Results by title

Neil Kraus evaluates both the influence of public opinion on local policy-making and the extent to which public policy addresses economic and social inequalities. Drawing on several years of fieldwork and multiple sources of data, including surveys and polls; initiatives, referenda, and election results; government documents; focus groups; interviews; and a wide assortment of secondary sources, Kraus presents case studies of two Midwestern cities, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Gary, Indiana. Specifically, he focuses on several major policy decisions in recent decades concerning education, law enforcement, and affordable housing in Minneapolis; and education and riverboat casino development in Gary.

Kraus finds that, on these issues, local officials frequently take action that reflects public opinion, yet the resulting policies often fail to meet the needs of the disadvantaged or ameliorate the effects of concentrated poverty. In light of citizens’ current attitudes, he concludes that if patterns of inequality are to be more effectively addressed, scholars and policymakers must transform the debate about the causes and effects of inequality in urban and metropolitan settings.

Paul Davidoff book of the year award from the Associated Collegiate Schools of Planning, 1990 "No planner, I predict, will be able to consider his education complete during the next decade or so who has not grappled vicariously with the dilemmas Krumholz faced." --Alan A. Altshuler, from the Foreword From 1969 to 1979, Cleveland's city planning staff under Norman Krumholz's leadership conducted a unique experiment in equity oriented planning. Fighting to defend the public welfare while also assisting the city's poorest citizens, these planners combined professional competence and political judgment to bring pressing urban issues to the public's attention. Although frequently embroiled in controversy while serving three different mayors, the Cleveland planners not only survived, but accomplished impressive equity objectives. In this book, Norman Krumholz and John Forester provide the first detailed personal account of a sustained and effective equity-planning practice that influenced urban policy. Krumholz describes the pragmatic equity-planning agenda that his staff pursued during the mayoral administrations of Carl B. Stokes, Ralph J. Perk, and Dennis J. Kucinich. He presents case studies illuminated with rich personal experience, of the Euclid Beach development, the Clark Freeway, and the tax-delinquency and land-banking project that resulted in a change in the State of Ohio's property law, among others. In the second part of the book, John Forester explores the implications of this experience and the lessons that can be drawn for planning, public management, and administrative practice more generally. "Fascinating, illuminating war stories from the nation's most creative and progressive (ex)municipal planning director, capped by an intelligent and useful set of 'lessons.'" --Chester W. Hartman, Fellow, Institute for Policy Studies, and Chair, Planner Network "In this extraordinary book, Norman Krumholz and John Forester team up to enlighten those seeking a progressive approach to planning on how to interpret the Clevland experience. Krumholz provides an analytic chronicle of his role as Cleveland's planning director under three mayors and of his efforts to plan on behalf of the city's impoversithed majority. Forester examines the Cleveland story from the perspective of a planning theorist whose focus is how planning can serve people with relatively little political influence. Together the authors identify the opportunities that exist within the urban governmental structure. They conclude that planning and politics are not antithical and that an astute political strategy depends on sound professionalism. This well-written book is required reading for both students and practitioners of planning." --Susan S. Fainstein, Rutgers University "Norman Krumholz's story is one of the high points in the history of city planning and urban affairs in this country, and John Forester is one of its foremost interpreters of this history." --Pierre Clavel, Cornell University "Over and over again this book reveals the extraordinary levels of commitment, creativity, and effort that were needed and expended to divert the market-driven urban development process, however slightly, from its normal course--the reinforcement and reproduction of the status quo." --APA Journal

Immigrants to the United States have long used the armed forces as a shortcut to citizenship. Cristina-Ioana Dragomir profiles Lily, Alexa, and Vikrant, three immigrants of varying nationalities and backgrounds who chose military service as their way of becoming American citizens. Privileging the trio’s own words and experiences, Dragomir crafts a human-focused narrative that moves from their lives in their home countries and decisions to join the military to their fraught naturalization processes within the service. Dragomir illuminates how race, ethnicity, class, and gender impacted their transformation from immigrant to soldier, veteran, and American. She explores how these factors both eased their journeys and created obstacles that complicated their access to healthcare, education, economic resources, and other forms of social justice.

