Leveraging the collective mind Haslam, S Alexander
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
09/2021, Letnik:
373, Številka:
6560
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Shared social identities can better prepare us to confront societal problems
Shrinking Cities: Urban Challenges of Globalization MARTINEZ-FERNANDEZ, CRISTINA; AUDIRAC, IVONNE; FOL, SYLVIE ...
International journal of urban and regional research,
March 2012, Letnik:
36, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Urban shrinkage is not a new phenomenon. It has been documented in a large literature analyzing the social and economic issues that have led to population flight, resulting, in the worse cases, in ...the eventual abandonment of blocks of housing and neighbourhoods. Analysis of urban shrinkage should take into account the new realization that this phenomenon is now global and multidimensional — but also little understood in all its manifestations. Thus, as the world's population increasingly becomes urban, orthodox views of urban decline need redefinition. The symposium includes articles from 10 urban analysts working on 30 cities around the globe. These analysts belong to the Shrinking Cities International Research Network (SCIRN), whose collaborative work aims to understand different types of city shrinkage and the role that different approaches, policies and strategies have played in the regeneration of these cities. In this way the symposium will inform both a rich diversity of analytical perspectives and country‐based studies of the challenges faced by shrinking cities. It will also disseminate SCIRN's research results from the last 3 years.
Résumé
La décroissance urbaine n'est pas un phénomène nouveau. De nombreux travaux ont analysé les problèmes sociaux et économiques conduisant au départ de populations et résultant dans les pires des cas à l'abandon d'îlots d'habitat et de quartiers entiers. Cependant, l'étude de la décroissance urbaine doit aujourd'hui tenir compte du constat récent selon lequel ce phénomène est désormais global et multidimensionnel, tout en restant peu appréhendé dans toutes ses composantes. Ainsi, alors que la population mondiale est de plus en plus urbaine, les conceptions classiques du déclin urbain méritent d'être réexaminées. Ce symposium inclut des articles de dix chercheurs travaillant sur trente villes à travers le monde. Ils appartiennent au Shrinking Cities International Research Netwok (SCIRN), dont le travail collectif a pour objectif d'analyser différents types de décroissance urbaine et le rôle que les multiples approches, politiques et stratégies ont joué dans la régénération des villes touchées par ce processus. Ce numéro s'appuie sur une diversité d'approches et sur l'étude de contextes urbains variés, ayant pour point commun d'être concernés par les enjeux de la décroissance urbaine. Il permet de diffuser les résultats des recherches menées au sein du SCIRN au cours des trois dernières années.
Many scholars and citizens alike have counted on civic groups to create broad ties that bind society. Some hope that faith-based civic groups will spread their reach as government retreats. Yet few ...studies ask how, if at all, civic groups reach out to their wider community. Can religious groups--long central in civic America--create broad, empowering social ties in an unequal, diverse society?
Over the past decade, abolitionist feminist and evangelical Christian activists have directed increasing attention toward the “traffic in women” as a dangerous manifestation of global gender ...inequalities. Despite renowned disagreements around the politics of sex and gender, these groups have come together to advocate for harsher penalties against traffickers, prostitutes’ customers, and nations deemed to be taking insufficient steps to stem the flow of trafficked women. In this essay, I argue that what has served to unite this coalition of “strange bedfellows” is not simply an underlying commitment to conservative ideals of sexuality, as previous commentators have offered, but an equally significant commitment to carceral paradigms of justice and to militarized humanitarianism as the preeminent mode of engagement by the state. I draw upon my ongoing ethnographic research with feminist and evangelical antitrafficking movement leaders to argue that the alliance that has been so efficacious in framing contemporary antitrafficking politics is the product of two historically unique and intersecting trends: a rightward shift on the part of many mainstream feminists and other secular liberals away from a redistributive model of justice and toward a politics of incarceration, coincident with a leftward sweep on the part of many younger evangelicals toward a globally oriented social justice theology. In the final section of this essay, I consider the resilience of these trends given a newly installed and more progressive Obama administration, positing that they are likely to continue even as the terrain of militarized humanitarian action shifts in accordance with new sets of geopolitical interests.
Congregations and faith-based organizations have become key participants in America's welfare revolution. Recent legislation has expanded the social welfare role of religious communities, thus ...revealing a pervasive lack of faith in purely economic responses to poverty.Charitable Choices is an ethnographic study of faith-based poverty relief in 30 congregations in the rural south. Drawing on in-depth interviews and fieldwork in Mississippi faith communities, it examines how religious conviction and racial dynamics shape congregational benevolence. Mississippi has long had the nation's highest poverty rate and was the first state to implement a faith-based welfare reform initiative. The book provides a grounded and even-handed treatment of congregational poverty relief rather than abstract theory on faith-based initiatives. The volume examines how congregations are coping with national developments in social welfare policy and reveals the strategies that religious communities utilize to fight poverty in their local communities. By giving particular attention to the influence of theological convictions and organizational dynamics on religious service provision, it identifies both the prospects and pitfalls likely to result from the expansion of charitable choice.
