BrooklynSoc

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

A Grateful Prayer for My Egyptian Friends

Last week I was asked to sign an online petition in support of demonstrations against Mubarak in Cairo. So, I wrote this message and sent it to some friends. “I am sitting here at my computer listening to coverage of the “million people” demonstration in Cairo and have to painfully remind myself that we have heard so  much loud racist nonsense in recent years about how Arabic, Moslem and other  non-European cultures and religions abhor democracy that the brave demands of  our sisters and brothers in Tunisia and Egypt must come as a shock to so many in  the west. of course I will sign the petition for those activists in Egypt, but  let’s redouble our efforts as educators to show our students that the longing  for and the possibility of democracy are not culturally and racially bound.”

Yesterday I asked Insha’Allah that Mubarak would leave. Today he said yes. Today I ask Insha’Allah that he stays away.

Glenn Beck Rhetoric Triggers Death Threats on Frances Fox Piven

I received an important message from Peter Dreier, which I have pasted below.

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

For several years, Glenn Beck has been spewing hateful lies about Frances Fox Piven, the distinguished political scientist and sociologist, on his TV and radio shows. He views Piven (along with her late husband, sociologist Richard Cloward) as the architects of a socialist conspiracy to destroy America, and claims that President Obama is a follower of Piven and Cloward’s strategy. Although Beck’s views are lunacy, his followers believe him. In recent months, Beck has escalated the rhetoric against Piven, which has led to a growing chorus of death threats against her,  as I explain in my article today on the Huffington Post website: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/glenn-becks-attacks-on-fr_b_812690.html. 

It is time to challenge the right-wing forces like Fox News and the Tea Party, the Darrell Issa wing of the Republican Party, and the billionaires like the Koch brothers who are funding them.   To learn more, and find out how, read on…

In the wake of the Tucson massacre, Beck’s rants must be taken seriously.  On Thursday, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a public interest law firm, issued a written appeal to Beck’s boss — Fox News chairman Roger Ailes — to put a stop to the increasing threats against Piven incited by Beck tirades. The letter, asked Ailes to distinguish between First Amendment rights, of which they are “vigorous defenders” and an “intentional repetition of provocative, incendiary, emotional misinformation and falsehoods [that place that Piven] in actual physical danger of a violent response.”

Beck’s  influence is frightening, not because he has a large audience, but because he is able to incite his relatively small niche  audience to action.  Beck’s influence may eventually implode, similar to what happened to his fictional predecessor, Lonesome Rhodes, a charismatic con man in the amazing 1957 film “A Face in the Crowd,” whose hubris led to his downfall. This may already have started happening with Beck.  Two years ago, a group called Color of Change organized a campaign to pressure advertisers to drop their sponsorship of Beck’s show. It had some success, as described in this article (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/advertisers-deserting-fox-news-glenn-beck-2009-08-14), but not enough to force Fox News to take Beck off the air. Earlier this month, however, WOR (710 AM), one of New York City’s two biggest talk radio stations, dropped Beck’s syndicated show. 

But as of now, Beck remains the most influential cheerleader of America’s right-wing movement, having replaced Rush Limbaugh for the top spot.

Fox News is part of a network of conservative bloggers, publications, columnists, think tanks, and activists like the Tea Party that have gained enormous influence within the Republican Party.  Knowing this, big business lobby groups have forged an unholy alliance with these right-wing forces.  Corporate lobby groups may not share the same views as Beck and the Tea Party, but they recognize the strategic importance of these right-wingers. Business provides campaign contributions to conservative candidates and the Tea Party and its ilk provide the ground troops to help them get elected.

These conservative forces have taken over the leadership of the Republican Party. And they and their business allies have a very clear agenda.  It is to dismantle government policies that require corporations and banks to be socially responsible, including protections for consumers, workers, families, and the environment. They also want to slash the social safety net, including Social Security, Medicare, financial aid for college students, and aid to the poor.  They want to reduce taxes on the rich (but retain subsidies for corporations, particularly military contractors). They want to destroy unions, environmental groups, and other components of the progressive movement.

And they have a plan. It is now obvious that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its Republican allies in Congress are using the accusation “job killer” the way Sen. Joseph McCarthy used the word “Communist” to stigmatize any organization and policy they disagree with.  For example,  the Republicans titled their effort to overturn the law the “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act.  

