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Employing ethnographic research methods, this paper provides a description and reflection on my fieldwork with a group of men working as day laborers at a casual work site in Brooklyn, New York City. The participants are diverse across various characteristics, in particular nationality, race, and ethnicity. This paper focuses on the interactions between the fieldworker and one of the different groups working at this intersection influenced by social positions of nationality, ethnicity, race, and gender. As significant as are the persons and social action that are the focus of study in fieldwork, there are also the participants? own interpretations of the fieldworker. I consider the participants? conceptions and thus, their social construction of the ethnographer and then go onto reflect how this experience informed and contributed to the interpretation of social meaning in the field. The overall project attempts to advance our understanding of the incorporation of new immigrants into American society, by considering the factors shaping these processes and the effects on American culture. And in this paper, the ethnographer?s work in interpreting meaning reflects the multiple realities and shifting identities of the various actors, including the researcher herself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper follows the route gentrification took in New York City from 1990-2000. It focuses on the key neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Gentrification is a process of urban renewal based on the middle- and upper-middle classes settling in working-class or poorer urban neighborhoods. My argument has four parts, (1) gentrification is still marked by demographic changes and displacements along racial lines, (2) real estate disinvestment precedes gentrification, (3) the state stimulates reinvestment through property tax enforcement policies, and (4) deindustrialization still occurs prior to and during the gentrification process. My argument responds to recent work by Neil Smith and Jason Hackworth. Methodologically, I employ a combination of variables to trace gentrification. To determine the timing of disinvestment and reinvestment I track real estate tax delinquency patterns. These patterns are linked to alterations in city property tax enforcement policies. I chart out neighborhood property sales to identify renewed capital interest. To show residential displacement I employ Census data showing citywide changes in neighborhood racial composition. I employ local electric company records to provide year-to-year changes in the neighborhood?s population. Finally, I use Standard Industrial Classification data to capture local industrial change. Smith and Hackworth privilege real estate capitalists in the expansion of gentrification. The timing of investment, demographic, and industrial changes I present challenges their argument. A more complex image of early population shifts, accompanied by legislative innovations and the decline of manufacturing, precedes extensive reinvestment by real estate capitalists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the importance of day to day life in a Brooklyn park for understanding urban residents relationship to nature. Utilizing ethnographic methods, this brief foray into daily life raises questions about the level of analysis commonly used when discussing environmental issues. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of commercial revitalization engenders vigorous public and political debate, yet its meaning remains elusive and rather simplistically examined within the literature. Researchers and policymakers increasingly describe resurgence of downtown retail in urban neighborhoods previously considered moribund and perilous areas to flee. However, the factors animating commercial revival are implicitly assumed in most instances, yet conceptually and empirically underdeveloped. This paper elucidates the meaning of commercial revitalization and examines ways that neighborhood-based small business owners collectively stimulate revitalization and transform the commercial landscape of a Brooklyn New York neighborhood into an alluring shopping destination. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1980s and 1990s, artists and artisan based entrepreneurial businesses are credited with creating a center for the arts and cultural production in Greenpoint Williamsburg, Community Board Number 1, on the Brooklyn waterfront. Yet, environmental hazards such as pollution and crime are missing from sociological accounts about artists' everyday lives. How did artists in Greenpoint-Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York, understand and interpret the toxic legacy of pollution and the presence of materials that are harmful to human health in their environment? Based on three years residence in the neighborhood, observation and depth interviews with 50 artists, this paper presents how artists participated in waste making, used environment and pollution as a discourse in their culture, and participated in the community concerning toxic waste and pollution. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers how amateur boxers use Gleason's Boxing Gym in Brooklyn, New York: how they understand their training and how the practices of boxing are linked to the transformation of social space in postindustrial Brooklyn. I argue that for amateur boxers, the gym stands between two major US institutions: the prison and wage labor. Most of the amateurs I collaborated with have experience with incarceration and use the gym as a space in which to recover from forced confinement, readjust to life outside prison walls, negotiate criminal markings, and avoid criminal futures. Others attempt to forfeit participation in criminal economies but find securing employment nearly impossible. Both groups of fighters, though they are not paid for their labor, understand boxing as their job. They use the gym to engage in the masculine socializations of wage labor, such as the production of discipline, dignity, status, and prestige. Whereas sociologists understand some of these social processes as the by-products of formalized work, amateur men reveal that certain socializations can be undertaken in alternative spaces, where works take place but without wages. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]