A compelling union of analysis and rich storytelling, Making the Immigrant Soldier traces the complexities of serving in the military in order to pursue the American dream.

This timely volume brings together case studies that address the urgent need to manage energy use and improve thermal comfort in modern buildings while preserving their historic significance and character.

This collection of ten case studies addresses the issues surrounding the improvement of energy consumption and thermal comfort in modern buildings built between 1928 and 1969 and offers valuable lessons for other structures facing similar issues. These buildings, international in scope and diverse in type, style, and size, range from the Shulman House, a small residence in Los Angeles, to the TD Bank Tower, a skyscraper complex in Toronto, and from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, a cultural venue in Lisbon, to the Van Nelle Factory in Rotterdam, now an office building. Showing ingenuity and sensitivity, the case studies consider improvements to such systems as heating, cooling, lighting, ventilation, and controls. They provide examples that demonstrate best practices in conservation and show ways to reduce carbon footprints, minimize impacts to historic materials and features, and introduce renewable energy sources, in compliance with energy codes and green-building rating systems.

The Conserving Modern Heritage series, launched in 2019, is written by architects, engineers, conservators, scholars, and allied professionals. The books in this series provide well-vetted case studies that address the challenges of conserving twentieth-century heritage.

As many as 30,000 African Americans have sickle cell disease (SCD). Though the political activism of the 1960s and a major 1970s health campaign spurred demands for testing, treatment, and education programs, little attention has been given to how families cope with SCD. This first study to give SCD a social, economic, and cultural context documents the daily lives of families living with this threatening illness. Specifically, Shirley A. Hill examines how low-income African American mothers with children suffering from this hereditary, incurable, and chronically painful disease, react to the diagnosis and manage their family's health care.The 23 mostly single mothers Hill studies survive in an inner-city world of social inequality. Despite limited means, they actively participate, create, and define the social world they live in, their reality shaped by day-to-day caregiving. These women overcome obstacles by utilizing such viable alternatives as sharing child care with relatives within established kinship networks.Highlighting the role of class, race, and gender in the illness experience, Hill interprets how these women reject, redefine, or modify the objective scientific facts about SCD. She acknowledges and explains the relevance of child-bearing and motherhood to African American women's identity, revealing how the revelation of the SCD trait or the diagnosis of one child often does not affect a woman's interpretation of her reproductive rights.

Twenty-three well-versed archivists and allied professionals teach you how to advocate effectively for your archives in Many Happy Returns: Advocacy and the Development of Archives. Editor Larry Hackman's opening essay is a tutorial on advocacy principles and application, including practical techniques and tactics. Hackman asserts that "advocacy is an investment that we make when we intentionally and strategically educate and engage individuals and organizations so that they in turn will support our archival work." Thirteen case studies address a variety of advocacy experiences and methods. For example, the New York Philharmonic archivist has spent more than 25 years building a strong and highly visible archives by finding and using allies within the Philharmonic's own internal family. One vital strategy has been to link the archives to the interests and needs of the symphony's very prominent music directors. Other examples include major breakthroughs, such as passage of a $7 million bond issue for the Butte archives in Montana, and creation of a significant preservation endowment for the Oberlin College Archives in Ohio, as well as more typical incremental advances made over longer periods by matching an archives advocacy methods to the culture, structures, and processes of the parent organization. A highly instructive chapter describes seven categories of advocacy lessons learned from the case studies and suggests areas that archivists should give higher priority, particularly in finding and using external advocates. The book concludes with essays on advocacy and archival education, the use of new technologies to build support for archives, and advocacy at the federal level. This book ably demonstrates that archivists can (and should!) invest time in advocacy efforts to produce "many happy returns" for themselves and their archives. And now, so can you!

Sensational headlines have publicized the drug trafficking, brutal violence, and other organized crime elements associated with Central America's mara gangs, but there have been few clear-eyed analyses of the history, hierarchies, and future of the mara phenomenon. The first book to look specifically at the Central American gang problem by drawing on the perspectives of researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds, Maras: Gang Violence and Security in Central America provides much-needed insight.

