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Lockers in middle schools and high schools in the United States are currently disappearing. Due to safety concerns and digitalized textbooks and other school supplies, lockers are becoming obsolete. As larger societal and technological changes drive this trend, the loss of lockers as a shared social space demands careful attention and consideration. Many students use lockers as a means in which to project their identities and membership in different social groups. At the same time, visiting lockers during passing periods provides students opportunities to run into (often literally) students from other social groups, creating unique possibilities for relationship-building that are rare in other school spaces. As social and political polarization continues to intensity in the US and other countries around the world, the loss of lockers in American schools can serve as a caution of the consequences that accrue from disappearing shared social spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public libraries are often regarded as having the potential to support healthy aging. Past work has shown that public librarians increasingly endeavor to offer programs and services for those aging in place. However, research about the effects that public library services and spaces have on the lives of older adults and the affordances they bring is limited. This article presents the results of a nationwide study in which 49 public libraries participated—most from rural and small towns across the United States. More than 535 older adults engaged in a 12-week strength-training program in these libraries. Results of the study indicate that health outcomes for participants can be grouped into three interconnected categories: physical health, mental health, and social health. Results also suggest that the program influenced the participants' perception of the public library as a social space. Implications for research on aging in place and public librarianship are highlighted and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current nativist and ethnocentric policies and rhetoric put forward in the United States have compromised the safety of undocumented Hispanic/Latinx Americans. Many in these communities abstain from overt action toward change. Nonetheless, there are examples of community members who embrace the narrative "undocumented and unafraid." Through in‐depth individual interviews and focus groups, we qualitatively examined how undocumented Mexican community coalition members (N = 10), focused on enacting socio‐political change on behalf of their predominantly Mexican southwestern community, understood the role of their group as a venue for bridging resources and social action. Findings centered on three specific broad themes: (1) Meeting Community Needs: A Disconnection from Resources; (2) Community Coalition as a Space for Bridging Resources; and (3) Community Coalition as a Space for Activism and Social Change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Older people have been overlooked in recent debates over the relationship between age, class and culture despite their prevalence and the conceptual questions they raise. Seeking to bridge mainstream class analysis with debates in social gerontology, especially via a shared turn to Pierre Bourdieu's relational sociology, this paper draws on survey data from the US to examine not only the class position of older people but their internal social and cultural differentiation. I use geometric data analysis to construct a model of the class system, locate older people within it and then explore differences among older people. I then proceed to compare the cultural symbolisations of social positions among older people to those of the larger sample. The core structures of social and cultural differentiation among older people are roughly homologous with those of the broader sample, but there are also notable differences and even inversions pointing toward the specificity - and autonomy - of ageing as a principle of difference and practice., (© 2024 The Author(s). The British Journal of Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science.)

Transnational circuits, as social practices, are not immaterial or virtual, but they do not depend on traditional understandings of one territorial location. Rather than fully and singularly determining the lives of its inhabitants, these local spaces belong now to a transterritory established by the physical, cultural, and imaginative labor ofmigrants connecting two such spaces, beyond the boundaries of one nation-state. Transnationalism, as a field of studies, has focused on these dynamics. Here they are used to address the question of a possible transnational politics inside the United States, connecting the lives of those who have the most and those who have the least, whether they are US nationals or foreign immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the role of heavy commenters on social media. We propose typologies of heavy commenters on Facebook pages of six news organizations in two systems that historically embraced different discourse cultures—the United States and Germany. We find that discourse cultures are impacted by news outlet and country: the US discourse is more participatory in terms of comment frequency, but further characterized by a strong non-discursive culture compared to a participatory liberal discourse culture in Germany. Frequency of commenting as normative ideal of social media sites (e.g. web traffic) does not lead to higher amounts of deliberation. On the contrary, it may contribute to what we conceptualize as the non-discursive model. As an expression of this, heavy commenters in the United States more often perform hate watching that manifests in hostile commenting on stories that are incongruent with their political ideologies. Implications for the democratic function of media organizations on social media are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This manuscript highlights a major finding from a larger study conducted in the United States that used phenomenological interviews with adults with autism who typed to communicate. Participants shared their United States educational