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By , January 24, 2011 9:55 am

!! PLEASE NOTE: The workshop will meet in Cobb 102 this Winter Quarter!!

Amanda Agan, Sarah Cattan, Christian Goldammer, and Gabriel Ulyssea, Department of Economics, University of Chicago

TITLE: “Using MTO to open the black box of neighborhood effects.”

ABSTRACT: The objective of this paper is to empirically identify the magnitude and the main channels through which social interactions (SI) and neighborhood characteristics (NC) can affect individuals’ behavior. Although there are numerous theoretical arguments that support the idea that SI can substantially affect individuals’ behavior, the empirical literature remains far from conclusive. One of the main difficulties faced by empirical works is the fact that the neighborhood of residence is not defined randomly, which creates a potentially severe self-selection problem. In this paper, however, we use neighborhood choice as an additional source of information to identify SI effects. We use a multi-choice Roy model, which allows us to move beyond scalar treatment effect parameters and to disentangle the different channels through which SI and NC can affect individual outcomes. Our data stems from the MTO intervention, which provides a natural exclusion restriction that allows for non-parametric identification of the outcome equation.

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By , January 20, 2011 11:13 am

Dear workshop attendees,

Starting next week, we will meet in Cobb 102 (12PM-1.15PM) instead of Stuart 101. Cobb 102 will be our new meeting place for the rest of the Winter quarter.

You can find details about Cobb Lecture Hall here: http://maps.uchicago.edu/mainquad/cobbhall.html

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By , January 10, 2011 10:04 am

Thomas Swerts is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Chicago.

TITLE: “Documenting Non-citizen Citizenship: The Political Participation of Undocumented Immigrants in Chicago and Brussels.”

ABSTRACT: Due to global migration patterns, undocumented immigrants have established a tangible presence in countries across the Western world. Despite their efforts to make a living in their host societies, undocumented immigrants are excluded from conventional political participation because of their status as non-citizens. However, in recent years, undocumented immigrants have increasingly come ‘out of the shadows’ to claim their civil rights. While the cultural, social and economic problems related to undocumented immigrants have been the object of sociological research, insufficient attention has been paid to the political significance of undocumented immigrants as political subjects.

This study aims to investigate why and how undocumented immigrants become politically active. Qualitative data will be gathered through in-depth interviews, organizational ethnographies and discourse analysis. The comparative research design of this study allows for comparison across different national contexts (US – Belgium), cities (Chicago – Brussels), civil society institutions (self-organizations, first-line organizations, second-line organizations and churches), migrant groups (Mexicans – Moroccans) and individual migrant trajectories. By comparing the political practices of undocumented immigrants in Chicago and Brussels, I will be able to show how undocumented immigrants become politically active in different structural urban environments. Within these urban contexts, the research focus will lie on the interactions between civil society institutions and undocumented immigrants.

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By , January 5, 2011 11:13 am

Below you can find the Winter schedule of the City, Society and Space Workshop. Like last quarter, we will meet on alternate Wednesdays (beginning on January 12th) from 12.00-13.15PM in Stuart 101.

More details on the presentations will be updated soon on this website soon.

January 12, 2011

Thomas Swerts, PhD student, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago

“Documenting non-citizen citizenship: The political participation of undocumented immigrants in Brussels and Chicago.”

January 26, 2011

Amanda Agan, Sarah Cattan, Christian Goldammer, and Gabriel Ulyssea, Department of Economics, University of Chicago

“Using MTO to open the black box of neighborhood effects.”

February 9, 2011

Neil Brenner, Professor of Sociology and Metropolitan Studies, Department of Sociology / Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University

“The urbanization question, or, the field formerly known as urban studies.”

February 23, 2011

Julia Burdick-Will, PhD student, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago

“Violence and the Chicago Public Schools.”

March 9, 2011

Eleonora Elguezabal, PhD candidate in sociology, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales / Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris

“The Production of Urban Boundaries: Naming Conflicts, Property Management and the Division of Labor in the New Luxury and Secured Buildings in Buenos Aires”

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By , November 29, 2010 8:36 am

Please note that our regular session will be replaced by the following job talk. This presentation will not take place in Stuart 101, but inSS 305 (12PM-1PM).

