BrooklynSoc

Political Suicide in New York City and Italy: Part II - NYC by Jerry Krase

New York City and Italy have a great deal in common, starting and ending with self-destructive electorates; voters who are intent on putting into office people who, in one way or another, hold them in contempt. In both electoral democracies, We The People are generally too ignorant and self-absorbed to notice that the pain we feel is self-inflicted. How does this happen? Again and again….This is the second of a two-part series at I-Italy.org. The first was on the last Italian parliamentary elections and this  is about the incredibly embarrassing buildup to the the mayoral election in the fall.

Server Maintenance

The photo archive will be offline for a while on Friday as we are upgrading the server software. Everything should be up and running by Saturday morning.

Political Suicide in New York City and Italy: Part I - Italy

This is my take on the Italian National Elections taking place as I type. It might be instructive for the forthcoming mayoral elections in New York City. Political Suicide in New York City and Italy: Part I - Italy

New York City and Italy have a great deal in common, starting and ending with self-destructive electorates; voters who are intent on putting into office people who, in one way or another, hold them in contempt. In both democracies, The People are generally too ignorant and self-absorbed to notice that the pain they feel is self-inflicted. How does this happen?

The N.R.A.’s W.M.Ds

Since Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado in April 29, 1999, a seemingly endless stream of senseless mass murders have taken place across our nation with only one thing in common —- the use of the National Rifle Association’s Weapons of Mass Destruction.

A real Patriotic Act would end the deluge of target practice in which America kills its own people.

Vote for Barack Obama: America’s Number One First Responder by Jerry Krase

I’ve been trying my darndest to come up with a simple metaphor to explain why President Barack (Hussein) Obama should be re-elected and thereby save our country from being cut up into little pieces and sold off to the People’s Republic of China by one or another vulture-like hedge fund like Mitt’s Bain Capital…. The simple facts of the matter are that the Republicans started the fire and when Obama tried to put it out they not only tried to cut off the water supply, they also poured gasoline on the flames. Now that the fire is almost under control, but still smoldering, the arsonists are blaming him for not doing enough to put it out. For the whole essay click here.

Vedi Napoli e poi Muori 2012 (See Naples and Die 2012)

“See Naples and Die” is a cryptically ominous, aphorism attributed to Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe he is said to have uttered about the magnificent opulence of Naples in the late 18th century. I can only guess that had Goethe lived long enough to visit Naples, Florida for the Republican National Convention he would have made a similarly cryptic comment about the political fortunes of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. If he had watched the first decidely unPresidential debate with Jim Lehrer at the helm in Denver, Colorado he might have thought Jim had taken his cryptic advice literally.
In any case, this piece is merely a nonpartisan (a)musing over my recent week-long trip to Naples. I went there with my wife Suzanne in order to participate in the Commission on Urban Anthropology’s International Conference on “Entrepreneurial Culture, Corporate Responsibility and Urban Development,” that took place at the Mostra d’Oltremare in Fuorigrotta. Click here for the link for the visually enhanced essay on I-Italy.org.

“Misogyny, or Gynophobia? Take your Pick”

Here’s the link to my recent missive about a small collection of conservative American Roman Catholic Bishops who are making it difficult for nuns and other Catholic women to do the work they have been called to do. The disarray in the Vatican is another, related, example of how things go wrong when women are left out of the picture, not to mention the hierarchy.

New Album: May Day march

Photographs from the May Day march in New York City. I was part of the PSC contingent.

http://www.brooklynsoc.org/blog/gallery3/index.php/Manhattan-May-Day-March-2012

London’s Chinatown

I just added photos to a new album in the gallery of images from my recent photo survey of London’s Chinatown, part of an ongoing research project, “Drifting in Chinatowns.”

http://www.brooklynsoc.org/blog/gallery3/index.php/London-Chinatown-2012

Brooklyn in the World

The World in Brooklyn: Gentrification, Immigration, and Ethnic Politics in a Global City, is a collection of scholarly papers which analyze demographic, social, political, and economic trends that are occurring in Brooklyn. Brooklyn, as the context, reflects global forces while also contributing to them. The idea for this volume developed as the editors discovered a group of scholars from different disciplines and various universities studying Brooklyn. Brooklyn has always been legendary and has more recently regained its stature as a much sought after place to live, work and have fun. Popular folklore has it that most U.S. residents trace their family origins to Brooklyn. It is presently referred to as one of the “hippest” places in New York. Thus, this book is a collection of demographic, ethnographic, and comparative studies which focus on urban dynamics in Brooklyn. The chapters investigate issues of social class, urban development, immigration, race, ethnicity and politics within the context of Brooklyn.