experiences before and after learning to type. This finding focused on how disability studies in education and the development of inclusive spaces, such as those designed for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual, and queer or questioning (LGBTQ) students, may change the way in which educators support students with autism in developing and sustaining natural and meaningful friendships. Thus, this paper examined the social experiences of one participant who had an inclusive education from preschool through college graduation, and whose experience with participation in a social club, described as an acceptance coalition for the LGBTQ community, can influence the way in which educators provide support for building relationships with peers beginning in the elementary school setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internationally, the research on the education of boys has sought to understand how social practices, behaviours and rituals contribute to identity construction. We are interested in approaches to the emotional labor of doing 'boy work'. As educators grapple with the gendered performances and subjectivities of young men, there is an imperative to engage with the affective dimensions of boyhood. We explore what theories of affect can add to our understandings of masculinities and masculine identity practices in rapidly changing affective economies of gender and, specifically, what this may mean for relationships formed between educators and students. To illustrate how theories of affect can open up new analytical spaces, we present two vignettes from a program in the United States designed to support young men and boys to gain critical awareness of restrictive 'gender norms'. Drawing primarily upon Ahmed's work on affective economies, we theorize how attention to affective economies of boyhood can positively influence the work of educators today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores Latinx adolescents' perceptions of power dynamics with authority around them. We seek to inform how community‐based professionals engage with and seek to understand members of this population. We conducted a critical discourse analysis of data collected during a community action photovoice project with 13 Latinx adolescents living in a metropolitan region of the southeastern United States. Participants felt they were under greater surveillance scrutiny by authority figures in social and academic spaces than their non‐Latino peers. They discussed ways their movements were at times constrained because others presumed they were deviant, and how that affected their identity development. Judgments and assumptions held by both powerful adults and oppressed groups alike serve to reinscribe social stratification that places Latinx adolescents at a power disadvantage relative to their white peers. These experiences and understandings of power relations shape the circuitous racial dispossession of youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Essay--written for a symposium hosted by the Wisconsin Law Review on Andrew Coan's splendid new book--examines the social space that nonclinical, tenure-track American constitutional law professors occupy, and whether that social space is a desirable one. Constitutional law professors are relatively unique among faculty in the current American research university for the degree to which they speak to those inside and outside of the university. Constitutional law professors are socialized by and participate in the research community of the university but also the elite legal profession. They aspire to speak truth to power, but they are also part of the power that they seek to evaluate. It is good for a society to have scholarly insights brought to bear on important decisions by powerful people, and law professors are increasingly the ones doing that. It is also good to have a scholarly discipline generated by combining its own original insights with the insights of other disciplines. As the humanities and social sciences produce more technical scholarship, more removed from the comprehension and concerns of daily life, this engaged and interdisciplinary role for constitutional law professors becomes more important because it is more uncommon. However, being such a part of the system that one aspires to evaluate also encourages law professors to be more deferential and defensive of existing power structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Markets have become an important form of governance in the neoliberal era. The ideology of markets as the most efficient form of organising economic activity has led to the expansion of their usage, both in terms of what is governed by the market, but also in terms of the spaces in which the practices of a given market apply. However, there have been important challenges to market expansion, particularly on political and ethical grounds. This paper analyses how the socio-technical practices of market expansion can be affected by political contestation and individual moral judgements. This is analysed in the context of two markets for biodiversity offsets, in the United States and England. In both cases, regulators attempted to devise and standardise calculative mechanisms and socio-technical practices that promoted the use and expansion of the market. However, these socio-technical market practices have struggled to cross and negotiate uneven political and social spaces, being subject to moral judgements and political contestation. The paper demonstrates how the socio-technical practices of market expansion are affected by social entanglements, highlighting how this creates limits to the expansion of the market as a form of governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses messages and pictures drawn on the walls by detainees at Ellis Island immigration station in New York c. 1900-1923. This fragmentary source material provides a valuable insight into the perceptions and emotions of people held in the limbo of immigration detention. Largely neglected in the historiography, the graffiti are significant as a counterpoint to official mark-making and bureaucracy. Ellis Island was an environment where the performance of writing was suffused with power, infamously