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Death and dying are woven throughout the work of home care aides, and yet the care they provide at the end of life (EOL) remains poorly understood. This is due in part to the multiple circumstances under which aides provide EOL care. In this paper, we elucidate the EOL care experiences of aides working in home care agencies in New York City. We conducted in-depth interviews with 29 home care aides, and we analyzed these data using inductive, team-based methods. Our findings show that aides may not be aware of or accept a client's EOL status, and they may avoid EOL care. These conditions shape EOL care, and we detail the committed forms of care aides provide when they are aware and accepting. We recommend improved training, support systems, and policy change to enhance aides' contributions to EOL care, while protecting aides' health and well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: To guide and provide orientation to research on student suicide, this study aimed to analyze the research status on student suicide with the help of bibliometric analysis. Utilising bibliometric methodology, this study complements existing literature by giving a comprehensive, reliable thematic representation of this topic. Method: A Scopus search was done and all published research papers were reviewed. A total of 187 papers published between 1959 and 2021 were analyzed. We identified the most influential journals in this field, the most prolific nations and institutions, as well as the years with the most publications, the most cited papers, notable authors, and most researched areas, It was followed by use of the VOSviewer software (version 1.6.18) to construct and visualize the bibliometric networks like co-authorship network map, inter-country co-authorship network map, and keywords co-occurrences network maps. Results: The analysis reveals the current research trend where the number of publications on 'student suicide' reflects an overall upward trend over the years, suggesting that research on student suicidology is fast evolving but the pace is slow. The maximum publications were in the year 2020. The United States made the largest contribution (n = 85). The most productive institution was the University of Rochester, New York (n = 10). Allan J Schwartz was the most prolific author, with nine research papers. Journal of College Student Psychotherapy (n = 13) was the journal and Medicine (n = 118) was the discipline with the highest number of publications. Conclusion: The study potentially has important implications for designing more comprehensive screening and assessment tools for suicide risk. Future work should pay more attention to developing effective intervention programs for students. The results also highlight the need for more research work on student suicidology. More research in this area is needed to create awareness among students. Consequently, this study can be a big critique and torch bearer at the same time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the contribution of Rose Laub Coser to sociological theory in the structural tradition. Laub Coser was one of the most successful women sociologists of her generation. She was born in Berlin in 1916 but left with her family in 1924 for Antwerp in Belgium, and went into exile in 1939 in New York. Thus, Laub Coser was familiar with many cultural worlds and languages. Although she primarily lived in the United States, the transnational influence of the metropolis of Berlin is manifest in her sociological work in several ways. Conceptually, this is relevant for Laub Coser's reception of Georg Simmel's Soziologie. In particular, her theory of the complexity of social roles as a seedbed of individual autonomy is founded on Simmel's theory of the importance of conflict and ambivalence for individualization. Her multiple experiences of emigration and exile influenced Laub Coser's work, including Women of Courage, an analysis of the social lives of Eastern European and Italian migrants in the metropolis of New York, and her internationally comparative studies on the family and women's rise in the labor market. Laub Coser investigated the social consequences of having multiple group affiliations and the conditions for such individuals in the cultural and social structure of modernity. In her transnationally comparative work of migrant cultures, she demonstrated the scope of her theory of role complexity. Contrary to images of migration bare of gender and culture, Laub Coser interprets the individuals she studied in Women of Courage as active agents of migration and provides insights on the influence that cultural definitions of situations have had toward creating the social structure of modern society. Starting from Robert K. Merton's role-set theory and integrating Simmel's analysis of forms of social differentiation, Laub Coser analyzed the conditions and consequences of multiple group affiliations, their observability, and the ambivalences in "cross-cutting social circles" (Simmel), which create conditions for developing individuality and individualism. The cultural mandate for women to be socialized toward the "greedy institution" of the family offers only restricted role-sets and opportunities for articulating social roles, constraining their social competencies as autonomous individuals. Despite the alienating and anomic consequences of role complexity, Laub Coser valued its liberating potential. Possibly this theoretical orientation was also influenced by her own experience as an immigrant, sociologist, and political activist in the socialist women's movement. The posthumously published study Women of Courage is based on a research project that began in the 1980s, comprising hundreds of qualitative interviews with women who had migrated to New York in the early 1920s, and who were at least 13 years old when they immigrated. The histories of these women demonstrate their role in enabling the social mobility of their families in the receiving society. They provided insights into how cultures change and how women migrants understood their lives in the New World. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States, pregnant people considering a vaginal birth after cesarean delivery (VBAC) face this decision in a highly contested environment where VBAC is simultaneously encouraged—situated within discourses promoting vaginal birth—and discouraged through discourses emphasizing reproductive risk. Woven through these competing discourses is a shared emphasis on maternal responsibility, reflective of a socially constructed belief that birth method is bound implicitly to one's "goodness" as a mother. This paper employs a discursive analytic lens to examine the experiences of 16 pregnant people in New York City seeking VBACs for their upcoming births. We examine how sociocultural discourses of "responsible" mothering shape participants' experiences of considering VBAC and examine participants' anxieties over VBAC and its attainability in light of their past birth experiences. Our analysis demonstrates that participants reproduce discourses privileging vaginal birth, and simultaneously challenge these discourses by invoking an "embodied knowledge" that enables them to assert themselves as responsible mothers in the context of past cesarean deliveries and uncertainty surrounding their upcoming births. Implications are discussed in the context of existing literature on birth and discourses of maternal responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates urban governance empirically by applying social network analysis methods to data gathered through structured interviews in London and New York. We explore how decisions are made in complex institutional environments inhabited by various types of actors. Owing to the time-consuming data collection and treatment processes, the research zooms in on transport. The comparative approach enabled the detection of different structural features in the governance networks shaping transport strategies in both cities. The perceived relative power, influence, dependence and/or affinity between the actors involved is discussed based on network attributes. The evidence suggests that transport governance in London is more centralised (and, arguably, more technocratic and integrated), in the sense that a few prestigious entities are clearly more prominent. In New York the institutional environment is typified by many checks and balances (and, arguably, more democratic and fragmented), where central actors are less obvious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As several US states have legalized recreational marijuana over the past decade, local approval of commercial marijuana activities has faced opposition in a non-negligible share of communities. A common provision in state laws often grants local governments the authority to prohibit marijuana businesses from locating within their jurisdictions. This paper analyzed determinants of local government policies in New York State following the legalization of recreational marijuana in 2021. A key feature of New York's law authorized municipal governments to pass an "opt-out" ordinance prohibiting marijuana retail stores, on-site consumption establishments, or both. Based on results from multilevel logistic regression models, the likelihood of allowing commercial marijuana activities was higher for local governments representing communities with larger Black populations, fewer evangelical Protestants, and lower levels of household income. While slightly more municipalities prohibited on-site consumption, determinants of opt-out decisions were similar for both retail and consumption businesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late 1960's New York State's Urban Development Corporation (UDC), now operating as the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), has been leveraged by New York City government to pursue large-scale projects. This paper examines two cases from New York City in which the city borrowed a state-controlled public authority's power to accomplish projects initiated at the local level: the case of Queens West, a development in western Queens, proposed in the early 1980s, and the case of Columbia - Manhattanville, an expansion of the Columbia University campus into Harlem, announced in 2003. These cases highlight how cities might, at times, embrace state involvement rather than lament its restrictions or rue its indifference. The study concludes by suggesting a theoretical path for incorporating such a city-state dynamic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an in-person and digital ethnography of people in New York State who use drugs and seek treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD) using phone or video connection to receive healthcare (telecare) including interviews prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. This article leverages a Feminist and Science and Technology Studies (STS) approach to elucidate how the framing of the opioid crisis shapes the interconnections that are discernable, providing a heuristic to understand the increased rates of deaths due to drug overdose during the pandemic. The narratives of people seeking treatment are analyzed through the theoretical lenses of Nelly Oudshoorn's concept of the technogeography of care, Nancy Campbell's concept of technologies of suspicion, and Nancy Fraser's analysis of the US juridical-administrative-therapeutic in/justice system. This paper traces and problematizes how telecare contributes to redefining the experience of familiar places, such as home, into spaces of both care and surveillance, and how the technology of telecare presents both affordances and foreclosures to accessing care as people struggle to conform with its requirements in order to receive care. Key findings are, (1) the significance of hugs and tactile connection that is sorely missed by people using telecare for group therapy, (2) the critical importance of proximity to in-person services even while using telecare, (3) the resistance strategies of telecare users to surveillance mechanisms, and (4) the continued stigmatization of drug use and treatment acts as a key barrier to people who are striving to produce the identity of a patient who is clinically stable for take-home medication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relevance of social capital in shaping Irish immigrants' reconstructions of their attachment to New York City (NYC) as place. Using extracts from Irish immigrants' previously unpublished oral histories, I make the case for situational capital, a multi-faceted and dynamic place-based resource which connects people in situ by virtue of their literal and metaphorical positionality. The coalescence of individual and collective memories, including childhood memories, underpinned the network of social relationships which fuelled interviewees' quest to recreate and reimagine a sense of 'home' both in NYC and Ireland. The resultant situational capital created by these relationships fostered a reflexive and sustained attachment to place which served to advance the cumulative economic, cultural, political and social prosperity of Irish men and women individually and collectively over time and space. Situational capital was also instrumental in advancing opportunities for Irish men and women and altering the physical characteristics of neighbourhoods. It shaped the genius loci of NYC as reconstructed by those interviewed pivoting around the fluid and ambiguous notion of real and imagined 'home.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent history of urban public libraries reveals significant changes in the way librarians, city officials, and patrons understood the value of public institutions. Branch libraries in the South Bronx during New York City's financial crisis of the 1970s reveal both the dramatic and seemingly minute developments through which the city shifted toward neoliberalism. This article draws on archives of the New York Public Library and the papers of Local 1930 (The New York Public Library Guild, AFSCME District Council 37). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the prison visitation context has recently grown, yet little is known about the overall composition of who visits. This paper describes visit groups using latent class analysis (LCA) separately for women and men incarcerated two or more years in New York State. In this context where policies support frequent in-person visits, many maintain large, diverse groups of external connections. Although theory suggests that some groups may be more beneficial than others (e.g., prosocial influence or social support), visitor classes did not predict recidivism, but recidivism was higher for those with no/few visits. Policies that restrict visitor types or amounts may diminish valuable external social ties that can be maintained and offer ongoing support in more visit-positive regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I analyze the emergence of New York City's infrastructure of homeless shelters dialectically, relationally, and historically. The members of Boogie Down Productions met in an incipient New York City homeless shelter in the mid-1980s. Their relationship and music is a window into a critical political consciousness of men living in homeless shelters because the artists gave expression to an emergent structure of feeling of resistance taking hold during intense changes to New York's political economy and its institutions. The paper first analyzes homeless policy and infrastructural change through a reading of archival sources and government reports and documents. The second section understands oral histories conducted with men living in a New York City homeless shelter as blues geographies—insurgent, critical explanations of these institutional spaces. Shelter residents actively challenge the material conditions, relations, and values that produce homeless shelters as essential instruments of the carceral state. I argue that they activate this resistance to the naturalization of shelters, and themselves as homeless, by narrating carceral spaces as abolitionist spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asks how the logics of globalized supply chains—particularly through fixes, risk, speed and stoppages, and motility—are articulated in carceral space. We employ critical logistics in conversation with carceral geographies and critical mobilities to examine prison transfers, the routine movement of incarcerated people between carceral sites, as a logistical system designed to fix carceral crises; which is to say, to make prisons viable. This work emerges from preliminary research on prison transfers, conducted from 2018 to 2019, including interviews with advocates and formerly incarcerated people and analysis of data and administrative documents obtained from the New York Department of Corrections, among others. First, we locate the emergence of contemporary practices of logistical transfer management ("transfer logistics") in the prison boom of the 1980s–1990s. We then examine the present-day transfer system to consider how risk calculation and carceral fixes inform movement throughout prison constellations as well as how transfers disrupt the fragile worlding that happens in prisons. Finally, we turn to how these logics are being reshaped and reiterated in the era of neoliberal urban planning through "justice hubs." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participatory research methodologies have expanded the opportunities for critical, emancipatory and democratic health and social work research. However, their practical application in research with vulnerable participants has historically been challenging due to ethical, practical and theoretical concerns. Individuals who are homeless are typically seen as 'hard-to-reach', transient, 'hidden' and even chaotic participant populations. Unsurprisingly, examples of the use of innovative participatory research techniques with those groups have been relatively scarce. This paper aimed to address this gap by discussing the application of one such technique – the mobile phone diary in research with multiply disadvantaged homeless adults. Diary methods are situated within the qualitative research on health, illness and social marginality, and the enhanced capabilities of the mobile phone diary are highlighted. The author illustrates the application of the mobile phone diary in his participatory research on the everyday life narratives of adults with serious mental illness (SMI) who were homeless. The process of designing the mobile phone diary is detailed. Following this, participant testimonies of their use of the mobile phone diary are presented. They demonstrate the participatory and inclusive nature, as well as the cathartic and empowering potential, of this technique. The methodological contributions and challenges and the theoretical generativity of the mobile phone diary method are discussed. The mobile phone diary is a feasible approach for eliciting evocative, contextualised and nuanced accounts of the lived experience of homelessness, social isolation, coping and recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Announces the Ninth International Conference of the National Organization on Male Sexual Victimization from October 25 to 28, 2001 in New York City. Theme of the conference.

Background: Part of a special issue on the high-stakes testing opt-out movement, this article focuses its analysis on the movement within New York State, and examines white privilege and power within one specific organization, the NYS Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE). Specifically, I examine how the public-facing work of NYSAPE addressed (or ignored) race and/or racism in their efforts to resist high-stakes testing. I also ask, in what ways do their public stances affirm and reinforce white privilege and power? Purpose: I explore the opt-out movement in New York State, and argue that it is a movement that has been largely dominated by white privilege and power. Employing critical race theory as analytical and methodological tools, I briefly examine the development and policy positions of NYSAPE, a coalition of grassroots parent, educator and community organizations. Research Design: This qualitative case study focuses on NYSAPE and employs critical race theory as a methodological and analytical framework, with specific emphasis on whiteness as property (power) and interest convergence. Conclusions/Recommendations: The paper aims to engage the opt-out movement in considering how its (in)actions are shaped by racism, a deeply entrenched element in our society, and pushes the movement to take a more liberatory stance for all children. Leaders within the opt-out movement, particularly in predominantly white and middle- to upper-class communities, have to examine their complicity in perpetuating racial inequities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the work of groups established by chapters of the American Association of Social Workers in the 1920s to develop a systematic and empirically based understanding of the interactional dynamics of the interview in social casework. Now largely forgotten, this work had influence beyond social work. The paper goes on to explore the call by the Chicago sociologist Ernest Burgess to use the ‘verbatim interview’ as a focus of common interest by sociologists and social workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Criminal justice system fines and fees are a source of revenue for courts, district attorneys, probation departments, and other actors both inside and outside of the justice system. Because these departments rely on fine and fee revenue to partially fund their budgets, they may be incentivized to oppose reforms that would reduce fine and fee collections. Using budget documents from counties and a sample of municipalities in Florida and New York, the authors find that budget reports provide more detailed data on fines and fees than are available from other data sources, including information on which types of fines and fees are collected and how much revenue criminal justice fines and fees provide, both on a per-capita basis and as a share of the total jurisdiction budget. This paper presents a replicable methodology for