As my Cry Wolf Project colleague Donald Cohen and I documented in an article in Huffington Post two weeks ago, the “job killer” claim is hardly new. Business groups have been using it for over a century – whether the issue was food safety, seat belts, the minimum wage, the Clean Air Act, workplace safety laws, or any other liberal/progressive initiatives.  As we reported, newly emboldened as chair of the House’s key investigative committee, Congressman Darrell Issa, a right-wing California Republican, recently sent letters to more than 150 business lobby groups, asking them to identify government rules that they want eliminated. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/donald-cohen/with-new-congress-crony-c_b_805003.html). And as Ryan Lizza reveals in an article in the current issue of the New Yorker, Issa’s goal – like that of Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Fox News, and others – is to destroy Obama’s presidency and, with it, the agenda and self-confidence of liberals and progressives.  (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/24/110124fa_fact_lizza)

In a brilliant column in the Washington Post two weeks ago, Steven Pearlstein exposed the corporate “job killer” mantra for the lie that it is. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/06/AR2011010605889.html

Donald Cohen’s new Huffington Post column, “Another Job Killer Lie Exposed,” also shows how business “cried wolf” about impending economic disaster during the 2002 debate over California’s landmark Paid Family Leave Law. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/donald-cohen/another-job-killer-lie-ex_b_812203.html).  In a newly-released study, , authors Ruth Milkman, a sociology professor at City University of New York, and Eileen Applebaum, an economist at the Center on Economic Policy Research, found that the California law has not turned out to be the costly “job killer” that big business warned about. To the contrary, the Paid Family Leave law has actually helped employers and produced significant economic, social and health benefits for both male and female workers. http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/leaves-that-pay

So long as they think they can get away with it, corporate lobby groups and their Republican friends will continue to demonize any government policy they dislike as a “job killer.”  The political climate is so rancid that even President Obama felt compelled to join the “job killer” chorus. In a column in the Wall Street Journal last week, Obama announced plans to “remove outdated regulations that stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive. …”

There is more than a semantic resemblance between the death threats targeted to Frances Fox Piven by Glenn Beck’s followers and the “job killer” mantra espoused by big business, the Republican leaders, the Tea Partiers, and the right-wing echo chamber led by Beck.   They want to destroy liberal and progressive ideas and undermine the credibility and reputations (and in some cases, the livelihoods) of the people who espouse them. 

I have no doubt that the CEOs of most major Fortune 500 corporations disagree with most of what Glenn Beck and the Tea Party believe. But they are convenient allies, or what some call “strange bedfellows.”

That said, some of the wealthiest Americans share the views of the right-wing lunatic fringe.  The most prominent of this group are the Koch brothers, oil industry billionaires who are the largest funders of the Tea Party, the right-wing Cato Institute, and other key parts of the extremist movement.  Last August, Jane Mayer wrote a brilliant expose of the Koch brothers in The New Yorker magazine. (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer).

Next week, on January 30, the Koch brothers have invited a group of  billionaires and millionaires who support the Tea Party and right-wing Republicans to a behind-closed-doors meeting at the Rancho Las Palmas Resort in Rancho Mirage (close to Palm Springs)  to plot their strategy for the 2012 elections.   Here’s is Think Progress’ background research on the political influence of this shadowing group of  billionaires: http://thinkprogress.org/2010/10/20/beck-koch-chamber-meeting/

The New York Times ran a story in October about this meeting under the headline: “Secretive Republican Donors Are Planning Ahead.”   http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/20/us/politics/20koch.html. Here’s the story’s opening paragraph:

A secretive network of Republican donors is heading to the Palm Springs area for a long weekend in January, but it will not be to relax after a hard-fought election — it will be to plan for the next one.  Koch Industries, an energy and manufacturing conglomerate run by the billionaire brothers Charles, left, and David Koch operates a foundation that finances political advocacy groups, but is protected from having to disclose much about what they do. Koch Industries, the longtime underwriter of libertarian causes from the Cato Institute in Washington to the ballot initiative that would suspend California’s landmark law capping greenhouse gases, is planning a confidential meeting at the Rancho Las Palmas Resort and Spa to, as an invitation says, “develop strategies to counter the most severe threats facing our free society and outline a vision of how we can foster a renewal of American free enterprise and prosperity.”

Fran Piven and many other activists believe that liberals and progressives should be in the streets protesting the right-wing Tea Party and the rest of the extremist conservative movement.  So here is  one opportunity to do this. A coalition of progressive/liberal groups – led by the Courage Campaign, Common Cause, HCAN (Health Care for America Now, the labor/consumer/liberal coalition that led the fight for health care reform), unions, community organizing groups, and others – is planning a protest action at the Koch brothers meeting. It will take place from 1-4 pm on Sunday, January 30.  Buses will be leaving from all over Southern California.  More information about the event and the bus locations can be found at www.commoncause.org/Kochbuses and at http://www.calaborfed.org/index.php/site/event/809 The rally location is 41-000 Bob Hope Drive, Rancho Mirage, CA 92270. 
Peter Dreier

E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics

Chair, Urban & Environmental Policy Department

Occidental College

1600 Campus Road

Los Angeles, CA 90041

Phone: (323) 259-2913

Website: http://employees.oxy.edu/dreier