in the marking out of passengers for further inspection with chalk symbols on their clothing. In the official documents, detainees' voices were translated, transcribed, and circumscribed. In contrast, the walls of dormitories and detention rooms formed a backstage space for personal musings, creativity, and low- level dissent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What makes political life in the United States so different from political life in France, Hungary or Argentina? This paper considers why societies “do politics” differently. We draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s criticism of substantialist thinking in sociology and on his conceptualization of the social space to propose a new way of relating methodological to theoretical claims in comparative political sociology. We do this by exploring and constructing a “space of polities” based on data from the 2004 World Values Survey, using relational statistical techniques ( e.g. , geometric data analysis). The main insight is that any single form of political action ( e.g. , joining a voluntary association, or a demonstration, or a boycott) only takes its meaning in the context of its objective relationship to other forms of political action and non-action that have currency in each particular society. We explore the diversity of polity types that actually exist and discuss how they emerge from similar configurations in countries’ spaces of political practices. We suggest that the reason for such clustering lies in similar political–historical trajectories. We conclude by arguing for a comparative approach that is sensitive to differences in overall systems of relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on the theory of ethnic enclaves to study Chinese international student communities and their role in constructing Chinese undergraduate student experiences on US campuses. Enclave theory has primarily been used by sociologists to study immigrant and diaspora populations, but it can also provide an important analytical tool for scholars examining the internationalisation of student populations in higher-education settings. Student interviews and participant observation at a representative research-intensive, doctoral-granting institution in the American Midwest indicate that institutional and media characterisations of Chinese international student communities as closed and segregated are far too simplistic. Chinese student enclaves provide their members with crucial information, support, and social spaces that help them adapt to - and in turn change - their host institutions. Chinese students are active participants in and creators of campus cultures that are often invisible to university administrators, faculty, and peers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article applies the "spatial turn" in historical scholarship to oral history research, and adopts a longitudinal, landscape-based analysis to examine the lived experiences and memories of people with connections to the Robstown Migrant Farm Labor Camp in South Texas. Established by the New Deal-era Farm Security Administration (FSA) as one of several labor camps in Texas, the Robstown Labor Camp was operated by the federal government for eight years before becoming a county-run migrant labor camp, hurricane refuge, nonmigrant housing project, and county park over the course of the next sixty-six years. We take an approach that is geobiographical, focusing on individuals' experiences with a place over several generations, and use the Robstown Labor Camp as a memory device which can conjure feelings and memories of wider histories that transcend that physical locale. In so doing, this article both builds on scholarship which typically discusses the FSA camp spaces only when they were under federal control, and examines how oral history can capture spatial relations in people's memories, helping to elucidate more complex, even dissonant, historical landscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the wildland-urban interface (WUI), wildfire risk contains both individual and collective components. The likelihood that a particular home will be threatened by wildfire in any given year is low, but at a broader scale the likelihood that a home somewhere in the WUI will be threatened is substantially higher. From a risk mitigation perspective, individuals may take a number of actions to reduce risk exposure, but their risk is lowered even further when neighboring properties also take mitigation measures. Collectively, risk mitigation on individual properties lowers both individual and community-level risk. Multiple factors contribute to whether or not an individual will take action to reduce their risk; when an individual opts to not implement risk mitigation measures that would be beneficial from a community standpoint, community leaders can use a variety of policy tools to encourage the individual to adopt an action or change their behavior. As proposed by Schneider and Ingram in 1990, these include passing rules or regulations, building capacity, providing incentives, and establishing community norms. As part of a larger longitudinal study on WUI communities in the western United States, we reviewed approaches used by six communities in Idaho, Oregon and Utah to mitigate interdependent wildfire risk at two points in time. Each community's approach was different, being well suited to meet the community's specific needs. The most consistent policy tool utilized across communities was capacity-building, primarily through raising awareness of fire hazards and potential mitigation behaviors and leveraging external resources. Another commonality was the involvement of a central group or individual that provided leadership by initiating and championing the mitigation effort and serving as a link to external resources. There are a number of other communities in the WUI that are also at risk for wildfire; these findings can be useful to community members and agency personnel who are seeking to engage residents to reduce individual and collective risk. Within our communities, several different approaches have been effective at encouraging homeowners to adopt and maintain mitigation activities ranging from collective efforts