future research in how to use local government budget documents to evaluate fine and fee collections. A larger, forthcoming study will use this methodology to examine fine and fee collections in five states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In April 2018, a statue commemorating J Marion Sims was removed from Central Park, New York, and relocated to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where he is buried. In 1849, Sims developed a repeatable surgical solution for obstetric fistula, a debilitating condition caused by prolonged, obstructed labour, which damages the vaginal wall, resulting in permanent leakage via the vagina from either the bowel or bladder and sometimes both. Initially, Sims appears worthy of widespread adulation. There are several commemorative statues of him, he has been afforded the title of the 'father of modern gynaecology', and for 37 years, the American Urogynecological Society held an annual eponymous lecture, among other honours. Obstetric fistula rendered women social pariahs, unable to engage fully in either domestic or public life. Sims was able to create a reliably repeatable surgical solution but did so through ongoing experimentation on enslaved women. One of these women, Anarcha, was operated on at least 30 times without the use of anaesthesia over a four-year period, despite the availability of anaesthesia for the majority of the experimentation period. Over 170 years later, Sims' story retains its relevance because it represents a clear point at which race, gender and class intersect with medicine. This paper will use Sims' own account to drive the narrative, then examine matters of agency, ethics and consent that come from it, to show that his work, and subsequent renown, were only possible because of the inherent violence of chattel slavery and other systemic forms of oppression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In April 2018, a statue commemorating J Marion Sims was removed from Central Park, New York, and relocated to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where he is buried. In 1849, Sims developed a repeatable surgical solution for obstetric fistula, a debilitating condition caused by prolonged, obstructed labour, which damages the vaginal wall, resulting in permanent leakage via the vagina from either the bowel or bladder and sometimes both. Initially, Sims appears worthy of widespread adulation. There are several commemorative statues of him, he has been afforded the title of the 'father of modern gynaecology', and for 37 years, the American Urogynecological Society held an annual eponymous lecture, among other honours. Obstetric fistula rendered women social pariahs, unable to engage fully in either domestic or public life. Sims was able to create a reliably repeatable surgical solution but did so through ongoing experimentation on enslaved women. One of these women, Anarcha, was operated on at least 30 times without the use of anaesthesia over a four-year period, despite the availability of anaesthesia for the majority of the experimentation period. Over 170 years later, Sims' story retains its relevance because it represents a clear point at which race, gender and class intersect with medicine. This paper will use Sims' own account to drive the narrative, then examine matters of agency, ethics and consent that come from it, to show that his work, and subsequent renown, were only possible because of the inherent violence of chattel slavery and other systemic forms of oppression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this article is to analyze the system benefits of distributed storage at different locations on a grid that has a high penetration of renewable generation. The chosen type of distributed storage modeled is deferrable demand (e.g., thermal storage) because it is relatively inexpensive to install compared to batteries and could potentially form a large component of the peak system load. The advantage of owning deferrable demand is that the purchase of energy from the grid can be decoupled from the delivery of an energy service to customers. Consequently, these customers can reduce costs by shifting their purchases from expensive peak periods to off-peak periods when electricity prices are low. In addition, deferrable demand can provide ramping services to the grid to mitigate the uncertainty of renewable generation. The primary economic issue addressed in this paper is to determine how the storage capacity is allocated between shifting load and providing ramping services. The basic economic tradeoff is between the benefit from shifting more load from peak periods to less expensive periods, and reserving some storage capacity for ramping to reduce the amount of conventional reserve capacity purchased. Our approach uses a new form of stochastic, multi-period Security Constrained Optimal Power Flow (SCOPF) that minimizes the expected system costs for energy and ancillary services over a 24-hour horizon. For each hour, five different levels of wind generation may be realized and these are treated as different system states with known probabilities of occurring. This model is applied to a reduction of the grid in New York State and New England and simulates the hourly load on a hot summer day, treating potential wind generation at different sites as stochastic inputs. The results determine the expected amount and location of conventional generating capacity dispatched, the reserve capacity committed to maintain operating reliability, the charging/discharging of storage capacity, and the amount of potential wind generation spilled. The results show there are major differences in how the deferrable demand at two large load centers, Boston and New York City, is managed, and we provide an explanation for these differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines an anti-homeless visual campaign which appeared in New York City in the summer of 2015, in the midst of a resurgence of public concern over the visibility of homeless New Yorkers. The campaign, produced by a police union and titled “Peek-A-Boo, We See You Too” encouraged police officers and allies concerned with a perceived decline in “quality of life” to photograph homeless people on the street, tagging their locations and uploading the photographs to a website. Using the photographs, concurrent discourses, and evidence from surveys conducted by a homeless-led organization, I argue that this campaign represents more than simply an instance of revenge upon and against the homeless. Rather, I suggest that it represents a moment of what philosopher Kristie Dotson calls “epistemic backgrounding” a case in which the people visually displayed at the center of the pictures are “backgrounded” in the knowledge produced off of their images. Connecting this singular campaign with a broader conception of anti-homeless actions, I suggest that we might understand the relationship of visuality and homelessness as one which relies on revanchism for its political logic but produces the simultaneous absence and presence of homeless people through epistemic backgrounding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are many ways nurses may be leaders and serve others in the community by utilizing a unique knowledge base that is grounded in the extant nursing theories and models. Leading and serving others with nursing knowledge demarks the contributions nurses make in all situations. The purpose of this paper