Podcasts about upscaling downtown from bowery saloons

With such high levels of residential segregation along racial lines in the United States, gentrifying neighborhoods present fascinating opportunities to examine places with varying levels of integration, and how people living in them navigate the thorny politics of race. Among the many conflicts revolving around race under gentrification is crime and its relationship with the displacement and marginalization of a neighborhood's existing low-income minority groups. Contributing to this conversation is sociologist Jan Doering, whose new book Us versus Them: Race, Crime, and Gentrification in Chicago Neighborhoods (Oxford University Press, 2020) examines the strategic practices of two groups in that city's Rogers Park and Uptown neighborhoods: “public safety” advocates, or people who were very concerned with crime and active in a variety of local initiatives to address it; and “social justice” advocates, or people who were more concerned with resisting gentrification and keeping their neighborhood racially and socioeconomically diverse. In documenting their efforts and clashes through three years of fieldwork, Doering focuses on two forms of racial claims-making each camp of residents uses to make its case: racial challenges, or charges of racially problematic behavior, and racial neutralizations, or any defensive or reparative responses to racial failings. Revealing links between how anticrime initiatives can amplify gentrification and contribute to marginalization through the invocation of race as they negotiate the politics of crime and gentrification, the book provides a highly nuanced, and quite timely, analysis of everyday battles over racial meanings with great resonance for today's political climate. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), and editor of Urban Ethnography: Legacies and Challenges (Emerald, 2019) and Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With such high levels of residential segregation along racial lines in the United States, gentrifying neighborhoods present fascinating opportunities to examine places with varying levels of integration, and how people living in them navigate the thorny politics of race. Among the many conflicts revolving around race under gentrification is crime and its relationship with the displacement and marginalization of a neighborhood’s existing low-income minority groups. Contributing to this conversation is sociologist Jan Doering, whose new book Us versus Them: Race, Crime, and Gentrification in Chicago Neighborhoods (Oxford University Press, 2020) examines the strategic practices of two groups in that city’s Rogers Park and Uptown neighborhoods: “public safety” advocates, or people who were very concerned with crime and active in a variety of local initiatives to address it; and “social justice” advocates, or people who were more concerned with resisting gentrification and keeping their neighborhood racially and socioeconomically diverse. In documenting their efforts and clashes through three years of fieldwork, Doering focuses on two forms of racial claims-making each camp of residents uses to make its case: racial challenges, or charges of racially problematic behavior, and racial neutralizations, or any defensive or reparative responses to racial failings. Revealing links between how anticrime initiatives can amplify gentrification and contribute to marginalization through the invocation of race as they negotiate the politics of crime and gentrification, the book provides a highly nuanced, and quite timely, analysis of everyday battles over racial meanings with great resonance for today’s political climate. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), and editor of Urban Ethnography: Legacies and Challenges (Emerald, 2019) and Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With such high levels of residential segregation along racial lines in the United States, gentrifying neighborhoods present fascinating opportunities to examine places with varying levels of integration, and how people living in them navigate the thorny politics of race. Among the many conflicts revolving around race under gentrification is crime and its relationship with the displacement and marginalization of a neighborhood’s existing low-income minority groups. Contributing to this conversation is sociologist Jan Doering, whose new book Us versus Them: Race, Crime, and Gentrification in Chicago Neighborhoods (Oxford University Press, 2020) examines the strategic practices of two groups in that city’s Rogers Park and Uptown neighborhoods: “public safety” advocates, or people who were very concerned with crime and active in a variety of local initiatives to address it; and “social justice” advocates, or people who were more concerned with resisting gentrification and keeping their neighborhood racially and socioeconomically diverse. In documenting their efforts and clashes through three years of fieldwork, Doering focuses on two forms of racial claims-making each camp of residents uses to make its case: racial challenges, or charges of racially problematic behavior, and racial neutralizations, or any defensive or reparative responses to racial failings. Revealing links between how anticrime initiatives can amplify gentrification and contribute to marginalization through the invocation of race as they negotiate the politics of crime and gentrification, the book provides a highly nuanced, and quite timely, analysis of everyday battles over racial meanings with great resonance for today’s political climate. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), and editor of Urban Ethnography: Legacies and Challenges (Emerald, 2019) and Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With such high levels of residential segregation along racial lines in the United States, gentrifying neighborhoods present fascinating opportunities to examine places with varying levels of integration, and how people living in them navigate the thorny politics of race. Among the many conflicts revolving around race under gentrification is crime and its relationship with the displacement and marginalization of a neighborhood's existing low-income minority groups. Contributing to this conversation is sociologist Jan Doering, whose new book Us versus Them: Race, Crime, and Gentrification in Chicago Neighborhoods (Oxford University Press, 2020) examines the strategic practices of two groups in that city's Rogers Park and Uptown neighborhoods: “public safety” advocates, or people who were very concerned with crime and active in a variety of local initiatives to address it; and “social justice” advocates, or people who were more concerned with resisting gentrification and keeping their neighborhood racially and socioeconomically diverse. In documenting their efforts and clashes through three years of fieldwork, Doering focuses on two forms of racial claims-making each camp of residents uses to make its case: racial challenges, or charges of racially problematic behavior, and racial neutralizations, or any defensive or reparative responses to racial failings. Revealing links between how anticrime initiatives can amplify gentrification and contribute to marginalization through the invocation of race as they negotiate the politics of crime and gentrification, the book provides a highly nuanced, and quite timely, analysis of everyday battles over racial meanings with great resonance for today's political climate. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), and editor of Urban Ethnography: Legacies and Challenges (Emerald, 2019) and Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

With such high levels of residential segregation along racial lines in the United States, gentrifying neighborhoods present fascinating opportunities to examine places with varying levels of integration, and how people living in them navigate the thorny politics of race. Among the many conflicts revolving around race under gentrification is crime and its relationship with the displacement and marginalization of a neighborhood's existing low-income minority groups. Contributing to this conversation is sociologist Jan Doering, whose new book Us versus Them: Race, Crime, and Gentrification in Chicago Neighborhoods (Oxford University Press, 2020) examines the strategic practices of two groups in that city's Rogers Park and Uptown neighborhoods: “public safety” advocates, or people who were very concerned with crime and active in a variety of local initiatives to address it; and “social justice” advocates, or people who were more concerned with resisting gentrification and keeping their neighborhood racially and socioeconomically diverse. In documenting their efforts and clashes through three years of fieldwork, Doering focuses on two forms of racial claims-making each camp of residents uses to make its case: racial challenges, or charges of racially problematic behavior, and racial neutralizations, or any defensive or reparative responses to racial failings. Revealing links between how anticrime initiatives can amplify gentrification and contribute to marginalization through the invocation of race as they negotiate the politics of crime and gentrification, the book provides a highly nuanced, and quite timely, analysis of everyday battles over racial meanings with great resonance for today's political climate. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), and editor of Urban Ethnography: Legacies and Challenges (Emerald, 2019) and Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012).