organized locally to others developed externally to provide incentives or potential punishments for not adopting treatments. Understanding the diversity of approaches and activities that have fostered mitigation can help managers identify what will work best for their specific communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Governments play a growing role in providing access to digital speech spaces. This development has important consequences for free expression. Communication's migration from physical public spaces to virtual ones has increased the State's capacity for ex ante interference with speech, from targeted blocking of users, websites, and applications on its communications networks to shutting off access to those networks altogether. Contrary to the conclusions of most Speech Clause scholars, the First Amendment's public forum doctrine is ill equipped to solve these problems, in part because the doctrine under-protects speech that is not expressed in shared physical space. Accordingly, this Article proposes a different path for applying the First Amendment to State-provided speech spaces: When a government transmits user speech over its networks, it should give that speech common carrier-type treatment, and both use-based and user-based discrimination over those networks should be presumptively barred. In addition, established doctrines such as prior restraint, incitement, and content neutrality can resolve any questions concerning digital speech in virtual public space. There is also the problem of contract law. Like any network service provider, municipalities place terms of use-based obligations on users as a condition of access to their networks, including waiver of government liability for disconnection or other denials of access. These waivers implicate the unconstitutional conditions doctrine. If the State must, as a First Amendment matter, carry the traffic of any willing user on its network subject to certain narrow content and viewpoint-neutral exceptions, it cannot then ask prospective users to waive that right as a precondition to carriage. By demanding waiver of suit for any disconnection as a prerequisite to speak, these terms of service provisions condition receipt of a government benefit upon acceptance of a prior restraint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper focuses on moments and spaces of encounter in which middle class people come into contact with 'poor others'. Much critical poverty work focuses on the re-inscription of difference across class, race and gender lines. We explore where, when and how middle class actors engage with 'poor others' in ways that (sometimes) lead to shifts in neoliberal and individualized understandings of poverty. Our paper explores boundary-breaking transformative moments that arise through spatial encounters. Drawing on Valentine's 'zones of encounter' we explore how middle class encounters with poverty are mediated by two sets of spatial processes: processes of (self)government and of radical contact. We draw illustrative examples from two projects: on rural poverty in the Pacific Northwest and on community development in Chicago. In each case we trace the ways in which these spaces of encounter foster governance and/or contact processes that reproduce or disrupt dominant discourses about poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how participation in watershed groups creates a social space that mediates the relationship between biophysical places and place-protective action. We analyze qualitative data from a survey of more than 200 watershed group volunteers in the Appalachian region of the United States who were asked to describe experiences that encouraged or discouraged their participation. “Place” emerged as a key theme, with further delineations between made places (those highly affected by human activity, including coal extraction); natural places; and re-made places (those restored by the efforts of the watershed-group participants). Our findings suggest that the places themselves—and the natural, institutional, and social resources in these places—are more than a backdrop or setting for the volunteer activities; they also inspire, enhance, and are transformed by the act of volunteering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses people from Umbria, Italy's migration to mining areas in the U.S. and European countries from 1900 to 1914. Particular focus is given to the social spaces established by Umbrian immigrants. An overview of the Umbrian migrants' social networks, including those of their families and friends.

While there are many empirical studies examining the effectiveness of smart growth policies, few of them study the perspective of developers, the major urban space producers in US cities. This article assesses the impacts of smart growth policies on home developers in the Portland bi-state metropolitan area by developing home developer location choice models. The study shows that home developers in the region are sensitive to most smart growth policies being implemented in the region, but they react to them differently across the border between Oregon and Washington due to their different land use planning systems. The findings suggest that smart growth policies impact single- and multifamily home developers’ location choices differently and that home developers exhibit strong spatial inertia in their location choice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