TITLE: “Evolution of Racial and Ethnic Segregation: Pace and Place of Neighborhood Change”

Michael Bader is a scholar in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society

Scholars program at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan in the summer of 2009. In his research, he investigates why people live where they live, what they think about the places they live, and the consequences of living where they live. Answering these questions in urban areas is particularly interesting because of their potential to help explain the persistent racial inequality that we witness across metropolitan areas and to understand how housing policies and gentrification might affect these persistent inequalities. A significant part of his research has also involved developing methodological tools to help determine residential preferences, measure the reliability of data collection methods, and use spatial patterns to help measure characteristics of residents’ neighborhoods.

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By , November 14, 2010 4:55 pm

William Sites is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. His fields of interest include urban studies, community organization, politics, movements and social theory.

Rebecca Vonderlack-Navarro is a PhD Candidate in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago.

TITLE: “Tipping the Scale, Centering the City: Bi-National State Projects, Chicago’s Mexican Hometown Associations, and the 2006 Marches for U.S. Immigrant Rights”

ABSTRACT:

First-generation Mexican immigrant hometown associations (HTAs) in Chicago played a leadership role in the city’s 2006 marches for immigrant rights.  Employing a bi-national historical framework focused on the complex relationship between states and social movements, we have argued elsewhere (Sites and Vonderlack-Navarro, in process) that the recent involvement of these traditionally Mexico-focused HTAs in U.S.-oriented mobilization is best understood as the result of an evolving history of organizational responses to political projects undertaken by various state actors on both sides of the Mexico-U.S. border.  Building on this work, this paper takes up questions of scale and urban politics, examining how the broad range of state projects relevant to an understanding of HTA-related mobilization (such as the Mexican government’s longstanding diaspora-reincorporation efforts, the U.S. national-policy debates over immigration reform, and the recent Illinois state-governmental programs that court Mexican HTAs as attractive voting blocs) might be understood in relation to processes of state rescaling and urban governance that have accompanied neoliberal restructurings in both Mexico and the United States.  Although, like many other observers, we recognize the pivotal role of the Sensenbrenner legislation (U.S. House of Representatives bill 4437) in spurring the 2006 marches, we argue that a longer-term conferral of political legitimacy upon the Chicago HTA federations by state projects at multiple scales enabled the threat posed by Sensenbrenner to become a catalyst (rather than a deterrent) to popular mobilization.  We also suggest that a major consequence of the 2006 marches – the accelerated U.S. political incorporation of Chicago’s Mexican emigrant/immigrant community – can be understood as a significant “tipping” of scale, one in which urban-centered coalition-building and U.S. state/local interest-group politics have become the organizations’ newly privileged field of engagement.

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By , November 1, 2010 4:26 pm

Jacob Lesniewski is a PhD student in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago.

TITLE: “Taxonomy Matters: Workers Centers and Conditions of Work in the Neoliberal City”

ABSTRACT:

The break-down of the old Fordist triplet of big business, big government, and big labor that undergirded relative prosperity for some workers in the developed world up to the 1970s has largely broken down in the ensuing forty years. In its wake, a multifarious set of policies and institutions emerged to the detriment of low-wage workers.  The evisceration of the regulatory apparatus that governed work in the United States, combined with the weakening of labor unions, have left low-wage workers facing increased abuse in the workplace.  Workers centers represent a significant attempt by workers and worker-advocates to change the conditions of work for low-wage workers.  There is a limited academic literature describing how workers centers attempt to improve conditions of work for low-wage workers and analyzing their perceived strengths and weaknesses. This literature tends to analyze workers centers as if they were nascent labor unions or some other form of labor market intermediary and develop recommendations and predictions about their ultimate usefulness accordingly.

This presentation, based on nine months of participant observation work as an organizer at a workers center in Chicago, will argue that understanding workers centers “simply” as labor-community hybrids causes researchers to gloss over significant lessons about social service delivery, community and labor organizing, how state structures interact with social movement organizations, and the nature of variegated neoliberalism in urban contexts.  This presentation will present a new taxonomy of workers centers that goes beyond mere labor-community hybrids, discuss how local and national state structures constrain and facilitate mobilization, and put forth some tentative thoughts on what workers centers can reveal about the nature of work in the neoliberal city.