With such high levels of residential segregation along racial lines in the United States, gentrifying neighborhoods present fascinating opportunities to examine places with varying levels of integration, and how people living in them navigate the thorny politics of race. Among the many conflicts revolving around race under gentrification is crime and its relationship with the displacement and marginalization of a neighborhood’s existing low-income minority groups. Contributing to this conversation is sociologist Jan Doering, whose new book Us versus Them: Race, Crime, and Gentrification in Chicago Neighborhoods (Oxford University Press, 2020) examines the strategic practices of two groups in that city’s Rogers Park and Uptown neighborhoods: “public safety” advocates, or people who were very concerned with crime and active in a variety of local initiatives to address it; and “social justice” advocates, or people who were more concerned with resisting gentrification and keeping their neighborhood racially and socioeconomically diverse. In documenting their efforts and clashes through three years of fieldwork, Doering focuses on two forms of racial claims-making each camp of residents uses to make its case: racial challenges, or charges of racially problematic behavior, and racial neutralizations, or any defensive or reparative responses to racial failings. Revealing links between how anticrime initiatives can amplify gentrification and contribute to marginalization through the invocation of race as they negotiate the politics of crime and gentrification, the book provides a highly nuanced, and quite timely, analysis of everyday battles over racial meanings with great resonance for today’s political climate. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), and editor of Urban Ethnography: Legacies and Challenges (Emerald, 2019) and Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With such high levels of residential segregation along racial lines in the United States, gentrifying neighborhoods present fascinating opportunities to examine places with varying levels of integration, and how people living in them navigate the thorny politics of race. Among the many conflicts revolving around race under gentrification is crime and its relationship with the displacement and marginalization of a neighborhood’s existing low-income minority groups. Contributing to this conversation is sociologist Jan Doering, whose new book Us versus Them: Race, Crime, and Gentrification in Chicago Neighborhoods (Oxford University Press, 2020) examines the strategic practices of two groups in that city’s Rogers Park and Uptown neighborhoods: “public safety” advocates, or people who were very concerned with crime and active in a variety of local initiatives to address it; and “social justice” advocates, or people who were more concerned with resisting gentrification and keeping their neighborhood racially and socioeconomically diverse. In documenting their efforts and clashes through three years of fieldwork, Doering focuses on two forms of racial claims-making each camp of residents uses to make its case: racial challenges, or charges of racially problematic behavior, and racial neutralizations, or any defensive or reparative responses to racial failings. Revealing links between how anticrime initiatives can amplify gentrification and contribute to marginalization through the invocation of race as they negotiate the politics of crime and gentrification, the book provides a highly nuanced, and quite timely, analysis of everyday battles over racial meanings with great resonance for today’s political climate. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), and editor of Urban Ethnography: Legacies and Challenges (Emerald, 2019) and Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With such high levels of residential segregation along racial lines in the United States, gentrifying neighborhoods present fascinating opportunities to examine places with varying levels of integration, and how people living in them navigate the thorny politics of race. Among the many conflicts revolving around race under gentrification is crime and its relationship with the displacement and marginalization of a neighborhood’s existing low-income minority groups. Contributing to this conversation is sociologist Jan Doering, whose new book Us versus Them: Race, Crime, and Gentrification in Chicago Neighborhoods (Oxford University Press, 2020) examines the strategic practices of two groups in that city’s Rogers Park and Uptown neighborhoods: “public safety” advocates, or people who were very concerned with crime and active in a variety of local initiatives to address it; and “social justice” advocates, or people who were more concerned with resisting gentrification and keeping their neighborhood racially and socioeconomically diverse. In documenting their efforts and clashes through three years of fieldwork, Doering focuses on two forms of racial claims-making each camp of residents uses to make its case: racial challenges, or charges of racially problematic behavior, and racial neutralizations, or any defensive or reparative responses to racial failings. Revealing links between how anticrime initiatives can amplify gentrification and contribute to marginalization through the invocation of race as they negotiate the politics of crime and gentrification, the book provides a highly nuanced, and quite timely, analysis of everyday battles over racial meanings with great resonance for today’s political climate. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), and editor of Urban Ethnography: Legacies and Challenges (Emerald, 2019) and Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With such high levels of residential segregation along racial lines in the United States, gentrifying neighborhoods present fascinating opportunities to examine places with varying levels of integration, and how people living in them navigate the thorny politics of race. Among the many conflicts revolving around race under gentrification is crime and its relationship with the displacement and marginalization of a neighborhood’s existing low-income minority groups. Contributing to this conversation is sociologist Jan Doering, whose new book Us versus Them: Race, Crime, and Gentrification in Chicago Neighborhoods (Oxford University Press, 2020) examines the strategic practices of two groups in that city’s Rogers Park and Uptown neighborhoods: “public safety” advocates, or people who were very concerned with crime and active in a variety of local initiatives to address it; and “social justice” advocates, or people who were more concerned with resisting gentrification and keeping their neighborhood racially and socioeconomically diverse. In documenting their efforts and clashes through three years of fieldwork, Doering focuses on two forms of racial claims-making each camp of residents uses to make its case: racial challenges, or charges of racially problematic behavior, and racial neutralizations, or any defensive or reparative responses to racial failings. Revealing links between how anticrime initiatives can amplify gentrification and contribute to marginalization through the invocation of race as they negotiate the politics of crime and gentrification, the book provides a highly nuanced, and quite timely, analysis of everyday battles over racial meanings with great resonance for today’s political climate. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), and editor of Urban Ethnography: Legacies and Challenges (Emerald, 2019) and Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Processes of globalization—the liberalization of national markets, the rapid movement of goods, services, and labor across national borders—have had profound impacts on local contexts, perhaps especially so in the Global South. While some people in the worlds of business, media, and even academia praise such policies for benefitting the poor in these countries, others, particular actors on the left, are highly critical of them for leaving impoverished populations and places behind. Entering this conversation with a fresh take and a novel case is sociologist Patrick Inglis, whose new book Narrow Fairways: Getting By and Falling Behind in the New India (Oxford University Press, 2019) uses the interactions between elite members of golf clubs in city of Bangalore and the caddies who carry their bags to examine how globalization is both upending and reproducing a status quo of extreme inequality. Based on more than ten years of ethnographic fieldwork, Inglis takes readers inside these clubs to show how the concentrated wealth and the increased privatization of institutions and social services in India—e.g. education, healthcare—have made the low-income, highly precarious caddies highly dependent on the members they serve. Through “upward servility,” a set of strategies of servility and deference, the caddies attempt to show members their worthiness for support and guidance and overcome a caste status they claim doesn’t influence their chances at upward mobility. By showcasing the lives and voices of the caddies, Inglis shows how globalization may not be creating polarized societies of haves and have-nots, but situations in which the rich and poor find themselves closely intertwined and in dubiously sustainable relationships. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017) and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Processes of globalization—the liberalization of national markets, the rapid movement of goods, services, and labor across national borders—have had profound impacts on local contexts, perhaps especially so in the Global South. While some people in the worlds of business, media, and even academia praise such policies for benefitting the poor in these countries, others, particular actors on the left, are highly critical of them for leaving impoverished populations and places behind. Entering this conversation with a fresh take and a novel case is sociologist Patrick Inglis, whose new book Narrow Fairways: Getting By and Falling Behind in the New India (Oxford University Press, 2019) uses the interactions between elite members of golf clubs in city of Bangalore and the caddies who carry their bags to examine how globalization is both upending and reproducing a status quo of extreme inequality. Based on more than ten years of ethnographic fieldwork, Inglis takes readers inside these clubs to show how the concentrated wealth and the increased privatization of institutions and social services in India—e.g. education, healthcare—have made the low-income, highly precarious caddies highly dependent on the members they serve. Through “upward servility,” a set of strategies of servility and deference, the caddies attempt to show members their worthiness for support and guidance and overcome a caste status they claim doesn’t influence their chances at upward mobility. By showcasing the lives and voices of the caddies, Inglis shows how globalization may not be creating polarized societies of haves and have-nots, but situations in which the rich and poor find themselves closely intertwined and in dubiously sustainable relationships. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017) and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Processes of globalization—the liberalization of national markets, the rapid movement of goods, services, and labor across national borders—have had profound impacts on local contexts, perhaps especially so in the Global South. While some people in the worlds of business, media, and even academia praise such policies for benefitting the poor in these countries, others, particular actors on the left, are highly critical of them for leaving impoverished populations and places behind. Entering this conversation with a fresh take and a novel case is sociologist Patrick Inglis, whose new book Narrow Fairways: Getting By and Falling Behind in the New India (Oxford University Press, 2019) uses the interactions between elite members of golf clubs in city of Bangalore and the caddies who carry their bags to examine how globalization is both upending and reproducing a status quo of extreme inequality. Based on more than ten years of ethnographic fieldwork, Inglis takes readers inside these clubs to show how the concentrated wealth and the increased privatization of institutions and social services in India—e.g. education, healthcare—have made the low-income, highly precarious caddies highly dependent on the members they serve. Through “upward servility,” a set of strategies of servility and deference, the caddies attempt to show members their worthiness for support and guidance and overcome a caste status they claim doesn’t influence their chances at upward mobility. By showcasing the lives and voices of the caddies, Inglis shows how globalization may not be creating polarized societies of haves and have-nots, but situations in which the rich and poor find themselves closely intertwined and in dubiously sustainable relationships. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017) and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Processes of globalization—the liberalization of national markets, the rapid movement of goods, services, and labor across national borders—have had profound impacts on local contexts, perhaps especially so in the Global South. While some people in the worlds of business, media, and even academia praise such policies for benefitting the poor in these countries, others, particular actors on the left, are highly critical of them for leaving impoverished populations and places behind. Entering this conversation with a fresh take and a novel case is sociologist Patrick Inglis, whose new book Narrow Fairways: Getting By and Falling Behind in the New India (Oxford University Press, 2019) uses the interactions between elite members of golf clubs in city of Bangalore and the caddies who carry their bags to examine how globalization is both upending and reproducing a status quo of extreme inequality. Based on more than ten years of ethnographic fieldwork, Inglis takes readers inside these clubs to show how the concentrated wealth and the increased privatization of institutions and social services in India—e.g. education, healthcare—have made the low-income, highly precarious caddies highly dependent on the members they serve. Through “upward servility,” a set of strategies of servility and deference, the caddies attempt to show members their worthiness for support and guidance and overcome a caste status they claim doesn’t influence their chances at upward mobility. By showcasing the lives and voices of the caddies, Inglis shows how globalization may not be creating polarized societies of haves and have-nots, but situations in which the rich and poor find themselves closely intertwined and in dubiously sustainable relationships. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017) and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Processes of globalization—the liberalization of national markets, the rapid movement of goods, services, and labor across national borders—have had profound impacts on local contexts, perhaps especially so in the Global South. While some people in the worlds of business, media, and even academia praise such policies for benefitting the poor in these countries, others, particular actors on the left, are highly critical of them for leaving impoverished populations and places behind. Entering this conversation with a fresh take and a novel case is sociologist Patrick Inglis, whose new book Narrow Fairways: Getting By and Falling Behind in the New India (Oxford University Press, 2019) uses the interactions between elite members of golf clubs in city of Bangalore and the caddies who carry their bags to examine how globalization is both upending and reproducing a status quo of extreme inequality. Based on more than ten years of ethnographic fieldwork, Inglis takes readers inside these clubs to show how the concentrated wealth and the increased privatization of institutions and social services in India—e.g. education, healthcare—have made the low-income, highly precarious caddies highly dependent on the members they serve. Through “upward servility,” a set of strategies of servility and deference, the caddies attempt to show members their worthiness for support and guidance and overcome a caste status they claim doesn't influence their chances at upward mobility. By showcasing the lives and voices of the caddies, Inglis shows how globalization may not be creating polarized societies of haves and have-nots, but situations in which the rich and poor find themselves closely intertwined and in dubiously sustainable relationships. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017) and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014).