is to illuminate how Parse’s leading-following model and the Rainbow PRISM model (RPM) guide healthcare services in academic nursing health and wellness centers that serve the needs of all persons living in the community. Also, concepts within the RPM are discussed to align with Parse’s current refinements of the humanbecoming paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws data from a 5-year ethnographic study of young multilingual (Mixteco/Spanish/English) children in their early childhood classrooms. In this paper, we focus on two of the children and their distinctive paths as they develop language and literacy. Using a sociocultural and multimodal theoretical framework we examine how these two children participate in and negotiate a balanced literacy curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Museums and heritage operations are increasingly employing experiential forms of interpretation, such as role adoption and first-person interpretation, in order to cultivate emotional bonds between visitors and the characters that populate historic sites. The paper argues that this form of relating to the past affectively reflects a notion of memory that is underpinned by commonsense temporality and a privileging of the corporeal, both of which serve to legitimate existing relations of power. Using a dispute surrounding public entry to Ellis Island, New York, via a bridge connected to New Jersey, I ask that we understand memory as a practice generating the past's perpetual arrival where the past continually comes into existence anew rather than 'returns' from what once was. Throughout the paper I relate a number of examples where thinking about memory along these lines, as arrival, can help us question the temporal logics that underpin heritage and the authorities heritage maintains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics often mourn a loss of publicness in cities due to the increased presence of antiterror security zones and related behavioral and access controls, although recent work suggests that security landscapes have shifted from the hard, intense, militarized architecture of the late 1990s-early 2000s to a softer, less obtrusive approach more commonly seen today. Nonetheless, these studies are mostly anecdotal in nature: few studies attempt to back these claims with empirical evidence and even fewer connect this physical security imposition with the policies and plans governing its implementation and operation. In this paper I describe results of site visits to Civic Centers and Financial Districts in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. In each neighborhood I catalog security landscapes using a simple tool to assess the intensity, duration, and location of individual security zones. I find that the security landscape covers between 3.4% and 35.7% of publicly accessible space in the districts studied, and that this landscape is most prevalent and intense in New York City. I also find that security zones governed by multistakeholder networks are more intense and militarized than zones managed by a single entity. By understanding how the policies impact physical security, albeit in a relatively small sample of cities and districts, we can better predict what the future of urban security measures might hold. This paper provides empirical grounding to more common theoretical speculations regarding the future of the urban security landscape in the global West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the institutional, social, and physical design forces that shaped the ideology of Clarence A. Perry and influenced his development of the "neighborhood unit" concept. Officially introduced in 1929 as a part of the published Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, the neighborhood unit, as conceived by Perry, has strongly influenced local planning and subdivision design since its inception. In addition, this paper investigates controversy surrounding attitudes toward the neighborhood unit and the purported "determinism" and reformist intents of the concept. It investigates the wide-spread influence of the model on residential design, investigates current attitudes of usefulness of the model, and considers New Urbanism as an opportune tweaking of the design elements of the neighborhood unit. It concludes that the neighborhood unit, while having social influences in residential life, is more accurately termed a physical design model that weaves neighborhood layout and opportunities for interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses ways in which artists and cultural practitioners have recently been using forms of urban exploration as a means of engaging with, and intervening in, cities. It takes its cues from recent events on the streets of New York that involved exploring urban spaces through artistic practices. Walks, games, investigations and mappings are discussed as manifestations of a form of 'psychogeography', and are set in the context of recent increasing international interest in practices associated with this term, following its earlier use by the situationists. The paper argues that experimental modes of exploration can play a vital role in the development of critical approaches to the cultural geographies of cities. In particular, discussion centres on the political significance of these spatial practices, drawing out what they have to say about two interconnected themes: 'rights to the city' and 'writing the city'. Through addressing recent cases of psychogeographical experimentation in terms of these themes, the paper raises broad questions about artistic practices and urban exploration to introduce this theme issue on 'Arts of urban exploration' and to lead into the specific discussions in the papers that follow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1996, Sotheby's in New York held a four-day auction of many of the possessions Jackie Onassis purchased during her lifetime. This paper is an ethnography of a loose social circle of gay men, some of whom attended the pre-auction display of these objects and who regularly hold their own informal Jackie ‘O’ celebrations. It looks at what their worshipping of a female figure, Jackie ‘O’, means and how a distinctive cultural capital is espoused by gay men which differentiates them from other Jackie collectors. To this end, the paper also focuses on ‘vocabularies of appreciation’ ( ), or kitsch consumption among this loose social circle and, in this process, categories of ‘us’ and ‘them’ are performed (see ; ; ). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses Sassen's model of informalization in advanced urban economies, and in particular, its application to the construction industry in New York City. The validity of the model is assessed in light of the ethnographic accounts of Irish construction workers, which deal with both the formal and informal economies within the construction sector. While the findings are generally compatible with Sassen' s model, the paper concludes that greater attention needs to be paid to the role of ethnicity as an independent variable operating in the labour market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair as a conflicted site of public-sphere formation, and the repercussions of these conflicts on organized labor in New York. Conceived within the liberal administration of Mayor La Guardia and dedicated to the principles of social cooperation, this “closed-shop exposition” granted American Federation of Labor (AFL) trade unions an unprecedented degree of workplace benefits and rhetorical support by the Fair administration. This was undermined, however, by the trade unions’ limited public activities within the fair itself and their refusal of city offers to establish outreach and educational programs through events, rallies, and pavilions. As a result, the public space and discourse of a fair nominally devoted to social interdependence was appropriated by a variety of other interests, particularly those of corporate America. This marginalization would ultimately contribute to delegitimization, as allegations of graft and racketeering by visitors, exhibitors, and the national media framed labor as a direct threat to the “World of Tomorrow” and its visitors. Millions of Americans found their visits marred by exorbitantly inflated prices, delayed by strikes, and disappointed by cancelled exhibits. In the face of outside pressure, and with labor groups unable to address hostile critiques within the fair itself, the exposition administration withdrew its public support for unions while dramatically restricting their workplace rights. In this way, the “business-union” principles of the AFL not only undermined their legitimacy in the eyes of the public, despite the efforts of liberal municipal officials to promote them, but ultimately served to undo those very workplace gains such principles were meant to secure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent urban and economic development policies put much emphasis on the promotion of experiences. Within the experience economy, the production and consumption of products and places is transformed into “theater.” The organization of international festivals highlights that trend. However, festivalization has also infiltrated urban and economic development on a much smaller scale and turned into an overall eventification. In addition, producers and marketers of cultural products simultaneously apply this concept to advance their market positions. Hence, eventification provides shared interests for local stakeholders and producers and marketers of cultural products and opportunities to further include the latter in urban growth coalitions. This paper demonstrates how eventification fosters new relationships between local urban developers and individual artists in Berlin-Wedding and the South Bronx, New York City. It explores the benefits and disadvantages of experience planning through eventification including social exclusion and arts-led revitalization. Ultimately, eventification not only embraces an accelerating logic of ever more experience schemes and thus raises questions about its sustainability, but also features a process in which urban space, itself, is transformed into staged experiences of event consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although prisoner reentry has taken center stage in correctional research and policy discussions, there has been little emphasis on reentry among jail populations. This paper examines a jail-based reentry program in New York City that begins while individuals are incarcerated and includes 90 days of postrelease services. This article explores these assumptions through an evaluation of a jail-based reentry program in New York City that begins while individuals are incarcerated and includes 90 days of postrelease services. To determine program impact, the authors compare samples of participants with nonparticipants and program completers with noncompleters. The groups are matched using developmental trajectories derived from group-based trajectory modeling, in addition to propensity score matching. Findings show that participants perform no better than nonparticipants over a 1-year follow-up, but those who stay engaged for at least 90 days of postrelease services experience significantly fewer (and slower) returns to jail. The findings regarding program completion are tempered by several methodological concerns, however. The article concludes with a discussion of how the study may offer insights for program implementation and operation with this target population. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the effect of the human capital characteristics of co-ethnic immigrant communities on foreign-born students' math achievement. We use data on New York City public school foreign-born students from 39 countries merged with census data on the characteristics of the immigrant household heads in the city from each nation of origin and estimate regressions of student achievement on co-ethnic immigrant community characteristics, controlling for student and school attributes. We find that the income and size of the co-ethnic immigrant community has no effect on immigrant student achievement, while the percent of college graduates may have a small positive effect. In addition, children in highly English proficient immigrant communities test slightly lower than children from less proficient communities. The results suggest that there may be some protective factors associated with immigrant community members' education levels and use of native languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by a white paper produced by the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability, this study uses different measures of calculating the cost of a college degree at an upstate community college in New York. Departmental cost per credit hour, direct instructional costs, and full costs are all explained. A transcript analysis of the 2008-2009 graduates highlights excess credit hours taken and cross-subsidies necessary within degree programs to produce these graduates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores questions of sexual difference and religious belief in relation to recent debates in urban studies and geography on urban encounters. Although it has been widely suggested that increased contact between members of different groups is an important driver for tolerant and respectful intergroup relations, there is need for more careful consideration of the kinds of sites that actually facilitate 'meaningful encounters'. Specifically, we draw on empirical research in Episcopalian churches in New York City and examine how straight-identified parishioners and clergy narrate and perceive their encounters with the city's LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) population. Moving beyond the traditional focus on public space in the literature on cosmopolitan urbanism, we examine how churches serve as 'micropublics' which organize, facilitate, and/or limit encounters with sexual difference. To capture the tension between orthodox theological understandings of human sexuality and lived experiences in a metropolitan context where homosexuality is expressed relatively openly, the discussion focuses in particular on an evangelical case-study parish, where the church leadership is opposed to full LGBT inclusion in the church [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The capitalization of urban property markets intensifies the contradictions between housing as use-value affordability versus exchange-value asset accumulation, and exacerbates displacement pressures. Policies designed to deal with these contradictions-public housing and rent regulations- allow some low-income renters to resist displacement, particularly in gentrifying neighborhoods. Unfortunately, the resulting empirical configuration has been interpreted in ways that cast doubt on the extent of displacement, its causal links to gentrification, and the necessity of protective policies. In this paper we present an alternative interpretation, using New York City as a case study to analyze the spatial evolution of displacement pressures amidst the restructuring of an embattled yet vital municipal welfare state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The New York City Police Department (NYPD) introduced Compstat in 1994. Since then, the NYPD and many other law enforcement agencies which have adopted Compstat, have declared dramatic decreases in reported index crime. Indeed, in New York City the claim is that index crime has decreased over 76 per cent. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, this research examines Compstat's managerial environment. Our main concern in this paper is examining the extent (if any) of pressures which managers believe they are exposed to at Compstat, as well as how those pressures might influence unethical crime reporting. Results indicate that managers perceive that they are subject to significantly greater pressure in the Compstat era especially, but not exclusively, with respect to decreasing index crime. Further, these pressures help explain unethical crime reporting in the Compstat era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Youth gun violence is most often a group phenomenon yet most empirical examinations ignore this fact. Using interview data with 416 violent male offenders from two disadvantaged New York City neighborhoods, this paper examines the roles that the peer contexts play in explaining the nuanced patterns of respondent gun-related behaviors. We hypothesize that respondents who are comparatively more embedded in networks of peers who carry and use guns will also report greater involvement in serious gun violence. We found that guns were equated with self-protection and the most prevalent reason given for possession and carrying behaviors of peers. Belonging to a group of associates was also perceived to have protective value. Guns and armed peers played a role in heightened risk for lethal conflict. Peers are involved as co-offenders in the majority of gun events reported. We discuss the implications of our findings for violence intervention policy and future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there has been rapid recent growth in the volume of research on both whiteness and childhood within geography, these literatures have only infrequently intersected explicitly. In this paper, I argue that a focus on narratives of childhood and child rearing can significantly enrich current understandings of how imaginative geographies of American (non)whiteness are sustained and reproduced. I develop this argument using a case study of recent narratives concerning one well-known program for children living in New York City, the Fresh Air Fund, which arranges for 'inner-city' children (most of whom identify as black or Latino) to spend portions of their summers living with host families (most of whom are white) in rural and suburban areas. The activities of the fund generate regular media coverage in both New York City and many of the destination communities, contributing to a wider public narrative concerning what white families and spaces have to offer 'inner-city' children. Drawing on journalistic accounts produced over the past two decades within one important destination site for the program, the US state of Vermont, I examine the racialized imaginative geographies of city, country, and suburb mobilized and reproduced within these stories of the Fund and its effects. I specifically argue that these accounts (re)script whiteness such that it becomes a solution to, rather than a source of, inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gay men's use of the internet for social and sexual purposes is now so common that some predict an end to gay bars. In New York City, where this study took place, the use of the internet by men to meet other men seeking sex without condoms, called bareback sex, has created concerns among public health and gay community HIV/AIDS workers. This study of six popular bareback internet sites seeks to understand the nature of this new online sexual culture, initially by investigating the sites themselves through the methodology of cyber-cartography. That investigation suggested that masculinity as an analytic in gender studies might offer some value in understanding what was happening on these sites. Issues of race and ethnicity also emerged to challenge any singular notion of masculinity. This paper suggests that masculinity itself might need some recalibration, and that we may also need to rethink these sites as evolving ethical sexual cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neighborhood research, the body of work examining how the built environment affects residents, has been actively pursued across the social sciences in the past decade. Within this work, researchers focus mainly on adult residents and rely on crude census reports to measure the neighborhood space. As there are many problems associated with census data, researchers are currently surveying residents about their perceptions of their neighborhoods. Since young people are not recognized in this research agenda, this paper describes a qualitative study with 10 early adolescents in New York City, aged 11 to 13 years, and their perceptions of their neighborhoods. Results from this study serve as a foundation for quantitative work exploring the relationship between different neighborhood measurements and their association to adolescents' health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses itself to literature on ‘aesthetic labour’ in order to extend understanding of embodied labour practices. Through a case study of fashion modelling in New York and London we argue for an extension of the concept to address what we see as problematic absences and limitations. Thus, we seek to extend its range, both in terms of occupations it can be applied to, not just interactive service work and organizational workers, and its conceptual scope, beyond the current concern with superficial appearances at work and within organizations. First, we attend to the ways in which these freelancers have to adapt to fluctuating aesthetic trends and different clients and commodify themselves in the absence of a corporate aesthetic. The successful models are usually the ones who take on the responsibility of managing their bodies, becoming ‘enterprising’ with respect to all aspects of their embodied self. Secondly, unlike Dean (2005 ) who similarly extends aesthetic labour to female actors, we see conceptual problems with the term that need addressing. We argue that the main proponents of aesthetic labour have a poorly conceived notion of embodiment and that current conceptualizations produce a reductive account of the aesthetic labourer as a ‘cardboard cut-out’, and aesthetic labour as superficial work on the body's surface. In contrast, drawing on phenomenology, we examine how aesthetic labour involves the entire embodied self, or ‘body/self’, and analyse how the effort to keep up appearances, while physical, has an emotional content to it. Besides the physical and emotional effort of body maintenance, the imperative to project ‘personality’ requires many of the skills in emotional labour described by Hochschild (1983 ). Thirdly, aesthetic labour