As a whole, this book considers both theoretical and practical urban issues. In most cases the scholarly perspective is on everyday life. With this in mind there are also social justice concerns. Issues of social segregation and attendant homogenization are brought to light. Moreover, social class and race advantages or disadvantages, as part of urban processes, are underscored through critiques of local policy decisions throughout the chapters. A common thread is the assertion by contributors that planning the future of Brooklyn needs to include multi-ethnic, racial, and economic groups, those very residents who make-up Brooklyn.

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780739166703

Seeing Cities Change: New Book

We at BrooklynSoc have been very busy. My new book Seeing Cities Change is out. Here’s the blurb: Cities have always been dynamic social environments for visual and otherwise symbolic competition between the groups who live and work within them. In contemporary urban areas, all sorts of diversity are simultaneously increased and concentrated, chief amongst them in recent years being the ethnic and racial transformation produced by migration and the gentrification of once socially marginal areas of the city.
Seeing Cities Change demonstrates the utility of a visual approach and the study of ordinary streetscapes to document and analyse how the built environment reflects the changing cultural and class identities of neighborhood residents. Discussing the manner in which these changes relate to issues of local and national identities and multiculturalism, it presents studies of various cities on both sides of the Atlantic to show how global forces and the competition between urban residents in ‘contested terrains’ is changing the faces of cities around the globe.
Blending together a variety of sources from scholarly and mass media, this engaging volume focuses on the importance of ‘seeing’ and, in its consideration of questions of migration, ethnicity, diversity, community, identity, class and culture, will appeal to sociologists, anthropologists and geographers with interests in visual methods and urban spaces. I have discussed some of the “Italian and Italian-American bits on my I-Italy.org Traces blog.

Walking in the City

Walking in the City: Quotidian Mobility and Ethnographic Method

Edited by Timothy Shortell, Ph.D., and Evrick Brown, Ph.D.

Department of Sociology, Brooklyn College CUNY

Local politicians, protesters, busy commuters, tourists, flâneurs, urban ethnographers. These social actors and many more work the city streets as an essential part of their quotidian routines. Everyday mobility on the streets and public spaces of urban neighborhoods is such an ubiquitous part of urban life and culture that it is often overlooked. Though sociologists have long noted that dynamism is an essential part of the urban way of life, walking as a significant social activity and crucial research method has not received the scholarly attention it deserves. This volume will consider walking in the city from a variety of perspectives, in a variety of places, with a variety of methods. Contributors will address the nature of quotidian mobility in contemporary global cities, how it relates to other significant social institutions and practices, as well as a method for studying urban life.

Among the questions this volume seeks to address:

• What does walking reveal about the spatial distribution of urban cultural activities?
• How does quotidian mobility reinforce and challenge stratification and segregation?
• How does walking as an everyday practice relate to more spectacular forms of walking, such as protest marches, which have lately occupied urban spaces?
• What does walking reveal about normative forms of social interaction in urban public space?
• Are there distinctive social types that occupy public space in contemporary cities through walking? If so, what are they and what is their significance?
• What is the relationship between quotidian mobility and power?
• How is urban walking a gendered or racialized activity?
• How does quotidian mobility relate to global population flows?
• How is quotidian mobility being incorporated in the New Urbanism model of city planners and what does it reveal concerning the politics of space? How is visual design conceptualized in this method to foster pedestrian friendly environments?
• How do individuals in ethnically diverse pedestrian friendly cities negotiate the stranger phenomenon in public space in comparison to those characterized by motorized urban sprawl?
• What is the role of walking in urban research methods?
• What can theorizing about quotidian mobility contribute to contemporary urban theory?

The editors seek chapters of 8,000-10,000 words addressing questions such as these. We welcome contributions from a variety of social science disciplines, theoretical perspectives, methodological approaches, and focuses on a variety of urban locations.

Send abstracts (200-400 words) to shortell@brooklyn.cuny.edu and ebrown@brooklyn.cuny.edu by April 1, 2012.

(Re)Making Meaning of 9/11: A Decade Later by Jerry Krase

To try to make meaning out of 9/11, every year since 2001 I have retraced my steps to re-photograph how my neighbors displayed their feelings about the tragedy. As time has passed it has become clearer to me what can and can’t be seen in the gentrified landscapes of Park Slope, Brooklyn. I am grateful that the pain we all felt then has, visibly at least, slowly faded away. Here is the link to my visually enhanced blog at i-italy.org