Increasing levels of globalization have led to the proliferation of spaces of international exchange. In her new book, Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence, and Empire in Subic Bay, Philippines (Stanford, 2019), sociologist Victoria Reyes looks at one such space, the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, in the Philippines, to understand how they are contested and imagined by different sets of actors in everyday life. She sees freeport zones, places intended to attract foreign investment through the relaxing of domestic economic laws, as examples of what she calls “global borderlands,” or “a place controlled by foreigners and one where the rules that govern socioeconomic life differ from those outside its walls” (2) (other examples include Acapulco, NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus, and any embassy or consulate around the world). They are where two or more legal systems coexist, and where the very notion of state sovereignty gets negotiated on the ground. Through ethnographic and historical-comparative analysis, Reyes shows the origins of the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, and looks in-depth at the wide array of contexts—military agreements, family arrangements, intimate encounters, shopping, and workplaces—to reveal these meanings and their underlying mechanisms. The result is a conceptual framework that social science scholars can apply to any space where international political, economic, and cultural tensions emerge. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Urban Ethnography: Legacies and Challenges (Emerald, 2012) and Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Contemporary Sociology, Work and Occupations, Metropolitics, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Finally, he is the director of the MA program in International Migration Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Increasing levels of globalization have led to the proliferation of spaces of international exchange. In her new book, Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence, and Empire in Subic Bay, Philippines (Stanford, 2019), sociologist Victoria Reyes looks at one such space, the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, in the Philippines, to understand how they are contested and imagined by different sets of actors in everyday life. She sees freeport zones, places intended to attract foreign investment through the relaxing of domestic economic laws, as examples of what she calls “global borderlands,” or “a place controlled by foreigners and one where the rules that govern socioeconomic life differ from those outside its walls” (2) (other examples include Acapulco, NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus, and any embassy or consulate around the world). They are where two or more legal systems coexist, and where the very notion of state sovereignty gets negotiated on the ground. Through ethnographic and historical-comparative analysis, Reyes shows the origins of the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, and looks in-depth at the wide array of contexts—military agreements, family arrangements, intimate encounters, shopping, and workplaces—to reveal these meanings and their underlying mechanisms. The result is a conceptual framework that social science scholars can apply to any space where international political, economic, and cultural tensions emerge. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Urban Ethnography: Legacies and Challenges (Emerald, 2012) and Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Contemporary Sociology, Work and Occupations, Metropolitics, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Finally, he is the director of the MA program in International Migration Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Increasing levels of globalization have led to the proliferation of spaces of international exchange. In her new book, Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence, and Empire in Subic Bay, Philippines (Stanford, 2019), sociologist Victoria Reyes looks at one such space, the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, in the Philippines, to understand how they are contested and imagined by different sets of actors in everyday life. She sees freeport zones, places intended to attract foreign investment through the relaxing of domestic economic laws, as examples of what she calls “global borderlands,” or “a place controlled by foreigners and one where the rules that govern socioeconomic life differ from those outside its walls” (2) (other examples include Acapulco, NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus, and any embassy or consulate around the world). They are where two or more legal systems coexist, and where the very notion of state sovereignty gets negotiated on the ground. Through ethnographic and historical-comparative analysis, Reyes shows the origins of the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, and looks in-depth at the wide array of contexts—military agreements, family arrangements, intimate encounters, shopping, and workplaces—to reveal these meanings and their underlying mechanisms. The result is a conceptual framework that social science scholars can apply to any space where international political, economic, and cultural tensions emerge. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Urban Ethnography: Legacies and Challenges (Emerald, 2012) and Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Contemporary Sociology, Work and Occupations, Metropolitics, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Finally, he is the director of the MA program in International Migration Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Increasing levels of globalization have led to the proliferation of spaces of international exchange. In her new book, Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence, and Empire in Subic Bay, Philippines (Stanford, 2019), sociologist Victoria Reyes looks at one such space, the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, in the Philippines, to understand how they are contested and imagined by different sets of actors in everyday life. She sees freeport zones, places intended to attract foreign investment through the relaxing of domestic economic laws, as examples of what she calls “global borderlands,” or “a place controlled by foreigners and one where the rules that govern socioeconomic life differ from those outside its walls” (2) (other examples include Acapulco, NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus, and any embassy or consulate around the world). They are where two or more legal systems coexist, and where the very notion of state sovereignty gets negotiated on the ground. Through ethnographic and historical-comparative analysis, Reyes shows the origins of the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, and looks in-depth at the wide array of contexts—military agreements, family arrangements, intimate encounters, shopping, and workplaces—to reveal these meanings and their underlying mechanisms. The result is a conceptual framework that social science scholars can apply to any space where international political, economic, and cultural tensions emerge. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Urban Ethnography: Legacies and Challenges (Emerald, 2012) and Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Contemporary Sociology, Work and Occupations, Metropolitics, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Finally, he is the director of the MA program in International Migration Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Increasing levels of globalization have led to the proliferation of spaces of international exchange. In her new book, Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence, and Empire in Subic Bay, Philippines (Stanford, 2019), sociologist Victoria Reyes looks at one such space, the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, in the Philippines, to understand how they are contested and imagined by different sets of actors in everyday life. She sees freeport zones, places intended to attract foreign investment through the relaxing of domestic economic laws, as examples of what she calls “global borderlands,” or “a place controlled by foreigners and one where the rules that govern socioeconomic life differ from those outside its walls” (2) (other examples include Acapulco, NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus, and any embassy or consulate around the world). They are where two or more legal systems coexist, and where the very notion of state sovereignty gets negotiated on the ground. Through ethnographic and historical-comparative analysis, Reyes shows the origins of the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, and looks in-depth at the wide array of contexts—military agreements, family arrangements, intimate encounters, shopping, and workplaces—to reveal these meanings and their underlying mechanisms. The result is a conceptual framework that social science scholars can apply to any space where international political, economic, and cultural tensions emerge. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Urban Ethnography: Legacies and Challenges (Emerald, 2012) and Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Contemporary Sociology, Work and Occupations, Metropolitics, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Finally, he is the director of the MA program in International Migration Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Increasing levels of globalization have led to the proliferation of spaces of international exchange. In her new book, Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence, and Empire in Subic Bay, Philippines (Stanford, 2019), sociologist Victoria Reyes looks at one such space, the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, in the Philippines, to understand how they are contested and imagined by different sets of actors in everyday life. She sees freeport zones, places intended to attract foreign investment through the relaxing of domestic economic laws, as examples of what she calls “global borderlands,” or “a place controlled by foreigners and one where the rules that govern socioeconomic life differ from those outside its walls” (2) (other examples include Acapulco, NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus, and any embassy or consulate around the world). They are where two or more legal systems coexist, and where the very notion of state sovereignty gets negotiated on the ground. Through ethnographic and historical-comparative analysis, Reyes shows the origins of the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, and looks in-depth at the wide array of contexts—military agreements, family arrangements, intimate encounters, shopping, and workplaces—to reveal these meanings and their underlying mechanisms. The result is a conceptual framework that social science scholars can apply to any space where international political, economic, and cultural tensions emerge. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Urban Ethnography: Legacies and Challenges (Emerald, 2012) and Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Contemporary Sociology, Work and Occupations, Metropolitics, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Finally, he is the director of the MA program in International Migration Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When we hear about the “future of work” today we tend to think about different forms of automation and artificial intelligence—technological innovations that will make some jobs easier and others obsolete while (hopefully) creating new ones we cannot yet foresee, and never could have. But perhaps this future isn't so incomprehensible. Perhaps it's here already, right in front of our faces, at the largest employer in the world. In their new book, Working for Respect: Community and Conflict at Walmart (Columbia University Press, 2018) sociologists Adam Reich and Peter Bearman analyze what it means to work at the world's largest retailer—and the largest provider of low-wage jobs. Through stories from Walmart employees and observations from stores around the country, they provide much insight into their working conditions and the relationship they have with their surrounding communities. But a truly novel approach and broad set of additional methods make the book shine. Inspired by the Freedom Summer of 1964, in 2014 (the 50th anniversary of that pivotal event) Reich and Bearman launched the “Summer of Respect,” for which they hired a team of college students to work on membership registration for OUR Walmart, a voluntary association of current and former Walmart associates. The students fanned out in teams to communities around the United States, and in addition to organizing and gathering data on Walmart workers, Reich and Bearman also examined them upon their return to determine the influence that social justice engagement has on people. Working for Respect, then, goes far beyond the typical “bad jobs” treatment to provide an impressive look at the important role of community in social change. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men's barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography.