entails on-going production of the body/self, not merely a superficial performance at work. The enduring nature of this labour is evidenced by the degree of body maintenance required to conform to the fashion model aesthetic (dieting, for example) and is heightened by the emphasis placed on social networking in freelancing labour, which demands workers who are ‘always on’. In this way, unlike corporate workers, we suggest that the freelance aesthetic labourer cannot walk away from their product, which is their entire embodied self. Thus, in these ways we see aesthetic labour adding to, or extending, rather than supplanting emotional labour, as Witz et al. (2003 ) would have it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the corning years, demographers report a rapid increase in the number of people over age 65, and in particular the number of persons from ethnic and racial minority groups over 65. While professionals in aging services are paying close attention to these trends and their implications, there are widespread implications that go beyond aging services. Using New York State as a case in point, this paper utilizes literature, demographics, and interviews with key informants to focus on two major trends associated with these demographic shifts: the increase in family caregiving and grandparents raising grandchildren. These trends are examined for their impact on the design and delivery of services including TANF, child welfare and adult protective services. Professionals beyond those in aging services are called upon to be aware of the impact of these aging demographics for clients in the array of public social service systems, and to meet the challenges of these demographic trends with a multigenerational and multicultural agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary offerings at Ellis Island Immigration Museum do little to indicate that the millions of immigrants and, later, tourists who have passed through Ellis Island cannot all have been reproductively focused and gender normative; the site, too, seems oddly unembodied. In this paper I consider representations and absences around sex at Ellis Island, arguing for strategies of embodiment that attend to the particular bodies inhabited and to the complexity, messiness, and contradictions of sexed bodies in their historical specificity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

HIV, hepatitis B & C, drug overdose, and other drug-related health problems still pose significant health risks to injection drug users (IDUs) and their sexual partners, indicating the need for further development of innovative public health interventions. A relatively new intervention implemented in many municipalities throughout the world is the "safer injection site" (SIS). An SIS is a legal facility that allows people to prepare and inject pre-obtained drugs in a hygienic, anxiety-free atmosphere under the supervision of health personnel. This paper examines the responses of a sample of IDUs in New York City to whether they would use an SIS should one be implemented in mid-town Manhattan. The SIS would be part of a comprehensive harm reduction project that already offers needle-exchange, street outreach, testing and counseling, support groups, referral services including drug treatment, and on-site primary medical and dental services. The results of our study indicate that a large majority of the IDUs sampled would utilize an SIS should one be implemented, and that those most likely to use it are IDUs at the highest risk for contracting or spreading blood-borne diseases such as HIV and hepatitis, and for experiencing a drug overdose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses holy New York City's workfare program has structured opportunities for collective action by welfare recipients. As workfare blurs the distinction between wage workers and welfare recipients, it calls into question accepted understandings of the rights and obligations of welfare recipients and fosters new claims on the state. The concept of "cultural opportunity structures" can help to explain the political mobilization of workfare participants if it is linked to a Durkheimian tradition of cultural analysis attentive to symbolic classification. The dramaturgic approach to culture exemplified in the work of Erving Goffman can usefully complement this structural approach if a narrowfocus on frames and framing processes is broadened to include interaction rituals and ceremonial profanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I attempt to advance the concept of embeddedness beyond the level of a programmatic statement by developing a formulation that specifies how embeddedness and network structure affect economic action. On the basis of existing theory and original ethnographies of 23 apparel firms, I develop a systematic scheme that more fully demarcates the unique features, functions, and sources of embeddedness. From this scheme, I derive a set of refutable implications and test their plausibility, using another data set on the network ties of all better dress apparel firms in the New York apparel economy. Results reveal that embeddedness is an exchange system with unique opportunities relative to markets and that firms organized in networks have higher survival chances than do firms which maintain arm's-length market relationships. The positive effect of embeddedness reaches a threshold, however, after which point the positive effect reverses itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on two forces (stressors and resources) in the life stress process as they affect psychological distress. Utilizing three waves of panel data from a representative community sample in upstate New York, six causal models of the life stress process are tested with indicators of two types of stressors (social and physiological) and two types of resources (social and psychological). Both deterring and coping models are tested. Analysis shows that: (1) stressors and resources in the social environment have a direct impact on depressive symptoms, (2) social resources mediate the effects of social stressors on psychological distress, and (3) psychological resources indirectly affect distress by enhancing social resources. The critical role played by the social environment in the life stress process involving psychological distress is substantiated. The implications of these and other findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research reported in this paper focused on out-of-treatment injection drug users recruited from the streets of East Harlem, New York City. Drug use was verified by urinalysis and HIV testing was offered. The research compared self-reported users and non-users of needle exchange programs (NEPs) on sociodemographic variables, HIV-related risk behaviors, and selected health variables. Results indicated that being White and having been incarcerated were the sociodemographic variables most strongly associated with NEP use. Other findings include the following: (1)compared to other groups, Puerto Ricans were most likely to be non-users of NEPs; (2) there were no significant differences between NEP users and non-users in reported injection risks, but NEP users reported significantly less unprotected sex; and (3) health data indicated that almost 50% of those tested were HIV infected and many had histories of sexually transmitted diseases and hepatitis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]