. Using San Francisco as a case study, it examines the institutional and spatial changes embedded in the city’s HOPE VI process. San...

Confronting the Procedural Fix: How Community Coalitions for Economic Justice Utilize City Planning Expertise to Support Community Benefits Campaigns

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

This paper investigates the use of planning expertise by two community benefits campaigns to advance their equity agendas. Due to criticism over the way in which redevelopment planning has been undertaken, a series of reforms aimed at controlling the development approval and permitting process has been enacted over the past thirty-five years. These reforms – which I refer to as the procedural fix – are aimed at controlling debate and making the process more predictable for developers. The Community Benefits Agreement is a tool community activists use to extract redistributive benefits directly from capital. City planning expertise is helpful, if not necessary, for negotiating the procedural fix. Because the procedural fix is composed of reforms with legal consequences, the type of strategy a particular campaign chooses to use has consequences for how the planning expertise is used to negotiate the fix. The story of these two campaigns demonstrates that the type of strategy...

Violent Design: People’s Park, Architectural Modernism and Urban Renewal

Fri, 11 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The events surrounding the 1969 struggle over People’s Park in Berkeley, California were among the most violent confrontations of the 1960s era. Typically, these events are seen as an episode of increased student radicalism and the anti-Vietnam war movement. Instead, this paper argues that conflict over competing visions of urban space was at the center of the People’s Park violence. The park movement was a reaction to the University’s plan to raze existing older housing in order to expand the campus, build modernist high-rise residential towers, and pursue a joint urban renewal program with the city. Park supporters, which included many design professors and students, drew on emergent new paradigms in planning and architecture. The park became an inspirational test case for theories of community-based development in architecture and planning, exposing the profound divisions in the design professions that characterized this time.

Cities, Citizenship and Undocumented Aliens: Dilemmas of Law and Political Community in Contemporary America

Thu, 10 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

This paper argues that cities are important political and legal communities that construct and govern the “rights in action” of undocumented aliens in the United States today. However, it also challenges the proposition that large U.S. cities are likely to be sites for expansive citizenship for all non-citizens. Through close examination of case law and publicly available documents related to New York City's changing police department policies concerning the immigration statuses of its residents, the paper reveals how limited U.S. cities may actually be in attempts to formulate positive laws expanding the “rights” or “citizenship” of undocumented aliens in particular. On a theoretical level, this paper argues that attention must be given to the prominent role of positive law in U.S. immigration and alienage law as well as to the complexities created for positive law by overlapping jurisdictions and modern administrative modes of governance. While this paper concedes that...

Black Rocks, Brown Clouds and the Borderlands: Air Quality and the Making of the Big Bend

Mon, 9 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

This paper concerns the making of a place, specifically the Big Bend region of the Texas-Mexico border. As an entry point, it examines the unexpected phenomenon of air pollution in this rural region and the ways in which this environmental impetus has spurred actions, at various scales, to preserve the Big Bend’s “character” and economy. The mobilizations over Big Bend air quality at several scales can be seen as moves to preserve the construction of this region as a pristine, rural pocket of the American West, rather than as part of the urbanized, tainted U.S.-Mexico borderlands. However, geographic and economic realities act to pull the Big Bend more deeply into the borderlands. In this way, issues of air pollution become part of the struggle to construct this region as unique, clean and precious in the face of some uncomfortable geographic realities.

Out of the Shadow of the State: Immigrant Nonprofits as Self-Motivated Political Actors in Urban Politics

Mon, 5 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I document and analyze the political presence in local politics of 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations catering to immigrants and refugees in San Francisco, California. Contrary to much of the nonprofit literature rationalizing the political apathy and quietude of 501(c)(3) nonprofits, my qualitative data from fieldwork conducted in 2005 and 2006 reveals that immigrant nonprofits have a broad understanding of what constitutes “politics” and are politically active in both the local policymaking and electoral processes. My data further shows that immigrant nonprofits function as multi-dimensional advocates engaged in legislative, administrative, and judicial advocacy at the local level. While immigrant nonprofits have a visible political presence within all three branches of local government, I argue that they are unique in the degree to which they engage in administrative advocacy targeted at the city’s bureaucratic agencies.