When we hear about the “future of work” today we tend to think about different forms of automation and artificial intelligence—technological innovations that will make some jobs easier and others obsolete while (hopefully) creating new ones we cannot yet foresee, and never could have. But perhaps this future isn’t so incomprehensible. Perhaps it’s here already, right in front of our faces, at the largest employer in the world. In their new book, Working for Respect: Community and Conflict at Walmart (Columbia University Press, 2018) sociologists Adam Reich and Peter Bearman analyze what it means to work at the world’s largest retailer—and the largest provider of low-wage jobs. Through stories from Walmart employees and observations from stores around the country, they provide much insight into their working conditions and the relationship they have with their surrounding communities. But a truly novel approach and broad set of additional methods make the book shine. Inspired by the Freedom Summer of 1964, in 2014 (the 50th anniversary of that pivotal event) Reich and Bearman launched the “Summer of Respect,” for which they hired a team of college students to work on membership registration for OUR Walmart, a voluntary association of current and former Walmart associates. The students fanned out in teams to communities around the United States, and in addition to organizing and gathering data on Walmart workers, Reich and Bearman also examined them upon their return to determine the influence that social justice engagement has on people. Working for Respect, then, goes far beyond the typical “bad jobs” treatment to provide an impressive look at the important role of community in social change. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When we hear about the “future of work” today we tend to think about different forms of automation and artificial intelligence—technological innovations that will make some jobs easier and others obsolete while (hopefully) creating new ones we cannot yet foresee, and never could have. But perhaps this future isn’t so incomprehensible. Perhaps it’s here already, right in front of our faces, at the largest employer in the world. In their new book, Working for Respect: Community and Conflict at Walmart (Columbia University Press, 2018) sociologists Adam Reich and Peter Bearman analyze what it means to work at the world’s largest retailer—and the largest provider of low-wage jobs. Through stories from Walmart employees and observations from stores around the country, they provide much insight into their working conditions and the relationship they have with their surrounding communities. But a truly novel approach and broad set of additional methods make the book shine. Inspired by the Freedom Summer of 1964, in 2014 (the 50th anniversary of that pivotal event) Reich and Bearman launched the “Summer of Respect,” for which they hired a team of college students to work on membership registration for OUR Walmart, a voluntary association of current and former Walmart associates. The students fanned out in teams to communities around the United States, and in addition to organizing and gathering data on Walmart workers, Reich and Bearman also examined them upon their return to determine the influence that social justice engagement has on people. Working for Respect, then, goes far beyond the typical “bad jobs” treatment to provide an impressive look at the important role of community in social change. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When we hear about the “future of work” today we tend to think about different forms of automation and artificial intelligence—technological innovations that will make some jobs easier and others obsolete while (hopefully) creating new ones we cannot yet foresee, and never could have. But perhaps this future isn’t so incomprehensible. Perhaps it’s here already, right in front of our faces, at the largest employer in the world. In their new book, Working for Respect: Community and Conflict at Walmart (Columbia University Press, 2018) sociologists Adam Reich and Peter Bearman analyze what it means to work at the world’s largest retailer—and the largest provider of low-wage jobs. Through stories from Walmart employees and observations from stores around the country, they provide much insight into their working conditions and the relationship they have with their surrounding communities. But a truly novel approach and broad set of additional methods make the book shine. Inspired by the Freedom Summer of 1964, in 2014 (the 50th anniversary of that pivotal event) Reich and Bearman launched the “Summer of Respect,” for which they hired a team of college students to work on membership registration for OUR Walmart, a voluntary association of current and former Walmart associates. The students fanned out in teams to communities around the United States, and in addition to organizing and gathering data on Walmart workers, Reich and Bearman also examined them upon their return to determine the influence that social justice engagement has on people. Working for Respect, then, goes far beyond the typical “bad jobs” treatment to provide an impressive look at the important role of community in social change. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When we hear about the “future of work” today we tend to think about different forms of automation and artificial intelligence—technological innovations that will make some jobs easier and others obsolete while (hopefully) creating new ones we cannot yet foresee, and never could have. But perhaps this future isn’t so incomprehensible. Perhaps it’s here already, right in front of our faces, at the largest employer in the world. In their new book, Working for Respect: Community and Conflict at Walmart (Columbia University Press, 2018) sociologists Adam Reich and Peter Bearman analyze what it means to work at the world’s largest retailer—and the largest provider of low-wage jobs. Through stories from Walmart employees and observations from stores around the country, they provide much insight into their working conditions and the relationship they have with their surrounding communities. But a truly novel approach and broad set of additional methods make the book shine. Inspired by the Freedom Summer of 1964, in 2014 (the 50th anniversary of that pivotal event) Reich and Bearman launched the “Summer of Respect,” for which they hired a team of college students to work on membership registration for OUR Walmart, a voluntary association of current and former Walmart associates. The students fanned out in teams to communities around the United States, and in addition to organizing and gathering data on Walmart workers, Reich and Bearman also examined them upon their return to determine the influence that social justice engagement has on people. Working for Respect, then, goes far beyond the typical “bad jobs” treatment to provide an impressive look at the important role of community in social change. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When we hear about the “future of work” today we tend to think about different forms of automation and artificial intelligence—technological innovations that will make some jobs easier and others obsolete while (hopefully) creating new ones we cannot yet foresee, and never could have. But perhaps this future isn’t so incomprehensible. Perhaps it’s here already, right in front of our faces, at the largest employer in the world. In their new book, Working for Respect: Community and Conflict at Walmart (Columbia University Press, 2018) sociologists Adam Reich and Peter Bearman analyze what it means to work at the world’s largest retailer—and the largest provider of low-wage jobs. Through stories from Walmart employees and observations from stores around the country, they provide much insight into their working conditions and the relationship they have with their surrounding communities. But a truly novel approach and broad set of additional methods make the book shine. Inspired by the Freedom Summer of 1964, in 2014 (the 50th anniversary of that pivotal event) Reich and Bearman launched the “Summer of Respect,” for which they hired a team of college students to work on membership registration for OUR Walmart, a voluntary association of current and former Walmart associates. The students fanned out in teams to communities around the United States, and in addition to organizing and gathering data on Walmart workers, Reich and Bearman also examined them upon their return to determine the influence that social justice engagement has on people. Working for Respect, then, goes far beyond the typical “bad jobs” treatment to provide an impressive look at the important role of community in social change. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When we hear about the “future of work” today we tend to think about different forms of automation and artificial intelligence—technological innovations that will make some jobs easier and others obsolete while (hopefully) creating new ones we cannot yet foresee, and never could have. But perhaps this future isn’t so incomprehensible. Perhaps it’s here already, right in front of our faces, at the largest employer in the world. In their new book, Working for Respect: Community and Conflict at Walmart (Columbia University Press, 2018) sociologists Adam Reich and Peter Bearman analyze what it means to work at the world’s largest retailer—and the largest provider of low-wage jobs. Through stories from Walmart employees and observations from stores around the country, they provide much insight into their working conditions and the relationship they have with their surrounding communities. But a truly novel approach and broad set of additional methods make the book shine. Inspired by the Freedom Summer of 1964, in 2014 (the 50th anniversary of that pivotal event) Reich and Bearman launched the “Summer of Respect,” for which they hired a team of college students to work on membership registration for OUR Walmart, a voluntary association of current and former Walmart associates. The students fanned out in teams to communities around the United States, and in addition to organizing and gathering data on Walmart workers, Reich and Bearman also examined them upon their return to determine the influence that social justice engagement has on people. Working for Respect, then, goes far beyond the typical “bad jobs” treatment to provide an impressive look at the important role of community in social change. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Consumers today have a lot of choices. Whether in stores or online, people are inundated by an abundance of options for what to buy. At the same time, the products we consume seem to have more and more ingredients, additives, and chemicals in them that put our health at risk, and even their packaging could be harmful to us. How do consumers make sense of the choices they have to make to reduce their own and their family's exposure to everyday toxics? In her engaging and insightful new book, Better Safe Than Sorry: How Consumers Navigate Exposure to Everyday Toxics (University of California Press, 2018), sociologist Norah MacKendrick shows readers how today's regulatory environment in the United States came about, how so much of what we consume remains unregulated, and how environmental health groups, food retail stores, and consumers have adjusted to these realities. In an age of deregulation, when individuals are forced to take on an increasing amount of risk with decreasing support from societal institutions, MacKendrick argues that many consumers today are practicing what she calls “precautionary consumption,” or a pattern of “green” or non-toxic shopping to try to ward off the harms of conventional modern products. The burden of such an intensive, resource-consuming approach to shopping, however, falls disproportionately on women, who remain charged with the responsibility of caring for the household (shopping, cooking, cleaning), and especially mothers, who still do the lion's share of child raising. Furthermore, MacKendrick questions the ability of precautionary consumption to truly achieve environmental justice and equitable forms of widespread regulation, so that the burden for preventing exposure to everyday toxics doesn't fall on the individual, and especially not on the groups bearing excessive responsibility to do so (women, mothers) or receiving a disproportionate amount of the harm (the poor). Examining everyday toxics from a variety of angles, MacKendrick's book is an impressive analysis of how many of us shop today, why we do so, and what we can do to achieve greater equality. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men's barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Consumers today have a lot of choices. Whether in stores or online, people are inundated by an abundance of options for what to buy. At the same time, the products we consume seem to have more and more ingredients, additives, and chemicals in them that put our health at risk, and even their packaging could be harmful to us. How do consumers make sense of the choices they have to make to reduce their own and their family’s exposure to everyday toxics? In her engaging and insightful new book, Better Safe Than Sorry: How Consumers Navigate Exposure to Everyday Toxics (University of California Press, 2018), sociologist Norah MacKendrick shows readers how today’s regulatory environment in the United States came about, how so much of what we consume remains unregulated, and how environmental health groups, food retail stores, and consumers have adjusted to these realities. In an age of deregulation, when individuals are forced to take on an increasing amount of risk with decreasing support from societal institutions, MacKendrick argues that many consumers today are practicing what she calls “precautionary consumption,” or a pattern of “green” or non-toxic shopping to try to ward off the harms of conventional modern products. The burden of such an intensive, resource-consuming approach to shopping, however, falls disproportionately on women, who remain charged with the responsibility of caring for the household (shopping, cooking, cleaning), and especially mothers, who still do the lion’s share of child raising. Furthermore, MacKendrick questions the ability of precautionary consumption to truly achieve environmental justice and equitable forms of widespread regulation, so that the burden for preventing exposure to everyday toxics doesn’t fall on the individual, and especially not on the groups bearing excessive responsibility to do so (women, mothers) or receiving a disproportionate amount of the harm (the poor). Examining everyday toxics from a variety of angles, MacKendrick’s book is an impressive analysis of how many of us shop today, why we do so, and what we can do to achieve greater equality. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Consumers today have a lot of choices. Whether in stores or online, people are inundated by an abundance of options for what to buy. At the same time, the products we consume seem to have more and more ingredients, additives, and chemicals in them that put our health at risk, and even their packaging could be harmful to us. How do consumers make sense of the choices they have to make to reduce their own and their family’s exposure to everyday toxics? In her engaging and insightful new book, Better Safe Than Sorry: How Consumers Navigate Exposure to Everyday Toxics (University of California Press, 2018), sociologist Norah MacKendrick shows readers how today’s regulatory environment in the United States came about, how so much of what we consume remains unregulated, and how environmental health groups, food retail stores, and consumers have adjusted to these realities. In an age of deregulation, when individuals are forced to take on an increasing amount of risk with decreasing support from societal institutions, MacKendrick argues that many consumers today are practicing what she calls “precautionary consumption,” or a pattern of “green” or non-toxic shopping to try to ward off the harms of conventional modern products. The burden of such an intensive, resource-consuming approach to shopping, however, falls disproportionately on women, who remain charged with the responsibility of caring for the household (shopping, cooking, cleaning), and especially mothers, who still do the lion’s share of child raising. Furthermore, MacKendrick questions the ability of precautionary consumption to truly achieve environmental justice and equitable forms of widespread regulation, so that the burden for preventing exposure to everyday toxics doesn’t fall on the individual, and especially not on the groups bearing excessive responsibility to do so (women, mothers) or receiving a disproportionate amount of the harm (the poor). Examining everyday toxics from a variety of angles, MacKendrick’s book is an impressive analysis of how many of us shop today, why we do so, and what we can do to achieve greater equality. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Consumers today have a lot of choices. Whether in stores or online, people are inundated by an abundance of options for what to buy. At the same time, the products we consume seem to have more and more ingredients, additives, and chemicals in them that put our health at risk, and even their packaging could be harmful to us. How do consumers make sense of the choices they have to make to reduce their own and their family’s exposure to everyday toxics? In her engaging and insightful new book, Better Safe Than Sorry: How Consumers Navigate Exposure to Everyday Toxics (University of California Press, 2018), sociologist Norah MacKendrick shows readers how today’s regulatory environment in the United States came about, how so much of what we consume remains unregulated, and how environmental health groups, food retail stores, and consumers have adjusted to these realities. In an age of deregulation, when individuals are forced to take on an increasing amount of risk with decreasing support from societal institutions, MacKendrick argues that many consumers today are practicing what she calls “precautionary consumption,” or a pattern of “green” or non-toxic shopping to try to ward off the harms of conventional modern products. The burden of such an intensive, resource-consuming approach to shopping, however, falls disproportionately on women, who remain charged with the responsibility of caring for the household (shopping, cooking, cleaning), and especially mothers, who still do the lion’s share of child raising. Furthermore, MacKendrick questions the ability of precautionary consumption to truly achieve environmental justice and equitable forms of widespread regulation, so that the burden for preventing exposure to everyday toxics doesn’t fall on the individual, and especially not on the groups bearing excessive responsibility to do so (women, mothers) or receiving a disproportionate amount of the harm (the poor). Examining everyday toxics from a variety of angles, MacKendrick’s book is an impressive analysis of how many of us shop today, why we do so, and what we can do to achieve greater equality. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Consumers today have a lot of choices. Whether in stores or online, people are inundated by an abundance of options for what to buy. At the same time, the products we consume seem to have more and more ingredients, additives, and chemicals in them that put our health at risk, and even their packaging could be harmful to us. How do consumers make sense of the choices they have to make to reduce their own and their family’s exposure to everyday toxics? In her engaging and insightful new book, Better Safe Than Sorry: How Consumers Navigate Exposure to Everyday Toxics (University of California Press, 2018), sociologist Norah MacKendrick shows readers how today’s regulatory environment in the United States came about, how so much of what we consume remains unregulated, and how environmental health groups, food retail stores, and consumers have adjusted to these realities. In an age of deregulation, when individuals are forced to take on an increasing amount of risk with decreasing support from societal institutions, MacKendrick argues that many consumers today are practicing what she calls “precautionary consumption,” or a pattern of “green” or non-toxic shopping to try to ward off the harms of conventional modern products. The burden of such an intensive, resource-consuming approach to shopping, however, falls disproportionately on women, who remain charged with the responsibility of caring for the household (shopping, cooking, cleaning), and especially mothers, who still do the lion’s share of child raising. Furthermore, MacKendrick questions the ability of precautionary consumption to truly achieve environmental justice and equitable forms of widespread regulation, so that the burden for preventing exposure to everyday toxics doesn’t fall on the individual, and especially not on the groups bearing excessive responsibility to do so (women, mothers) or receiving a disproportionate amount of the harm (the poor). Examining everyday toxics from a variety of angles, MacKendrick’s book is an impressive analysis of how many of us shop today, why we do so, and what we can do to achieve greater equality. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Consumers today have a lot of choices. Whether in stores or online, people are inundated by an abundance of options for what to buy. At the same time, the products we consume seem to have more and more ingredients, additives, and chemicals in them that put our health at risk, and even their packaging could be harmful to us. How do consumers make sense of the choices they have to make to reduce their own and their family’s exposure to everyday toxics? In her engaging and insightful new book, Better Safe Than Sorry: How Consumers Navigate Exposure to Everyday Toxics (University of California Press, 2018), sociologist Norah MacKendrick shows readers how today’s regulatory environment in the United States came about, how so much of what we consume remains unregulated, and how environmental health groups, food retail stores, and consumers have adjusted to these realities. In an age of deregulation, when individuals are forced to take on an increasing amount of risk with decreasing support from societal institutions, MacKendrick argues that many consumers today are practicing what she calls “precautionary consumption,” or a pattern of “green” or non-toxic shopping to try to ward off the harms of conventional modern products. The burden of such an intensive, resource-consuming approach to shopping, however, falls disproportionately on women, who remain charged with the responsibility of caring for the household (shopping, cooking, cleaning), and especially mothers, who still do the lion’s share of child raising. Furthermore, MacKendrick questions the ability of precautionary consumption to truly achieve environmental justice and equitable forms of widespread regulation, so that the burden for preventing exposure to everyday toxics doesn’t fall on the individual, and especially not on the groups bearing excessive responsibility to do so (women, mothers) or receiving a disproportionate amount of the harm (the poor). Examining everyday toxics from a variety of angles, MacKendrick’s book is an impressive analysis of how many of us shop today, why we do so, and what we can do to achieve greater equality. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The built environment around us seems almost natural, as in beyond our control to alter or shape. Indeed, we have reached a point in history when cities—the largest and most complex of our settlements—are more scientifically planned, managed, and controlled than ever, leaving relatively little room for citizen input in their design or look, or in the activities allowed in them. But when we look closely we see many examples of interventions that everyday citizens make to their surroundings, ranging from graffiti and skateboarding to musical and theatrical performances and protests in public space. But a recent set of these endeavors found in today's built environment strives for something besides artistic or political expression. In his well-researched, eye-opening new book, The Help-Yourself City: Legitimacy and Inequality in DIY Urbanism (Oxford University Press, 2018), sociologist Gordon Douglas takes readers onto the streets and public spaces of cities around the world to reveal the projects and practitioners of “DIY urban design,” a specific type of informal interventions in urban public space that emphasizes functionality and civic-mindedness in physical alternations and additions. Through such projects as building and installing benches in places lacking seating and posting signage to both encourage and guide walking in neighborhoods, Douglas's DIY urban designers, who are relatively privileged socially, aim to improve their cities in ways they feel local governments should but don't or can't, and in ways that are beneficial and helpful for everyone. The book shines when he explores the implications for such practices for revealing and exacerbating inequality in today's segregated city. Ultimately, as these practices continue, and as city governments and planning agencies borrow and implement many of the ideas and projects of DIY urban design, the book encourages a consideration of the real issues of inclusion and exclusion that they signify for the sake of achieving greater levels of equality in public space. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men's barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The built environment around us seems almost natural, as in beyond our control to alter or shape. Indeed, we have reached a point in history when cities—the largest and most complex of our settlements—are more scientifically planned, managed, and controlled than ever, leaving relatively little room for citizen input in their design or look, or in the activities allowed in them. But when we look closely we see many examples of interventions that everyday citizens make to their surroundings, ranging from graffiti and skateboarding to musical and theatrical performances and protests in public space. But a recent set of these endeavors found in today’s built environment strives for something besides artistic or political expression. In his well-researched, eye-opening new book, The Help-Yourself City: Legitimacy and Inequality in DIY Urbanism (Oxford University Press, 2018), sociologist Gordon Douglas takes readers onto the streets and public spaces of cities around the world to reveal the projects and practitioners of “DIY urban design,” a specific type of informal interventions in urban public space that emphasizes functionality and civic-mindedness in physical alternations and additions. Through such projects as building and installing benches in places lacking seating and posting signage to both encourage and guide walking in neighborhoods, Douglas’s DIY urban designers, who are relatively privileged socially, aim to improve their cities in ways they feel local governments should but don’t or can’t, and in ways that are beneficial and helpful for everyone. The book shines when he explores the implications for such practices for revealing and exacerbating inequality in today’s segregated city. Ultimately, as these practices continue, and as city governments and planning agencies borrow and implement many of the ideas and projects of DIY urban design, the book encourages a consideration of the real issues of inclusion and exclusion that they signify for the sake of achieving greater levels of equality in public space. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The built environment around us seems almost natural, as in beyond our control to alter or shape. Indeed, we have reached a point in history when cities—the largest and most complex of our settlements—are more scientifically planned, managed, and controlled than ever, leaving relatively little room for citizen input in their design or look, or in the activities allowed in them. But when we look closely we see many examples of interventions that everyday citizens make to their surroundings, ranging from graffiti and skateboarding to musical and theatrical performances and protests in public space. But a recent set of these endeavors found in today's built environment strives for something besides artistic or political expression. In his well-researched, eye-opening new book, The Help-Yourself City: Legitimacy and Inequality in DIY Urbanism (Oxford University Press, 2018), sociologist Gordon Douglas takes readers onto the streets and public spaces of cities around the world to reveal the projects and practitioners of “DIY urban design,” a specific type of informal interventions in urban public space that emphasizes functionality and civic-mindedness in physical alternations and additions. Through such projects as building and installing benches in places lacking seating and posting signage to both encourage and guide walking in neighborhoods, Douglas's DIY urban designers, who are relatively privileged socially, aim to improve their cities in ways they feel local governments should but don't or can't, and in ways that are beneficial and helpful for everyone. The book shines when he explores the implications for such practices for revealing and exacerbating inequality in today's segregated city. Ultimately, as these practices continue, and as city governments and planning agencies borrow and implement many of the ideas and projects of DIY urban design, the book encourages a consideration of the real issues of inclusion and exclusion that they signify for the sake of achieving greater levels of equality in public space. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men's barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography.  

