Showing papers in "City and society in 2007"

Negotiating Grit and Glamour: Young Women of Color and the Gentrification of the Lower East Side

Abstract: This paper examines experiences of gentrification from the perspective of young working class women of color who have grown up on the Lower East Side of New York City in the 1980s and 90s. In a participatory action research project entitled “Makes Me Mad: Stereotypes of young urban womyn of color”, six young women researchers investigate the relationship between the gentrification of their community, public (mis)representations, and their self-understanding. Focusing on how young women negotiate processes of disinvestment and gentrification, this paper offers insights into how globalization is worked out on the ground and in their everyday lives. Bridging the material and psychological, I explore the socio-spatial constitution of young women's identities as they interpret their experiences growing up on the Lower East Side having to live up both to the grittyness of ghetto life and the glamour of the club, cafe and boutique life. Drawing connections between the white-washing sweep of gentrification, and socioeconomic disinvestment of their community, the women express a nuanced understanding of neighborhood change. I maintain that we can learn about the contradictions of globalization from these young women's ambivalent relationship with neighborhood change.

Morality, Cosmopolitanism, or Academic Attainment? Discourses on “Quality” and Urban Chinese‐Only‐Children's Claims to Ideal Personhood

Abstract: The term “quality” (suzhi) has become a ubiquitous part of Chinese popular discourses and the focus of Chinese educational campaigns. Amorphous, multivalent, and widely used, the term “high quality” represents a kind of ideal personhood associated with urban modernity. Based on 32 months of participant observation conducted in schools and homes in a Chinese city between 1997 and 2006, this paper examines how and why urban Chinese only-children with various different strengths in morality, cosmopolitanism, and academic attainment chose, defended, and promoted definitions of quality that favored their own strengths.

Fluid Exchanges: The Negotiation of Intimacy between Tourist Women and Local Men in a Transnational Town in Caribbean Costa Rica

Abstract: In a transnational tourist town in black Caribbean Costa Rica situated both on the margins of “white” Costa Rican society and squarely in global tourism, the mobility of European and North American women tourists in and out constitute a significant tourist flow. Central to the town's social sexual history and modes of sociability are economically ambiguous sexual and often intimate relations between female tourists and local predominantly black Caribbean men. I use the concept of “fluid exchanges” to comprehend the fluidity and corporeality of these relationships in which, I argue, intimacy plays a significant role. Local men, who are situated outside of hegemonic masculinity, use sexual knowledge and masculine privilege to “give” intimacy freely as well as to bargain for payment and acquire cosmopolitan identities, and to regulate the unfettered mobility of First World women tourists within a disparate global sex market and era where new erotic subjectivities and transnational intimate relations are being forged in hybrid and fluid places like Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica.

“To Choose a House Means to Choose a Lifestyle.” The Consumption of Housing and Class-Structuration in Urban China

Abstract: The introduction of land prices and a real estate market in the reform period have led to residential differentiations in previously largely homogenous Chinese cities. Based on qualitative data from 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in an upscale Beijing suburb, in this paper I draw attention to the agency of urban residents in this process. I argue that housing choices in China today are deeply embedded in and related to a larger socio-cultural and spatial reconfiguration of Chinese society. The new urban middle class has developed specific ideas about their living environment and life-style. They aspire to have green space, better air quality, and spaciousness, among other physical characteristics, but also privacy and exclusivity in their new places of residence. I show that residential compounds have become the basis for identity and lifestyle formation, crucial in the process of social differentiation, which in turn underline and reinforce growing disparities in Chinese society. Over and above the outcome of economic restructuring and political decision making, residential differentiation in China today is a social practice that marks urban professionals' status and supports their new modern, urban identities. In addition, this social practice also has an impact on Beijing's suburbanization process.

Youth Cosmopolitanism: Clothing, the City and Globalization in Dakar, Senegal

Abstract: Youth clothing and exchange shape cosmopolitan identities, the city, and global flows in Dakar, Senegal. How Dakarois youth use dress to shape the city and urban identity is puzzling. Despite the declining economy and for many, extreme poverty, youth dress up in stylish and provocative outfits. In Dakar, youth are increasingly entrepreneurial individuals who base the authenticity of their cosmopolitan identity on an ability to buy and sell (trade) in the urban/global informal economy. Because the informal economy is intensely competitive for both buyers and sellers, youth rely on social networks, various forms of reciprocity, and trust in order to perform their work. At times, youth engage in dishonest acts and banditry in order to sell and procure clothing. These strategies highlight the uncertainty of life in Dakar, the relativity of morality, and the creativity that youth employ to make their lives and a life for the city. In these often hidden and subtle ways, youth steer the economic cultural life of the city and keep it hooked in to the global economy. This research is based on fieldwork conducted in Dakar and New York City between 1996 and 2005. Research methods include interviews, participant observation, focus groups and engaging youth in authoring informal fashion magazines which feature their own photography and stories about contemporary clothing trends in Dakar.