"But I Want That One": Consumer Citizenship and the Politics of Exclusion, Public Space and Homelessness in the Gay Ghetto

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

In this paper I will first describe how commodities are ‘promiscuously’ displayed by homeless queer youth in San Francisco in their attempts to pass as not only normal, but affluent. I will argue that when a youth successfully displays the signs of these commodities, they become part of a prosthetic shield that wraps around him or her. These shields protect homeless queer youth from the status degradation inherent in being classified as homeless. Thereby, homeless queer youth use the sign of the commodity to prevent being continually marked by spoiled identities. Their struggles reveal contradictions in the differential allocation of citizenship in which those who pass as ‘normal’ are granted the right to consume public space unmolested. I will conclude by suggesting that there has been a primarily unobserved convergence of neoliberal social policies within both San Francisco and gay politics detrimental to poor and otherwise marginal people.

Migration as a Matter of Time: Reasons for Migration and its Meaning for Children and Youth

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Studies of immigrant children and youth rely upon limited temporal and spatial frameworks of analysis. These narrow frames present a fragmented view of children’s immigrant experience that is limited to life after arrival in the U.S. and to their experiences within schools. These frames also assume an unproblematic journey of migration and ignore what children experience prior to migration. Using transnational literature about immigrant families and motherhood as well as fictional work, I demonstrate the weaknesses of these narrow frames, and argue that in order to understand the complexities of immigrant children’s lives, analysis of the process of migration must include a consideration of their lives beyond the school and their experiences before they physically make the move.

Experiencing Imminence: The Presence of Hope in a Movement for Equitable Schooling

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Critical scholarship on reform-oriented interventions has emphasized the normalizing, capitalist power of reformist discourses, institutions and technologies. Whereas care is often taken to account for the agency of reform’s subaltern targets, scant research has attended to the subjective experiences of implicated reformers. This paper examines the ascent of a movement for small, equitable schools in Oakland, California in order to explore the hopes and aspirations of its most ardent advocates. I begin by contrasting the movement’s assertion of its equity-centered strategy with the complex race and class hierarchies that grounded power relations within the movement. The question that emerges from this discontinuity is how reformers come to experience the movement as equitable and unequivocally progressive. I find that the gap between reformers’ ideals and their material circumstances is bridged by the movement’s ample production of hope.

Waiting for Work: An Ethnography of a Day Labor Agency

Tue, 14 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

This paper addresses the shifting temporal dimensions of work brought about by the flexibilization of employment. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in a corporate day labor agency located in a West Coast city, I examine the way in which uncertainty is both produced and experienced in an effort to analyze the mode of domination captured by Bourdieu’s concept of “flexploitation.” Specifically, I examine the organization of the hiring and job allocation process, workers’ experience and understanding of this temporally uncertain employment relationship, and the way in which management manipulates this temporal experience as a technique of labor control. I argue that the enforced waiting period that is endemic in this industry is not only a strategy of externalizing risk (through “time funneling”) but of manufacturing a reserve army of labor that is highly disciplined.

Municipal Annexation and Metropolitan Colonialism at the Nation's Fringe: San Ysidro, San Diego and the U-S///Mexico Border

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

This paper reviews and challenges current Urban Studies literature on annexation, suburbanization, and segregation. Specifically, it investigates the economic and political forces that led to boundary changes in San Ysidro, California. Prior scholarship on municipal annexations has focused primarily on the procedural mechanics and local dynamics that inform municipal boundary changes. This paper argues that this approach is “too local,” and suggests that global capital flows and forces play a powerful role in municipal annexations. Through a world-systems lens and a legal history of cities, this paper also provides a framework for rethinking municipal annexations as reenactments of colonial enterprises at a metropolitan scale and considers the implications this framework has on ongoing debates about citizenship.

Between ‘Blight’ and a New World: Urban Renewal, Political Mobilization, and the Production of Spatial Scale

Mon, 24 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines political mobilization around urban renewal in San Francisco’s Japantown (Nihonmachi or J-town) during the post-World War II era. An assessment of the efforts of the Committee Against Nihonmachi Eviction (CANE) – a largely Japanese American, grassroots organization that opposed the city’s redevelopment plan – demonstrates the centrality of space to the political mobilization of people of color. CANE’s mobilization was not merely a politics of the local, fought building by building and block by block. Rather, CANE sought to organize at larger scales, for example, by procuring international allies. In addition to illustrating the scalar strategies adopted by community organizers, this case study offers lessons for understanding the relationship between urban renewal and racism, property, and the liberal capitalist state, specifically under conditions of geo-economic and geopolitical crisis.

Backpacks and Diaper Bags: Latina School-Age Mothers in an Alternative School Setting

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Social commentators, policy makers, and members of the mass media have been instrumental in casting teen pregnancy in opposition to educational achievement. Dropping out of school is seen as one of the major negative outcomes of teen pregnancy. This ethnographic study explores the educational experiences of nine Latina school-age mothers who were enrolled at two sites of an alternative secondary program for pregnant or parenting teens located in a large, urban, northern California city. Contrary to those who claim that teen motherhood is the cause of low achievement, this study suggests that having a child inspires school-age mothers to pursue their educational goals. These goals are nurtured when young mothers are provided with an alternative school experience that supports their needs as both students and mothers.

Challenging the Sociological Notion of the 'Ghetto': A Case Study of South Los Angeles

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Just as the inner cities of America were transformed by the great African American migrations from the South, immigrants from Latin American countries, such as Mexico, have begun to change the contemporary urban landscape. As early as 1990, the Mexican and Central American population was close to edging out African Americans as the largest ethnic population in South Central Los Angeles. This paper relies upon ethnographic fieldwork to assess the impact of Latino neighborhood settlement on politics in the ghetto. An examination of two key and interrelated institutions – local L.A. City chartered Neighborhood Councils and a local Catholic church – shows that even though Latinos are the majority population, they have had a minimal impact on politics in South L.A. when measured in terms of their participation in Neighborhood Councils. Moreover, the comparatively high rates of participation among African Americans in Neighborhood Councils can be understood, in part, as a direct...

From "Moving Feels Like Home" to "We Will Not Be Moved!": Immigrant Communities Facing Evictions and the Role of Young People's Organizing, Oakland Chinatown, California, 2003-2005

Wed, 29 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000

In April 2003, residents of fifty units of affordable housing were evicted from their low-income units in downtown Oakland, California’s Chinatown. The ensuing community struggle demonstrated the challenges of organizing and mobilizing in immigrant and refugee communities who have been subjected to the collective trauma of the last century’s wars and displacements in China and throughout Asia. Young people’s organizing in Oakland’s Chinatown was simultaneously an attempt to heal rifts within the community and between generations, and to articulate a normal and central space for a progressive and radical politics that is grounded in the migration stories of elders.

Civic Sideshows: Communities and Publics in East Oakland

Wed, 16 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

How do urban spatial practices contribute to the formation of collective identities and action and to the hierarchical structures of a city’s varied communities? This paper examines this question by presenting a comparative case study of two East Oakland public spaces – the streets and parks of a residential neighborhood and the hybrid public spaces of the Eastmont Town Center. A comparative analysis of the implicit property relations and “publics” produced at each site shows that, despite their differences, these spaces and their attendant collectivities share the same fundamental logic and limits.

Undue Process: Immigrant Detention, Due Process, and Lesser Citizenship

Mon, 7 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

The paper traces the genealogy of social and legal inequalities in citizenship and in the racialization of immigrants in the U.S. that are constitutive of contemporary immigrant detention practices. Presenting a challenge to the exceptionalism which frames policy responses to 9/11 and the “war on terror,” the paper argues that contemporary detention policies emerge from an episodic history of immigrant detention, precipitated by a series of broadly defined national security crises over the last century—from fear of contagion, to the demonization of “foreign” ideologies, to international military conflicts and domestic “wars” on crime, drugs and terrorism. These “crises” have been invoked to reduce the rights and civil liberties of racialized immigrants and citizens in the detention process. Even before the “war on terror” began, the coordinates of race, noncitizenship and national crisis were mobilized by the government through the vehicle of detention to deny due procedural...