ABSTRACT How far has anthropology come in becoming racially inclusive? In this article, we analyze an online survey of anthropology graduate students and faculty of color undertaken by the AAA Commission on Race and Racism in Anthropology. Despite some progress, institutional and attitudinal barriers remain. We use the concept of 'white public space' to analyze these barriers: departmental labor is divided in ways that assign to faculty and graduate students of color responsibilities that have lower status and rewards than those of their white counterparts. Colorblind racial explanatory practices-discourses that explain away racially unequal institutional practices as being 'not about race'-are common. We argue that such practices make many anthropology departments feel like white-owned social and intellectual spaces. We conclude by suggesting steps with which anthropology departments can create more inclusive social spaces that are owned equally by scholars of color and their white peers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decade, the term safe haven has stirred controversy both in the political arena as well as in the academic literature. Several authors have emphasised the imprecise and commonly ill-conceived use of this terminology. This article intends to provide a fresh analytical framework to better understand the notion of terrorist safe haven. Rejecting the orthodox state-centric approach that envisions terrorist safe havens solely in their static and territorial dimensions, we focus rather on the social dynamics that characterise these spaces. We contend that although they might appear socially fragmented, these geographical areas are ruled by alternative modes of governance that impose a form of social order regulating interactions among actors. We use the concept of ‘social space’ to capture the framework in which social interactions between local actors are taking place. While we recognise that the social order that governs a given social space imposes constraints for actors, we contend that it can be subjected to internal contestation, opening a series of opportunities for transnational terrorist networks. We then try to highlight how terrorist groups might take advantage of these internal dynamics and create new ones to ensnare some local actors into forming alliances with them. This article addresses several case studies to further illustrate the theoretical discussion. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of the importance of interpersonal relationships between local and transnational actors. While this article proposes a preliminary analysis of the question, it opens up new research avenues in conceptualising why and how some regions have come to attract transnational terrorist groups. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The imposition of Euro-American orders of time has had a major impact on indigenous North American peoples throughout the history of contact. To demonstrate that impact, this article examines some of the complex ways in which multiple types and levels of time have reshaped Northern Arapaho society from the late eighteenth century to the present as well as how Arapaho people have actively adapted to contact-induced changes in time throughout that period. Investigated are directly and indirectly imposed changes in interactional, daily, seasonal, life-historical, historical, and long-durational levels of time as well as, at a higher level of analysis, the divergent and often contradictory ways in which Arapahos and Euro-Americans have constructed and interrelated those dimensions. Such a history of time is revealed to be essential for a fuller understanding of past and present changes in cultural identity, social space, communication, social relations, decision making, policy, and many other aspects of Arapaho life. While this study does not purport to be comprehensive for the context at hand, it does aim to open suggestive paths for ethnohistorical investigations of time as a historical reality. The analysis thus offers possibilities for transcending past or prevailing approaches that have tended to reduce analysis to (1) one type of time, such as experiential durational time in the work of Alfred Gell (1992), considered to be empirical, universal, and singular, when in fact it is none of those things; (2) in ethnohistory especially, chronological time disconnected from other types and dimensions of time; (3) one type of time in cultural contact, such as clock time or work-discipline, to the exclusion of others; or (4) simple binaries of cultural difference (e.g., lincar versus cyclical) without concern for the complex and various shapes of time on either side of and in the intercultural encounter between Euro-Americans and indigenous peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the spaces where students engaged in practices and forms of cultural production with transformative possibilities in the U.S. It mentions an after school hip-hop club called Lyric that provides an example of how a youth popular culture form can play a contradictory and at times reproductive role in structuring performative forms of cultural productions in youth space. Moreover, a Conquergood's synthesis of performance theory was used to build youth spaces literature.

The effective management of convicted sex offenders continues to challenge local law enforcement agencies and public safety officials. While recently enacted legislation at the federal level seeks to increase the monitoring and tracking of sex offenders, legislation at the state and local levels seeks to limit the residential options of convicted sex offenders through various geographic constraints. An issue that arises, however, is the extent to which some communities and/or neighbourhoods are exposed to a disproportionately high number of offenders, potentially placing vulnerable populations at risk. The purpose of this paper is to outline spatial optimization approaches to assess and benchmark spatial risk and the geographic distribution of sex offenders within a community. Results suggest that these approaches are useful decision support tools for crafting and evaluating sex offender residency policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses an intersectional approach to predict attitudes toward immigrants by examining the intersections of race, class, gender, and social space. With data from the 2004 General Social Survey and the 2000 Census, generalized hierarchal linear modeling generates significant two-way and three-way interactions in predicting attitudes toward immigrants taking jobs, improving the economy, committing crime, and migrating to the United States. Important differences in attitudes between groups and within groups only emerge when particular intersections are considered in the analysis. One implication is that pro-immigrant organizations may gain greater support by devising political strategies from an intersectional perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes how Extreme Makeover: Home