The built environment around us seems almost natural, as in beyond our control to alter or shape. Indeed, we have reached a point in history when cities—the largest and most complex of our settlements—are more scientifically planned, managed, and controlled than ever, leaving relatively little room for citizen input in their design or look, or in the activities allowed in them. But when we look closely we see many examples of interventions that everyday citizens make to their surroundings, ranging from graffiti and skateboarding to musical and theatrical performances and protests in public space. But a recent set of these endeavors found in today’s built environment strives for something besides artistic or political expression. In his well-researched, eye-opening new book, The Help-Yourself City: Legitimacy and Inequality in DIY Urbanism (Oxford University Press, 2018), sociologist Gordon Douglas takes readers onto the streets and public spaces of cities around the world to reveal the projects and practitioners of “DIY urban design,” a specific type of informal interventions in urban public space that emphasizes functionality and civic-mindedness in physical alternations and additions. Through such projects as building and installing benches in places lacking seating and posting signage to both encourage and guide walking in neighborhoods, Douglas’s DIY urban designers, who are relatively privileged socially, aim to improve their cities in ways they feel local governments should but don’t or can’t, and in ways that are beneficial and helpful for everyone. The book shines when he explores the implications for such practices for revealing and exacerbating inequality in today’s segregated city. Ultimately, as these practices continue, and as city governments and planning agencies borrow and implement many of the ideas and projects of DIY urban design, the book encourages a consideration of the real issues of inclusion and exclusion that they signify for the sake of achieving greater levels of equality in public space. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The built environment around us seems almost natural, as in beyond our control to alter or shape. Indeed, we have reached a point in history when cities—the largest and most complex of our settlements—are more scientifically planned, managed, and controlled than ever, leaving relatively little room for citizen input in their design or look, or in the activities allowed in them. But when we look closely we see many examples of interventions that everyday citizens make to their surroundings, ranging from graffiti and skateboarding to musical and theatrical performances and protests in public space. But a recent set of these endeavors found in today’s built environment strives for something besides artistic or political expression. In his well-researched, eye-opening new book, The Help-Yourself City: Legitimacy and Inequality in DIY Urbanism (Oxford University Press, 2018), sociologist Gordon Douglas takes readers onto the streets and public spaces of cities around the world to reveal the projects and practitioners of “DIY urban design,” a specific type of informal interventions in urban public space that emphasizes functionality and civic-mindedness in physical alternations and additions. Through such projects as building and installing benches in places lacking seating and posting signage to both encourage and guide walking in neighborhoods, Douglas’s DIY urban designers, who are relatively privileged socially, aim to improve their cities in ways they feel local governments should but don’t or can’t, and in ways that are beneficial and helpful for everyone. The book shines when he explores the implications for such practices for revealing and exacerbating inequality in today’s segregated city. Ultimately, as these practices continue, and as city governments and planning agencies borrow and implement many of the ideas and projects of DIY urban design, the book encourages a consideration of the real issues of inclusion and exclusion that they signify for the sake of achieving greater levels of equality in public space. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The built environment around us seems almost natural, as in beyond our control to alter or shape. Indeed, we have reached a point in history when cities—the largest and most complex of our settlements—are more scientifically planned, managed, and controlled than ever, leaving relatively little room for citizen input in their design or look, or in the activities allowed in them. But when we look closely we see many examples of interventions that everyday citizens make to their surroundings, ranging from graffiti and skateboarding to musical and theatrical performances and protests in public space. But a recent set of these endeavors found in today’s built environment strives for something besides artistic or political expression. In his well-researched, eye-opening new book, The Help-Yourself City: Legitimacy and Inequality in DIY Urbanism (Oxford University Press, 2018), sociologist Gordon Douglas takes readers onto the streets and public spaces of cities around the world to reveal the projects and practitioners of “DIY urban design,” a specific type of informal interventions in urban public space that emphasizes functionality and civic-mindedness in physical alternations and additions. Through such projects as building and installing benches in places lacking seating and posting signage to both encourage and guide walking in neighborhoods, Douglas’s DIY urban designers, who are relatively privileged socially, aim to improve their cities in ways they feel local governments should but don’t or can’t, and in ways that are beneficial and helpful for everyone. The book shines when he explores the implications for such practices for revealing and exacerbating inequality in today’s segregated city. Ultimately, as these practices continue, and as city governments and planning agencies borrow and implement many of the ideas and projects of DIY urban design, the book encourages a consideration of the real issues of inclusion and exclusion that they signify for the sake of achieving greater levels of equality in public space. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The built environment around us seems almost natural, as in beyond our control to alter or shape. Indeed, we have reached a point in history when cities—the largest and most complex of our settlements—are more scientifically planned, managed, and controlled than ever, leaving relatively little room for citizen input in their design or look, or in the activities allowed in them. But when we look closely we see many examples of interventions that everyday citizens make to their surroundings, ranging from graffiti and skateboarding to musical and theatrical performances and protests in public space. But a recent set of these endeavors found in today’s built environment strives for something besides artistic or political expression. In his well-researched, eye-opening new book, The Help-Yourself City: Legitimacy and Inequality in DIY Urbanism (Oxford University Press, 2018), sociologist Gordon Douglas takes readers onto the streets and public spaces of cities around the world to reveal the projects and practitioners of “DIY urban design,” a specific type of informal interventions in urban public space that emphasizes functionality and civic-mindedness in physical alternations and additions. Through such projects as building and installing benches in places lacking seating and posting signage to both encourage and guide walking in neighborhoods, Douglas’s DIY urban designers, who are relatively privileged socially, aim to improve their cities in ways they feel local governments should but don’t or can’t, and in ways that are beneficial and helpful for everyone. The book shines when he explores the implications for such practices for revealing and exacerbating inequality in today’s segregated city. Ultimately, as these practices continue, and as city governments and planning agencies borrow and implement many of the ideas and projects of DIY urban design, the book encourages a consideration of the real issues of inclusion and exclusion that they signify for the sake of achieving greater levels of equality in public space. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With the rise of the #MeToo movement following dozens of high-profile cases of sexual harassment and assault by professional men against women colleagues, gender equality has become a popular topic of discussion and a policy goal. Among the many topics under consideration is the persistent gender wage gap and how to close it. Most of the conversation of equal pay between men and women revolves around such issues as family leave policies, the undervaluing of feminine jobs, and gendered approaches to salary negotiation, among others. And almost all of the discussion concerns adult women during their peak earning years. But are there other factors that we must consider to fully understand why women continue to earn less than men despite earning bachelors and even some graduate degrees at higher rates? Does an explanation perhaps reside before women even go to college? In her timely and intriguing book, The Cost of Being a Girl: Working Teens and the Origins of the Gender Wage Gap (Temple University Press, 2017), sociologist Yasemin Besen-Cassino considers the first jobs that women have, as teenagers, and how their work conditions and treatment by employers help shape their self-understandings as workers and approach to being a worker. Focusing on people who work as babysitters and in retail, she shows how girls learn to accept such inequities as having to work extra hours for no pay and to have their work regarded as naturally “caring,” and therefore not something worth compensating. Through an innovative mixed-methods approach, Besen-Cassino goes a long way toward revealing how the seeds for the gender wage gap get sown.  Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men's barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With the rise of the #MeToo movement following dozens of high-profile cases of sexual harassment and assault by professional men against women colleagues, gender equality has become a popular topic of discussion and a policy goal. Among the many topics under consideration is the persistent gender wage gap and how to close it. Most of the conversation of equal pay between men and women revolves around such issues as family leave policies, the undervaluing of feminine jobs, and gendered approaches to salary negotiation, among others. And almost all of the discussion concerns adult women during their peak earning years. But are there other factors that we must consider to fully understand why women continue to earn less than men despite earning bachelors and even some graduate degrees at higher rates? Does an explanation perhaps reside before women even go to college? In her timely and intriguing book, The Cost of Being a Girl: Working Teens and the Origins of the Gender Wage Gap (Temple University Press, 2017), sociologist Yasemin Besen-Cassino considers the first jobs that women have, as teenagers, and how their work conditions and treatment by employers help shape their self-understandings as workers and approach to being a worker. Focusing on people who work as babysitters and in retail, she shows how girls learn to accept such inequities as having to work extra hours for no pay and to have their work regarded as naturally “caring,” and therefore not something worth compensating. Through an innovative mixed-methods approach, Besen-Cassino goes a long way toward revealing how the seeds for the gender wage gap get sown.  Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With the rise of the #MeToo movement following dozens of high-profile cases of sexual harassment and assault by professional men against women colleagues, gender equality has become a popular topic of discussion and a policy goal. Among the many topics under consideration is the persistent gender wage gap and how to close it. Most of the conversation of equal pay between men and women revolves around such issues as family leave policies, the undervaluing of feminine jobs, and gendered approaches to salary negotiation, among others. And almost all of the discussion concerns adult women during their peak earning years. But are there other factors that we must consider to fully understand why women continue to earn less than men despite earning bachelors and even some graduate degrees at higher rates? Does an explanation perhaps reside before women even go to college? In her timely and intriguing book, The Cost of Being a Girl: Working Teens and the Origins of the Gender Wage Gap (Temple University Press, 2017), sociologist Yasemin Besen-Cassino considers the first jobs that women have, as teenagers, and how their work conditions and treatment by employers help shape their self-understandings as workers and approach to being a worker. Focusing on people who work as babysitters and in retail, she shows how girls learn to accept such inequities as having to work extra hours for no pay and to have their work regarded as naturally “caring,” and therefore not something worth compensating. Through an innovative mixed-methods approach, Besen-Cassino goes a long way toward revealing how the seeds for the gender wage gap get sown.  Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With the rise of the #MeToo movement following dozens of high-profile cases of sexual harassment and assault by professional men against women colleagues, gender equality has become a popular topic of discussion and a policy goal. Among the many topics under consideration is the persistent gender wage gap and how to close it. Most of the conversation of equal pay between men and women revolves around such issues as family leave policies, the undervaluing of feminine jobs, and gendered approaches to salary negotiation, among others. And almost all of the discussion concerns adult women during their peak earning years. But are there other factors that we must consider to fully understand why women continue to earn less than men despite earning bachelors and even some graduate degrees at higher rates? Does an explanation perhaps reside before women even go to college? In her timely and intriguing book, The Cost of Being a Girl: Working Teens and the Origins of the Gender Wage Gap (Temple University Press, 2017), sociologist Yasemin Besen-Cassino considers the first jobs that women have, as teenagers, and how their work conditions and treatment by employers help shape their self-understandings as workers and approach to being a worker. Focusing on people who work as babysitters and in retail, she shows how girls learn to accept such inequities as having to work extra hours for no pay and to have their work regarded as naturally “caring,” and therefore not something worth compensating. Through an innovative mixed-methods approach, Besen-Cassino goes a long way toward revealing how the seeds for the gender wage gap get sown.  Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With the rise of the #MeToo movement following dozens of high-profile cases of sexual harassment and assault by professional men against women colleagues, gender equality has become a popular topic of discussion and a policy goal. Among the many topics under consideration is the persistent gender wage gap and how to close it. Most of the conversation of equal pay between men and women revolves around such issues as family leave policies, the undervaluing of feminine jobs, and gendered approaches to salary negotiation, among others. And almost all of the discussion concerns adult women during their peak earning years. But are there other factors that we must consider to fully understand why women continue to earn less than men despite earning bachelors and even some graduate degrees at higher rates? Does an explanation perhaps reside before women even go to college? In her timely and intriguing book, The Cost of Being a Girl: Working Teens and the Origins of the Gender Wage Gap (Temple University Press, 2017), sociologist Yasemin Besen-Cassino considers the first jobs that women have, as teenagers, and how their work conditions and treatment by employers help shape their self-understandings as workers and approach to being a worker. Focusing on people who work as babysitters and in retail, she shows how girls learn to accept such inequities as having to work extra hours for no pay and to have their work regarded as naturally “caring,” and therefore not something worth compensating. Through an innovative mixed-methods approach, Besen-Cassino goes a long way toward revealing how the seeds for the gender wage gap get sown.  Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With the rise of the #MeToo movement following dozens of high-profile cases of sexual harassment and assault by professional men against women colleagues, gender equality has become a popular topic of discussion and a policy goal. Among the many topics under consideration is the persistent gender wage gap and how to close it. Most of the conversation of equal pay between men and women revolves around such issues as family leave policies, the undervaluing of feminine jobs, and gendered approaches to salary negotiation, among others. And almost all of the discussion concerns adult women during their peak earning years. But are there other factors that we must consider to fully understand why women continue to earn less than men despite earning bachelors and even some graduate degrees at higher rates? Does an explanation perhaps reside before women even go to college? In her timely and intriguing book, The Cost of Being a Girl: Working Teens and the Origins of the Gender Wage Gap (Temple University Press, 2017), sociologist Yasemin Besen-Cassino considers the first jobs that women have, as teenagers, and how their work conditions and treatment by employers help shape their self-understandings as workers and approach to being a worker. Focusing on people who work as babysitters and in retail, she shows how girls learn to accept such inequities as having to work extra hours for no pay and to have their work regarded as naturally “caring,” and therefore not something worth compensating. Through an innovative mixed-methods approach, Besen-Cassino goes a long way toward revealing how the seeds for the gender wage gap get sown.  Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With the rise of the #MeToo movement following dozens of high-profile cases of sexual harassment and assault by professional men against women colleagues, gender equality has become a popular topic of discussion and a policy goal. Among the many topics under consideration is the persistent gender wage gap and how to close it. Most of the conversation of equal pay between men and women revolves around such issues as family leave policies, the undervaluing of feminine jobs, and gendered approaches to salary negotiation, among others. And almost all of the discussion concerns adult women during their peak earning years. But are there other factors that we must consider to fully understand why women continue to earn less than men despite earning bachelors and even some graduate degrees at higher rates? Does an explanation perhaps reside before women even go to college? In her timely and intriguing book, The Cost of Being a Girl: Working Teens and the Origins of the Gender Wage Gap (Temple University Press, 2017), sociologist Yasemin Besen-Cassino considers the first jobs that women have, as teenagers, and how their work conditions and treatment by employers help shape their self-understandings as workers and approach to being a worker. Focusing on people who work as babysitters and in retail, she shows how girls learn to accept such inequities as having to work extra hours for no pay and to have their work regarded as naturally “caring,” and therefore not something worth compensating. Through an innovative mixed-methods approach, Besen-Cassino goes a long way toward revealing how the seeds for the gender wage gap get sown.  Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many of us move to a new place at some point in our lives for a variety of reasons: for a job, to be with a partner, to attend school, for a change of scenery, to retire. When we have a choice, we consider a host of place characteristics to make a decision on where to go: its cost of living, crime rate, climate, array of “qualities” (life, schools, housing), amenities. And, we often assume that when we get there we will either always “be ourselves” or reinvent ourselves, and become a new person. Little do we know that our identities—how we think about and perform them—are more out of our control in new environments than we ever would have thought and could never have planned. In her provocative new book, How Places Make Us: Novel LBQ Identities in Four Small Cities, sociologist Japonica Brown-Saracino challenges the idea that we always possess a “core self” wherever we go. By examining lesbian, bisexual, and queer (LBQ) women in four cities around the U.S. (Ithaca, NY; San Luis Obispo, CA; Portland, ME; and Greenfield, MA), she strikingly finds homogeneity in terms of how people self-identify within places, but heterogeneity across places despite both the cities and people being similar. Brown-Saracino discovers that these women adopt distinct local “sexual identity cultures” that are shaped by elements in each place’s ecology, specifically how they perceive the abundance and acceptance there of others like them, the city’s narratives about itself, and the types of women like them that they meet. Most importantly, how they arrange and act out these identities are often very different from how they did so before they moved there. Featuring a rigorous analysis and compelling presentation, this book forces us to rethink what we know about the identities we hold, the communities we belong to, and the places where we live. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale mens barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City and Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012) and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Public scholarship takes many forms, from op-eds to activism to blog posts. In their new book, Down the Up Staircase: Three Generations of a Harlem Family (Columbia University Press, 2017), Associate Professor Bruce Haynes and freelance writer, developmental editor, and educator Syma Solovitch (both co-authors and a married couple) use a “sociological memoir” to show a variety of social science concepts in the fields of urban studies, social class, and race. The subject is Haynes's family, whose members were at the heart of several key events, periods, and organizations in African American life in the twentieth century. His grandfather was a leading scholar of the Great Migration and founded the National Urban League, while his grandmother was a noted children's book author of the Harlem Renaissance. The couple became members of the new black Harlem. His parents, who made great sacrifices, such as the gradual deterioration of their house, to send their three sons to private school, resembled the tenuous position African Americans held in the middle class. And Haynes and his brothers came of age in an equally exciting and dangerous period in New York City's history: the turbulence of the 60s, decline of the 70s, and devastation of the 80s. Interweaving a variety of sociological concepts and historical examinations with intimate portraits of this singular family, Down the Up Staircase takes readers on an entertaining and provocative tour of twentieth-century urban America. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale mens barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge; 2012) and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography.

Urban sociologists typically use a few grand narratives to explain the path of the American city through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. These include industrialization, mass immigration, the “Great Migration,” deindustrialization, suburbanization (or “white flight”), gentrification, and postindustrial/neoliberal growth policies, among others. In Race and the Politics of Deception: The Making of an American City (New York University Press, 2017) , Associate Professor Christopher Mele shows readers the more granular details of this history. Focusing on growth, decline, and revitalization of Chester, a small city in Pennsylvania near Philadelphia, Mele specifically reveals how race, or an ideology and discourse of racial blindness, have been used as a strategy of exclusion since World War I. Proceeding chronologically, the book examines how the politics of growth in Chester have revolved on ideas of race, from housing segregation to civil rights clashes. It culminates with the present-day realities of life in Chester, in which the city boasts a casino, a soccer stadium, and a redeveloped waterfront, mainly for visitors, while its majority population of low-income minorities get labeled as either compliant participants in (e.g. as low-wage workers) or obstructions to (e.g. as criminals or deviants) this image and growth. The imagery ignores the structural conditions that create their poverty. Mele provides a new, fascinating lens for looking at the relationship between race and space in the city. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men's barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge; 2012) and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices