Digital Commons Network^™

Climate Change And Critical Agrarian Studies, Ian Scoones, Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Amita Baviskar, Marc Edelman, Nancy Peluso, Wendy Wolford

Publications and Research

Climate change is perhaps the greatest threat to humanity today and plays out as a cruel engine of myriad forms of injustice, violence and destruction. The effects of climate change from human-made emissions of greenhouse gases are devastating and accelerating; yet are uncertain and uneven both in terms of geography and socio-economic impacts. Emerging from the dynamics of capitalism since the industrial revolution — as well as industrialisation under state-led socialism — the consequences of climate change are especially profound for the countryside and its inhabitants. The book interrogates the narratives and strategies that frame climate change and examines the …

Be: Fall/Winter 2023–2024 Issue, Be: A Journal Of Black Experimental And Interdisciplinary Work

Publications and Research

Our fall/winter issue explores, with a cool and objective eye, memory and history; it may give you some necessary de ja vu, as we think of family, books, and films we want to preserve. This is our interview/review issue, and we’ve spoken to people or reviewed work that seems necessary for building better futures. Our interview with Amos White argues for the preservation of life-giving and life-affirming trees. We’ve also included reviews of heart-opening books — Tara Christina’s “More than a Drop” and Caron Knauer’s “American Slavery on Film” — that reinforce the significance of familial and collective memory. And …

The Compound Risk Of Heat And Covid-19 In New York City: Riskscapes, Physical And Social Factors, And Interventions, Janelle Knox-Hayes, Juan Camilo Osorio, Natasha Stamler, Maria Dombrov, Rose Winer, Mary Hannah Smith, Reginald Blake, Cynthia Rosenzweig

Publications and Research

Climate change is disrupting the fundamental conditions of human life and exacerbating existing inequity by placing further burdens on communities that are already vulnerable. Risk exposure varies by where people live and work. In this article, we examine the spatial overlap of the compound risks of COVID-19 and extreme heat in New York City. We assess the relationship between socio-demographic and natural, built and social environmental characteristics, and the spatial correspondence of COVID-19 daily case rates across three pandemic waves. We use these data to create a compound risk index combining heat, COVID-19, density and social vulnerability. Our findings demonstrate …

It Turned Into A Bioblitz: Urban Data Collection For Building Scientific Literacy And Environmental Connection, Kelly O'Donnell, Lisa Brundage

Publications and Research

In 2013, Macaulay Honors College redesigned its required science curriculum to focus on scientific literacy skills rather than content. Central to this shift was inclusion of a data collection event, a BioBlitz, to provide students with the basis for their own semester-long research projects. Students are teamed with naturalists in an urban green space to find as many species as they can in 24 h and to contribute to a global biodiversity database via the app iNaturalist. We have learned two important lessons: (1) developing an interdisciplinary curriculum with a high degree of experiential learning is more successful when both …

The Production And Destiny Of Public Space In An American City: Examining The Emergence And Disruption Of Brooklyn City Hall Square, Jason Montgomery

Publications and Research

Urban form should reflect collective value for place in communities. Urban squares in particular have the potential to serve as the nucleus of communities, urban artefacts that link place to memory and heritage while serving basic needs for everyday life in the city. Civic squares, those linked to governmental institutions, have further potential to facilitate community gatherings for memorialisation, commemoration, celebration and political action. Despite these important functions and potential, the incremental planning of Brooklyn in the early nineteenth century placed little emphasis on squares of any kind, despite the community’s expressed desires. Brooklyn’s first civic square, here referred to …

Studying Factors Of Environmental Injustice And Ways To Achieve Equity, Arham Hussain, Reginald Metellus

Publications and Research

In today's day of age, the biggest concern for current and future generations: the environment. The urban heat island (UHi) with its significant energy, health, and societal impacts is among the major environmental issues in urban regions, especially in historically underserved and socially vulnerable communities (HUSVCs). In the 1930s, the former federal agency, Homeowners' Loan Corporation (H0Lq, created ''Residential Security" maps of major cities, known today as "redlined" areas. These neighborhoods were often designated as "hazardous" due to the high percentages of people of color living there, leading to systematic disinvestment based on race. While the program ended in 1968, …

Intersecting Mobilities: Beyond The Autonomy Of Movement And Power Of Place, Miriam Ticktin, Rafi Youatt

Publications and Research

It is widely understood that we live in a world where people, goods, species, and things of all sorts are on the move, and that the politics around mobility and its regulation and meaning are critical to contemporary political and social life. Human migration has been globally intensive for well over a century; industrial economic production, consumption, and trade move goods around the world; transportation infrastructure moves all sorts of cargo around, human and nonhuman; regular and irregular ecological processes and changes are creating new patterns of nonhuman movement; variants of viruses race around the world; even geological elements are …

A Call For The Library Community To Deploy Best Practices Toward A Database For Biocultural Knowledge Relating To Climate Change, Martha B. Lerski

Publications and Research

Abstract

Purpose – In this paper, a call to the library and information science community to support documentation and conservation of cultural and biocultural heritage has been presented.

Design/methodology/approach – Based in existing Literature, this proposal is generative and descriptive— rather than prescriptive—regarding precisely how libraries should collaborate to employ technical and ethical best practices to provide access to vital data, research and cultural narratives relating to climate.

Findings – COVID-19 and climate destruction signal urgent global challenges. Library best practices are positioned to respond to climate change. Literature indicates how libraries preserve, share and cross-link cultural and scientific knowledge. …

Making The Case For Addressing Second-Generation Gender Bias In Public Administration, Helisse Levine, Maria J. D’Agostino, Meghna Sabharwal

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Minerva Cuevas: Disidencia, Alaina Claire Feldman, Clayton Press, Solange Farkas, Gabriel Bogossian

Publications and Research

Bilingual catalogue for the exhibition "Minerva Cuevas: Disidencia" presented at Baruch College's Mishkin Gallery.

Area Characteristics And Consumer Nutrition Environments In Restaurants: An Examination Of Hispanic Caribbean Restaurants In New York City, Melissa Fuster, Hanish Kodali, Krishnendu Ray, Brian Elbel, Margaret A. Handley, Terry T. Huang, Glen Johnson

Publications and Research

Hispanics in the USA, particularly those of Caribbean descent, experience high levels of diet-related diseases and dietary risk factors. Restaurants are an increasingly important yet understudied source of food and may present opportunities to positively influence urban food environments. We sought to explore food environments further, by examining the association between neighborhood characteristics and restaurant consumer nutrition environments within New York City’s Hispanic Caribbean (HC) restaurant environments. We applied an adapted version of the Nutrition Environment Measurements Survey for Restaurants (NEMS-R) to evaluate a random sample of HC restaurants (n=89). NEMS-HCR scores (continuous and categorized as low, medium, and high …

At What Cost: Modern Capitalism And The Future Of Health (Preface), Nicholas Freudenberg

Publications and Research

Freedom of choice lies at the heart of American society. Every day, individuals decide what to eat, which doctors to see, who to connect with online, and where to educate their children. Yet, many Americans don't realize that these choices are illusory at best. By the start of the 21st century, every major industrial sector in the global economy was controlled by no more than five transnational corporations, and in about a third of these sectors, a single company accounted for more than 40 percent of global sales. The available options in food, healthcare, education, transportation, and even online presence …

Intangible Cultural Heritage: A Benefit To Climate-Displaced And Host Communities, Gül Aktürk, Martha B. Lerski

Publications and Research

Climate change is borderless, and its impacts are not shared equally by all communities. It causes an imbalance between people by creating a more desirable living environment for some societies while erasing settlements and shelters of some others. Due to floods, sea level rise, destructive storms, drought, and slow-onset factors such as salinization of water and soil, people lose their lands, homes, and natural resources. Catastrophic events force people to move voluntarily or involuntarily. The relocation of communities is a debatable climate adaptation measure which requires utmost care with human rights, ethics, and psychological well-being of individuals upon the issues …