Managing Labor Migration in the 21st Century

Abstract: City & Society, Vol. 19, Issue 1, pp. 5–18, ISSN 0893-0465, eISSN 1548-744X. © 2007 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/city.2007.19.1.5. The world is divided into about 200 nation states. Their per capita incomes in 2004 ranged from less than $250 per person per year to more than $50,000 (World Bank Indicators 2006:20–22), providing a significant incentive for especially young people to migrate from one country to another for higher wages and more opportunities. The 30 high-income countries had one billion residents in 2004, a sixth of the world’s population, and their gross national income was $32 trillion, 80 percent of the global $40 trillion.1 The resulting average per capita income of $32,000 in high-income countries was 21 times the average $1,500 for the 5/6 of the world’s people in low and middle-income countries, and this 21–1 ratio has been stable over the past quarter century (Martin, Abella, Kuptsch, 2005). About three percent of the world’s 6.4 billion people were international migrants in 2005 (UN 2006). These 191 million migrants included 62 million who moved from south to north (from a developing to a developed country), 61 million who moved from south to south, 53 million who moved from north to north, and 14 million who moved from north to south. In each of these flows, about half of the migrants were in the labor force of the destination area (ILO 2004), raising the question: what role can migrant workers who move from a developing to a high-income country play fostering trade and accelerating development in their countries of origin? For most of human history, it was assumed that migrants contributed primarily to their new homes, not to their countries of origin. Historians debate the emigration mistakes of governments, as when the French expelled the Huguenots in the 16th century, helping to spark the Industrial Revolution in Britain. However, About three

Contesting race and power: Second-generation dominican youth in the New Gotham

Abstract: One of the effects of the new era of globalization has been an intensification of racialized inequalities, both globally and locally. Youth in cities like New York have been working arduously to establish projects and coalitions that challenge globalization and its consequences. This article examines social and racial justice projects in which New York based Dominican youth are involved. In their attempts to confront and challenge globalization and racism, they have begun to construct a new political identity; their work involves other people of color throughout the diaspora. What does the work of these activists tell us about the prospects of the “new contestatory politics” emerging among youth? What does their work tell us about the ways in which people reconfigure their sense of self, of political community, and social justice ideology in today's world?

Southern Green Revolution: Urban Environmental Activism in Kaohsiung, Taiwan

Abstract: While the environmental movement in southern Taiwan exemplifies the recent worldwide trend of social movements with participants seeking local identity and autonomy in an increasingly global but deterritorialized world, it also has distinctive local characteristics derived from Taiwan's unique geo-political history. In Taiwan, environmental movements were an integral part of the larger process of democratization. In their effort to create a cleaner and greener environment, green activists in Kaohsiung, the second largest city in Taiwan, set up examples of citizen participation and assisted in establishing within the existing administrative framework formal mechanisms for public involvement. More crucially, via the language of ecological conservation, they helped to create a powerful political discourse that not only fundamentally challenged the central government's legitimacy, but also forced the country to rethink and refashion the foundation of Taiwan's national identity that, in turn, aided the efforts of environmental preservation.

HONORARY MENTION OF 2006 SUNTA GRADUATE STUDENT PRIZE: Race, Class and the Politics of Multicultural Learning: Chinese Immigrant Workers and the Brokered American Dream in Chicago

Abstract: This paper examines interactions between a largely middle class-operated social service agency in Chicago's Chinatown, the Chinese American Cultural Center (CACC), and its new Chinese immigrant clientele. Using ethnographic data obtained from the agency's Chef Training Program, the research explores middle class Chinese-Americans' role as cultural brokers in initiating new immigrants into the dominant U.S. race and class system. I argue that CACC's management of recent Chinese immigrants' racial learning is grounded in a middle class racial ideology of strategic colorblindness, which ends up perpetuating new immigrants' racialized position at the bottom of the American labor hierarchy.