These essays trace the development of the gangs, from Mara Salvatrucha to the 18th Street Gang, in Los Angeles and their spread to El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua as the result of members' deportation to Central America; there, they account for high homicide rates and threaten the democratic stability of the region. With expertise in areas ranging from political science to law enforcement and human rights, the contributors also explore the spread of mara violence in the United States. Their findings comprise a complete documentation that spans sexualized violence, case studies of individual gangs, economic factors, varied responses to gang violence, the use of intelligence gathering, the limits of state power, and the role of policy makers.

Raising crucial questions for a wide readership, these essays are sure to spark productive international dialogues.

Materializing Ritual Practices explores the deep history of ritual practice in Mexico and Central America and the ways interdisciplinary research can be coordinated to illuminate how rituals create, destroy, and transform social relations.
 
Ritual action produces sequences of creation, destruction, and transformation, which involve a variety of materials that are active and agential. The materialities of ritual may persist at temporal scales long beyond the lives of humans or be as ephemeral as spoken words, music, and scents. In this book, archaeologists and ethnographers, including specialists in narrative, music, and ritual practice, explore the rhythms and materiality of rituals that accompany everyday actions, like the construction of houses, healing practices, and religious festivals, and that paced commemoration of rulers, ancestor veneration, and relations with spiritual beings in the past.
 
Connecting the kinds of observed material discursive practices that ethnographers witness to the sedimented practices from which archaeologists infer similar practices in the past, Materializing Ritual Practices addresses how specific materialities encourage repetition in ritual actions and, in other circumstances, resist changes to ritual sequences. The volume will be of interest to cultural anthropologists, archaeologists, and linguists with interests in Central America, ritual, materiality, and time.
 
Contributors: M. Charlotte Arnauld, Giovani Balam Caamal, Isaac Barrientos, Cedric Becquey, Johann Begel, Valeria Bellomia, Juan Carillo Gonzalez, Maire Chosson, Julien Hiquet, Katrina Kosyk, Olivier Le Guen, Maria Luisa Vasquez de Agredos Pascual, Alessandro Lupo, Philippe Nondedeo, Julie Patrois, Russel Sheptak, Valentina Vapnarsky, Francisca Zalaquett Rock
 

In the early- to mid-2010s, Mitt Romney’s presidential candidacy, the hit Broadway musical The Book of Mormon, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ “I’m a Mormon” media campaign brought critical media attention to Mormonism. In this first lengthy treatment of Mormon identities as they intersect with their religious institution, the internet, and modernity during the so-called “Mormon Moment,” Rosemary Avance explores how LDS stakeholders challenged traditional notions of what it means to be Mormon, vying for control of their own public narratives.

Mediated Mormons uses a case study approach to consider various iterations of Mormon identity as presented by church authorities, faithful members, the secular media, and heterodox and former adherents. These often-conflicting perspectives challenge traditional models of LDS authority, dismantling a monolithic view of Mormons and offering a window into processes of social activism and institutional change in the internet era.

While the profession has generated many books on information literacy, none to date have validated exactly why it is so difficult to teach. In her new book, Reale posits that examining and reflecting on the reality of those factors is what will enable practitioners to meet the challenge of their important mandate. Using the same warm and conversational tone as in her previous works, she

• uses personal anecdotes to lay out the key reasons that teaching information literacy is so challenging, from the limited amount of time given to instructors and lack of collaboration with faculty to one’s own anxieties about the work;
• examines how these factors are related and where librarians fit in;
• validates readers’ struggles and frustrations through an honest discussion of the emotional labor of librarianship, including “imposter syndrome,” stress, and burnout;
• offers a variety of approaches, strategies, and topics of focus that will assist readers in their daily practice;
• looks at how a vibrant community of practice can foster positive change both personally and institutionally; and
• presents “Points to Ponder” at the end of each chapter that encourage readers to self-reflect and then transform personal insights into action.

The death of the daily newspaper in the internet age has been predicted for decades. While print newspapers are struggling from drops in advertising and circulation, their survival has been based on original reporting. Instead of a death knell, metro dailies are experiencing an identity crisis—a clash between traditional print journalism’s formality and detail and digital journalism’s informality and brevity.  

In Metro Dailies in the Age of Multimedia Journalism, Mary Lou Nemanic provides in-depth case studies of five mid-size city newspapers to show how these publications are adapting to the transition from print-only to multiplatform content delivery—and how newsroom practices are evolving to address this change. She considers the successes when owners allow journalists to manage their newspapers—to ensure production of quality journalism under the protection of newspaper guilds—as well as how layoffs and resource cutbacks have jeopardized quality standards.

Arguing for an integrated approach in which print and online reporting are considered complementary and visual journalism is emphasized across platforms, Nemanic suggests that there is a future for the endangered daily metro newspaper.

Large rural areas in some regions of the world are still grappling with the challenge of electrification. The optimal solution is to provide reliable energy without adding more fossil fuel plants by using distributed renewable generation.

In Millions of Gifts for the Gods, Jonathan E. Reyman chronicles a remarkable thirty-four-year applied anthropology initiative that bridged ancient traditions with contemporary conservation challenges. From 1982 to 2015 the Feather Distribution Project addressed the critical need for macaw, parrot, and wild turkey feathers essential to Pueblo religious practices, directly supporting their constitutional right to freedom of religion.

Grounded in Sol Tax’s concept of “action anthropology,” the project facilitated community-driven decision-making rather than imposing external solutions. This collaborative approach enabled Indigenous communities to maintain cultural practices that have persisted for over a millennium, dating back to the Ancestral Pueblo people and the Mogollon and Sinagua tribes, who viewed birds as sacred beings that helped humans emerge from the underworld. Yet the project’s impact extended far beyond cultural preservation. Over three decades, it distributed approximately 14.5 million feathers, valued at $20 million, to the Southwest Pueblos and other Indigenous Americans at no cost to them. Through partnerships with turkey hunters, zoos, bird clubs, the National Wild Turkey Federation, and dozens of volunteers, the initiative reduced illegal bird smuggling from Latin America, alleviated pressure on threatened bird populations, and eliminated harmful plucking practices.

Millions of Gifts for the Gods is an extended case study in applied anthropology, demonstrating how sustained collaboration between anthropologists and Indigenous communities can effectively address complex cultural, legal, and environmental challenges while preserving sacred traditions. This unique project is of special interest to anthropologists working in the American Southwest, as well as students and scholars of archaeology, ethnography, and ethnohistory.
 

Butte, Montana, long deserved its reputation as a wide-open town. Mining Cultures shows how the fabled Montana city evolved from a male-dominated mining enclave to a community in which men and women participated on a more equal basis as leisure patterns changed and consumer culture grew. Mary Murphy looks at how women worked and spent their leisure time in a city dominated by the quintessential example of "men's work": mining. Bringing Butte to life, she adds in-depth research on church weeklies, high school yearbooks, holiday rituals, movie plots, and news of local fashion to archival material and interviews. 

A richly illustrated jaunt through western history, Mining Cultures is the never-told chronicle of how women transformed the richest hill on earth.

Examines the role of architecture in the history of global development and decolonization.

In Modernism’s Magic Hat, Ijlal Muzaffar examines how modern architects and planners help resolve one of the central dilemmas of the mid-twentieth-century world order: how to make decolonization plausible without accounting for centuries of capital drain under colonial rule. In the years after World War II, architects and planners found extensive opportunities in new international institutions—such as the World Bank, the UN, and the Ford Foundation—and helped shape new models of global intervention that displaced the burden of change onto the inhabitants. Muzaffar argues that architecture in this domain didn’t just symbolically represent power, but formed the material domain through which new modes of power acquired sense. Looking at a series of architectural projects across the world, from housing in Ghana to village planning in Nigeria and urban planning in Venezuela and Pakistan, Muzaffar explores how architects and planners shaped new ideas of time, land, climate, and the decolonizing body, making them appear as sources of untapped value. What resulted, Muzaffar argues, is a widespread belief in spontaneous Third World “development” without capital, which continues to foreclose any global discussion of colonial theft.