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By , October 18, 2010 1:43 pm

Len Albright is a doctoral candidate

in the department of sociology at the University of Chicago. From 2004 to 2007, he was a recipient of the University’s Phoenix Fellowship. His research interests include affordable and mixed-income housing, community studies, the built environment, and urban theory. His dissertation is supported by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

TITLE: “Making it Out Here: Understanding Mobility in a Suburb

an Affordable Housing Program”

ABSTRACT:

The Mount Laurel Decision in New Jersey was a landmark judicial action aimed at dispersing poverty and increasing affordable housing across the state. In honor of the woman who brought the case against the state, a nonprofit developer built a 140-unit affordable housing complex named the Ethel Lawrence Homes in Mount Laurel Township. The project brought more than 100 primarily minority families from an urban area into a largely White, upper-middle class suburb. Housing complexes like this have been built across the state and continue to be constructed. My research is an interview and ethnographic case study of this high-profile and highly symbolic housing project. Given a primary focus in housing policy on geographic dispersal and suburban housing programs, this study of the Ethel Lawrence Homes will provide needed answers to the question: To what extent do minority housing program residents integrate themselves into the social structure of suburban communities, and how do race and class differences affect this process?  For this workshop, I plan to facilitate a conversation about what my findings can help uncover about the process of social, economic, and spatial mobility. What does it take it to “make it” to and in the suburbs, and what can “making it out here” tell us about people in social motion?

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By , October 7, 2010 12:05 pm

Virginia Parks is an Associate Professor at the School of Social Service Administration.

Her fields of special interest include urban geography, urban labor markets, immigration, racial and gender inequality, residential segregation, and community organizing and development. She teaches courses at SSA in policy formulation and implementation and in community organizing and development

TITLE: “Trajectories of Wal-Mart Site Fight Campaigns: Making Sense of Regulatory Strategies from Below”

ABSTRACT: In response to growing wage inequality and stagnation of the federal minimum wage, why have social movement actors organized at the urban scale around different regulatory “solutions,” ranging from a variety of public living wage ordinances to privately negotiated community benefits agreements?  I develop a framework that explains regulatory and policy innovation among social movement actors as a tactic to maximize bargaining power by constraining or expanding the scope of conflict.  This approach emphasizes the scope of conflict, as conceived by Schattschneider, as a continuum bounded by opposing tendencies toward the privatization or socialization of conflict.  Using a comparative case study of community-labor economic justice campaigns (initiated by Wal-Mart site fights) in Los Angeles and Chicago, I show how this framework explains the emergence of seemingly disparate public and private regulatory innovations as organizing tactics to win collective benefits for union and non-union workers.  Though social movement actors frequently seek to expand the scope of conflict to offset their relative powerlessness, I show how they can sometimes maximize bargaining leverage by constraining, or privatizing, the scope of conflict in the short term.

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By , October 7, 2010 12:03 pm

The Workshop on City, Society and Space is back! Like last year, we will meet on alternate Wednesdays (beginning exceptionally on October 13) from 12.00-13.15PM in STUART 101.

Below, you can find the 2010 Fall schedule. More information on the presenters etcetera will be updated soon.

In case you would have any additional questions about the workshop, please contact the student coordinator of the workshop, Thomas Swerts at:  tswerts@uchicago.edu.

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FALL SCHEDULE 2010

Wednesday, October 13^, 2010

“Trajectories of Wal-Mart Site Fight Campaigns: Making Sense of Regulatory Strategies from Below”

Professor Virginia Parks, Associate Professor, School of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago

Wednesday, October 20^, 2010

“Making it Out Here; Understanding Mobility in a Suburban Affordable Housing Program”

Len Albright, PhD student, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

“Taxonomy Matters: Workers Centers and Conditions of Work in the Neoliberal City”

Jacob Leswniewski, PhD student, School of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

“Tipping the Scale, Centering the City: Bi-National State Projects, Chicago’s Mexican Hometown Associations, and the 2006 Marches for U.S. Immigrant Rights”

Professor William Sites, Associate Professor, School of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago

Rebecca Vonderlack-Navarro, PhD student, School of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

“The Policy Approach of Mixed-Income Development in Chicago and Vancouver – A Comparative Analysis.”

Naomi Bartz, PhD student, Department of Comparative Human Development,  University of Chicago