Los Angeles is the epicenter of the American gang problem. Rituals and customs from Los Angeles' eastside gangs, including hand signals, graffiti, and clothing styles, have spread to small towns and ...big cities alike. Many see the problem with gangs as related to urban marginality - for a Latino immigrant population struggling with poverty and social integration, gangs offer a close-knit community. Yet, as Edward Orozco Flores argues inGod's Gangs, gang members can be successfully redirected out of gangs through efforts that change the context in which they find themselves, as well as their notions of what it means to be a man. Flores here illuminates how Latino men recover from gang life through involvement in urban, faith-based organizations. Drawing on participant observation and interviews with Homeboy Industries, a Jesuit-founded non-profit that is one of the largest gang intervention programs in the country, and with Victory Outreach, a Pentecostal ministry with over 600 chapters, Flores demonstrates that organizations such as these facilitate recovery from gang life by enabling gang members to reinvent themselves as family men and as members of their community.The book offers a window into the process of redefining masculinity. As Flores convincingly shows, gang members are not trapped in a cycle of poverty and marginality.With the help of urban ministries, such men construct a reformed barrio masculinity to distance themselves from gang life.Edward Orozco Flores is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Loyola University Chicago.
A historicist interpretation of how the Christian religion, whose theology had notoriously been used to foster coloniality and explicitly nurture apartheid philosophy, had transformed itself into an ...intellectual force and an organisational bulwark of the struggle for freedom in South Africa. This is presented through documents and statements of the ecumenical movement which attest to the development of successive theological positions that were being arraigned against the apartheid regime. The reflection covers the period from the year 1960, which signaled the beginning of an identifiable Christian tradition of protest against political oppression and repression in South Africa, that is, from the Cottesloe Conference following the Sharpeville Massacre, to the 'Standing for the Truth Campaign' on the eve of FW De klerk's February 2 1990 Speech in Parliament. The gallant resistance of the people and the churches of South Africa is presented here as both a living record of the tumultuous past, and an inspiration for new local and global struggles.
In the last few decades, the al contours of American social inequality have been transformed by the rapid growth in the prison and jail America's prisons and jails have produced a new social group, a ...group of social outcasts who are joined by the shared experience of incarceration, crime, poverty, racial minority, and low education. ... carcerai inequalities are intergenerational, affecting not just those who go to prison and jail but their families and children, too.
In 1993, a group of women shocked Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, with the news that dozens of girls and women had been murdered and dumped, like garbage, around the city during the year. As the numbers of ...murders grew over the years, and as the police forces proved unwilling and unable to find the perpetrators, the protestors became activists. They called the violence and its surrounding impunity “femicide,” and they demanded that the Mexican government, at the local, state, and federal levels, stop the violence and capture the perpetrators. Nearly two decades later, the city’s infamy as a place of femicide is giving way to another terrible reputation as a place of unprecedented drug violence. Since 2006, more than six thousand people have died in the city, as have more than twenty-eight thousand across the country, in relation to the violence associated with the restructuring of the cartels that control the production and distribution of illegal drugs. In response to the public outcry against the violence, the Mexican government has deployed thousands of troops to Ciudad Juárez as part of a military strategy to secure the state against the cartels.
In this essay, I argue that the politics over the meaning of the drug-related murders and femicide must be understood in relation to gendered violence and its use as a tool for securing the state. To that end, I examine the wars over the interpretation of death in northern Mexico through a feminist application of the concept of necropolitics as elaborated by the postcolonial scholar Achille Mbembe. I examine how the wars over the political meaning of death in relation both to femicide and to the events called “drug violence” unfold through a gendering of space, of violence, and of subjectivity. My objective is twofold: first, to demonstrate how the antifemicide movement illustrates the stakes for a democratic Mexican state and its citizens in a context where governing elites argue that the violence devastating Ciudad Juárez is a positive outcome of the government’s war against organized crime; and second, to show how a politics of gender is central to this kind of necropolitics.
In 1900 the Catholic Church stood staunchly against human rights, religious freedom, and the secular state. According to the Catholic view, modern concepts like these, unleashed by the French ...Revolution, had been a disaster. Yet by the 1960s, those positions were reversed. How did this happen? Why, and when, did the world's largest religious organization become modern?James Chappel finds an answer in the shattering experiences of the 1930s. Faced with the rise of Nazism and Communism, European Catholics scrambled to rethink their Church and their faith. Simple opposition to modernity was no longer an option. The question was how to be modern. These were life and death questions, as Catholics struggled to keep Church doors open without compromising their core values. Although many Catholics collaborated with fascism, a few collaborated with Communists in the Resistance. Both strategies required novel approaches to race, sex, the family, the economy, and the state. Catholic Modern tells the story of how these radical ideas emerged in the 1930s and exercised enormous influence after World War II. Most remarkably, a group of modern Catholics planned and led a new political movement called Christian Democracy, which transformed European culture, social policy, and integration. Others emerged as left-wing dissidents, while yet others began to organize around issues of abortion and gay marriage. Catholics had come to accept modernity, but they still disagreed over its proper form. The debates on this question have shaped Europe's recent past—and will shape its future.