Edition is making over democratic citizenship in post-9/11 America. Seeking to counter a temporal bias that displaces attention to the spatial in communication scholarship, I conduct a kairotopic, or temporal-spatial, analysis of this program to illustrate how it mediates citizenship through a particular material space-time: the contemporary American home. Overall, I argue that this show operates to domesticate political practices by relocating social responsibility from public institutions to private corporations and redirecting political agency into familiar (nuclear) familial space-times. In so doing, the program paradoxically combines the economic and governmental imperatives of neoliberalism with the moral and social norms of neoconservativism to build a new national home that is both post-dissident and postfeminist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Summary: Motivational factors have been viewed as central to both the initiation and perpetuation of substance abuse. Until now, the relationship of substance use motives to previous life experiences has yet to be fully explored. This mixed methods study investigated the association between social reinforcement-type substance use motives and stressful events, as well as patterns and consequences of use among 68 men and women with a history of incarceration. • Findings: Themes coded from the respondents' narratives yielded three principal motivational categories: social reinforcement, coping, and enhancement. Discriminant analyses revealed that social reinforcement motives were associated with drinking in greater quantities, alcohol and drug dependence, parental divorce or separation, and greater perceived stress at fathers' and siblings' deaths. • Applications: Social work practice implications are discussed including conducting a comprehensive motivational assessment at the inception of substance abuse treatment along with interventions focused on enhancing social support, increasing the capacity for attachment, and the utilization of role models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lacking access to legal residency and to regular employment, undocumented Latinos in the USA often find work as day laborers. Some suburban towns have tried to force Latinos out by enacting statutes to restrict their movement and their search for jobs. How do day laborers, who are conspicuous because of their racial-ethnic and language differences, find work by meeting employers in public spaces despite legal restrictions against their presence there? This comparative ethnography of day laborers in Freehold, New Jersey, and Manassas, Virginia, shows that workers engage such tactics as avoiding police and showing deference to white residents while battling for leverage when negotiating wages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper advances understanding of how unequal risks to environmental hazards are generated. Marginalization is the best known explanation for the production of risk. The concept of marginalization was elaborated through studies of hazards in the global South and connotes how social inequalities constrain livelihood options of less powerful social groups. Thus, marginal groups are pressured to degrade landscapes and occupy hazardous environments while they experience decreased capacities to cope with environmental change. This paper directs analytical attention beyond the material to include the discursive realm and demonstrates that the production of unequal risk is contingent upon how hazards are differentially perceived, represented, and contested in social spaces. Findings from a flood disaster case study in the El Paso (US)–Ciudad Juárez (Mexico) border metropolis highlight how hegemonic discourses reinforce material processes of marginalization in flood-prone social spaces. Findings also reveal how socially-powerful geographical groups of people have harnessed institutional resources in their efforts to externalize risks and capitalize on environmental opportunities in some flood-prone areas. The concept of facilitation is used to explain the material-discursive production of socially-elite, flood-prone spaces. Facilitation clarifies how powerful groups are provided privileged access to institutional resources in their pursuit of environmental rewards, contributing to unjust socioenvironmental outcomes. In conclusion, I outline key aspects of how unequal risks are materially and discursively (re)produced within hazardscapes through relational processes of marginalization/facilitation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article discusses the visible spatialization of Asian American communities, particularly ethnic-specific communities in the U.S. It looks at the interest in knowing how Asian Americans establish their own places in the community, also examining how issues of race, class and gender affect both the external and internal spatial dimension of the community. It also suggests that future investigations about Asian American communities should also include questions on the autonomy of Asian American neighborhoods such as Chinatown or Koreatown.

The article focuses on strategies by foreign Mexican laborers to find work as day laborers through congregating in shared social spaces and to avoid provoking the dominant whites in a U.S. town. The authors present findings from a study in Freehold, New Jersey, where citizens formed an organization in opposition to the presence of the Mexican migrant workers. The social space is viewed in the context of the social, political and economic strata of the larger society. The efforts of the marginalized Mexicans to defuse opposition to their presence included addressing stereotypes against dirt, disease, noise and crowding.

The authors suggest that the border between the U.S. and Mexico is more than a boundary on a map. They mention that the border is a transcultural social space and not a separator and argue that the location and movement of Mexicans constitutes the border. They suggest that building a wall along the border reinforces U.S. hegemonic views and disenfranchises Mexicans who are the "crossers." They maintain that their view of the Mexican body as border is critical to an understanding of Mexican identity in the U.S.