Out of Sight, Out of Mind: The Evolution of One Bay Area Industrial Suburb

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Financed by San Francisco capitalists, industry began to move beyond the boundaries of San Francisco in the 1850s. Industrial growth in the East Bay led to the development of a number of working-class communities along the San Joaquin River, including Martinez, Bay Point and Pittsburg. A case study of the development of Pittsburg, California demonstrates the critical role heavy industry has played in the suburbanization of the San Francisco Bay Area. The mixed land use, racial heterogeneity and working-class character of industrial suburbs such as Pittsburg challenge the widely held belief that American suburbs in general and Bay Area suburbs in particular are solely residential enclaves of white, middle-class families. Disproportionately polluted and poor, industrial suburbs serve as economic engines used to fuel the outward growth of American cities.

The Social Context of Childrearing: Public Spending in Oakland, 1970-2000

Mon, 20 Jun 2005 00:00:00 +0000

This paper takes stock of spending in Oakland on children from 1970-2000, in order to gauge the trends in families’ “collective consumption.” Using funding for schools, parks, libraries, museum and the police as a proxy for public spending on children’s lives generally, I find that while monies for parks and the museum declined, funding for police and libraries stayed level. Schools offer a more complex case, in which increases in per-pupil expenditures may be mitigated by ballooning needs for special education services, and in which parent-raised funds contribute further to intra- and inter-district inequality. I propose the notion of “concentric rings of consumption” to analytically treat these parent-raised funds, which are not quite private but not quite public either. After reviewing a case of privatized educational services, I suggest that public spending decreases lead to three linked and overlapping outcomes: “compensatory spending,” or the individual’s choice...

Muslims and Jews, Moving with God: Re-thinking the Relationship between Immigration, Religion and Theory

Thu, 2 Jun 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Researchers who study recent shifts in immigration in the United States focus primarily on either how well new immigrants manage to integrate into the American economy or how poorly they integrate into American culture. In general, scholars have tended to ignore the dynamic relationship between immigrants’ cultural belief systems and their integration into the United States’ economy. In this paper, I begin to develop a theoretical map that links these two areas by examining the interrelationship of strongly held cultural beliefs and socioeconomic conditions of immigrants. I consider the experiences of Jewish and Muslim immigrants in the United States and critique the theories of Bourdieu and Wallerstein to argue that culture, and specifically religion, is necessary for understanding social relations inside the immigrant community as well as the ways in which immigrants interact with both individuals and institutions outside of immigrant enclaves. I conclude by suggesting...

Musical Crossings: Identity Formations of Second-Generation South Asian American Hip Hop Artists

Tue, 3 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

This paper stems from a dissertation project on second-generation South Asian American hip hop artists based on twenty-two months of fieldwork conducted primarily in the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area. Through interviews, participant observation, and an analysis of their lyrics, this paper examines how South Asian American (desi) hip hop artists develop a racial consciousness and identities that both challenge narrow identity politics strictly drawn around ethnic lines and provide alternative ways of “being desi in America” by creating interracial alliances and racialized identities based on a politics of identification. By identifying as both South Asians and as people of color, the young adults in this study simultaneously articulate ethnic and racialized second-generation identities in ways that challenge assimilation theories that predict the downward assimilation of immigrants who adopt Black culture. This paper explores the political potential of hip hop—a medium rooted...

Missionary Destinations and Diasporic Destiny: Spatiality of Korean/American Evangelism and the Cell Church

Tue, 3 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

The existing literature on immigrant Korean Protestant churches in North America typically addresses identity formation and dynamics of assimilation in the context of North American religious pluralism and multiculturalism, particularly focusing on the role of religion in “maintaining ethnicity” and “preserving traditions.” In this literature, the immigrant Korean church is depicted as an ethnic enclave, a bounded territorial enclosure that facilitates adjustment and transition into the mainstream. The argument presented in this paper reconceptualizes the immigrant Korean church as an “extroverted space,” with a profoundly “global sense of place.” First, I examine the articulation of divine destiny and theological conservatism in the production of a missionary designation called the “10/40 Window,” locating Korean and Korean American evangelicals in transnational and transdenominational movements pivoting around the U.S.-South Korea axis. Second, in a case study of an evangelical...