The US government has presented Guantánamo Bay to the world through the lens of “exceptional sovereignty”. This argument holds that international law does not apply at Guantanamo because while America has “complete authority” over the base “ultimate sovereignty” rests with Cuba. Many accounts rightly critical of the abuses of power taking place at Guantanamo similarly understand it as something wholly abnormal—a literal “non-place”. But in falling back on this argument both the American position and many of its critics have tended to “black box” what is taking place within the camp. In this paper I suggest that we ditch any sort of critique that says Guantanamo is somehow outside of the law and instead replace this line of argument with a critical history of the deployment of a particular sort of Executive power there. From this perspective, Guantanamo is better understood as a rather more normal part of the current imperial moment and connected up in various ways to American imaginations and materialisations of power. As a way of exploring some of these connections in greater detail, I examine the construction of Guantanamo as a particular sort of social space by drawing upon the accounts of those who have been there: former guards, detainees and their defence lawyers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will explore the impacts of globalisation on cultural identities and conceptualisations of social space. Using Mexican Americans as a case study, I will firstly consider the rise of the Chicano Movement; a cultural nationalist project that emerged amongst Mexican Americans in the 1960s. After examining cultural identities that emerged during this period, I will consider the subsequent rise of globalisation and how it has influenced identity-formations. I will demonstrate that Mexican Americans are reworking their identities in ways which go beyond the old cultural nationalist project towards new post-nationalist, cosmopolitan modes of identification. Parallel shifts are taking place in Mexican American constructions of social space, with nationalist conceptualisations of space now yielding to the notion of a borderlands. Lastly, I will consider how Mexican Americans' changing views of social space are couched in different understandings of their own hybridity. I will hence attempt to produce a tentative sketch of a theory regarding the relationship between cultural hybridity and social space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The residential patterns, adaptation experiences, and impacts of immigrants on North American cities have been well documented in the geographical literature. In this article, we build on prior work by testing the theories of Gaim Kibreab, who identified three factors that shape the experiences of recent refugees: attitudes of the receiving society; current policy environments; and employment opportunities in local communities. We analyze some of the ways in which these factors operate as interrelated systems for two comparative groups of foreign-born migrants in Portland, Oregon: sub-Saharan Africans; and Russians and Ukrainians. Using a mixed-methods approach, we triangulate data from a blend of in-depth interviews, participant observation in the community and at refugee and immigrant social service agencies, census and other statistical records, and cartographic analyses to report on the findings of our work. Data suggest that the residential, economic, and social spaces of new refugees are constructed as a complex multiplicity of networks and relationships that link time and place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although studies have shown that Tongan migrants maintain strong linkages with Tongans in Tonga as well as with their kin in New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, the Tongan concept of vä, social space, has not been used to understand Tongan transnational relations. For Tongans, vä is organized through one's genealogy and kinship ties. The concept of space is central to our understanding of transnationality because global practices involve the movement and flows of people and things within space and across spatial boundaries while people maintain sociospatial connections with one another. Tongans generally view reciprocal exchanges, whether within Tonga or transnational, as tauhi vä: taking care of sociospatial ties with kin and kin-like members. In this article, I explore the concept of vä and the practice of tauhi vä primarily through my research among Tongans in Maui, Hawai'i, as well as my experience with Tongans in Seattle, Washington. I argue that vä and tauhi vä provide us with new spatial concepts for framing our understanding of Tongan transnationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research has argued that youths seek out employment to support consumption habits. This article focuses on work performed by students during their free time in the suburban United States, and argues that this work is not performed solely for money, but is itself a form of consumption. Based on an ethnographic study conducted between 2001-2004 at several branches of a national coffee chain located in affluent, suburban settings, this article deconstructs current labor theories from the perspective of teenage employees. This perspective allows us to unravel the ways in which work itself can be consumed as an activity, and thus contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of youth employment in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For more than a century the concept of community has been the subject of numerous studies, but only few have been initiated by geographers. However, their studies have enhanced our understanding of the role of space and place in a community. This paper will examine Anne Buttimer's concept of social space and the potential it has to broaden our understanding of community. This theoretical reflection, inspired by the Little Québec of Florida, will also propose a working definition of community that takes into account the notions of space and place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]