Chemical Exposure From Manufactured Gas Plants: Public Health Risks?, Aneeza Hussain

Publications and Research

This project aims at identifying the chemicals and their risk factors to public health, which were found underneath Public Place, a brownfield next to the Gowanus Canal. The site is heavily contaminated with coal tar — a toxic chemical by-product of gas manufacturing, which happened at the site for 100 years until the gas plant closed down in the 1960s and the land was seized by the city. Recently, the city has planned to develop Public Place into “Gowanus Green” and which will be comprised of a school and low-income housing units on this site. The aim of this research …

Chemical Exposure From Manufactured Gas Plants: Demographic & Governmental Research, Aneeza Hussain

Publications and Research

There are thousands of brownfields in New York on former Manufactured Gas Plants (MGP) similar to the Public Place site in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Public Place is an active brownfield abutting an EPA Superfund site currently undergoing remediation. After consulting recent literature finding that populations living on and near superfund sites have lower life expectancy that also correlate with “sociodemographic factors” like income and race, we used American Community Survey data to conduct a demographic analysis of census districts within the rezone area. Assessment of current demographic data shows that Gowanus residents living within census districts overlapping with the rezone area …

Public Library-Based Social Work Field Placements: Guidance For Public Libraries Planning To Become A Social Work Practicum Site, Elizabeth A. Wahler, Jacob D. Ressler, Sarah C. Johnson, Colleen Rortvedt, Tasha Saecker, John Helling, Michael A. Williams, Danielle Hoover

Publications and Research

Public libraries are increasingly faced with patron psychosocial needs, including mental health problems, substance use, homelessness, or poverty-related needs. Since library staff are often not trained to address these needs, many are choosing to host on-site social work practicum students to provide information and referrals for patrons presenting with psychosocial needs. However, little existing guidance is available about initiating a social work practicum placement, which can leave libraries unprepared and often “reinventing the wheel”. This manuscript provides guidance on the steps that should be considered by libraries intending to host their first social work practicum student.

Invisible Inequalities: Persistent Health Threats In The Urban Built Environment, Kara M. Schlichting, Melanie A. Kiechle

Publications and Research

A city’s materiality creates health and illness. We both write about air – its movement and its temperature – as it affects human bodies. We offer two topics as case studies, heat and ventilation, and how they exacerbate the effects of each other, to illustrate the long history of seemingly new challenges posed by the novel coronavirus. The environmental inequalities of heat exposure and access to fresh air underscore that cities can only be considered ‘low impact’ on the environment from a top-down, large-scale approach. In writing about air and heat, we direct attention to the feel and the bodily …

Learning Places: Place-Based Learning In An Interdisciplinary Approach To Undergraduate Research, Jason Montgomery

Publications and Research

High-impact educational practices outlined by the Association of American Colleges and Universities give faculty a toolkit of specific practices that current research identifies as having particular effectiveness in student engagement and learning in the 21st century. Included in this list of effective practices is undergraduate research. While this high-impact educational practice is most often associated with the sciences, it has wider applicability to undergraduate learning where the methods of research can integrate synergistic strategies that further enhance student engagement and learning: place-based learning and interdisciplinary teaching. In this chapter, these two compelling approaches to higher education are presented as …

Covid-19 And Inequity: A Comparative Spatial Analysis Of New York City And Chicago Hot Spots, Andrew Maroko, Denis Nash, Brian Pavilonis

Publications and Research

There have been numerous reports that the impact of the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic has disproportionately impacted traditionally vulnerable communities, including well-researched social determinants of health, such as racial and ethnic minorities, migrants, and the economically challenged. The goal of this ecological cross-sectional study is to examine the demographic and economic nature of spatial hot and cold spots of SARS-CoV-2 rates in New York City and Chicago as of April 13, 2020.

In both cities, cold spots (clusters of low SARS-CoV-2 rate ZIP code tabulation areas) demonstrated typical protective factors associated with the social determinants of health and the ability to …

The Public Reckoning: Anti-Debt Futures After #Rickyrenuncia, Sarah Molinari

Publications and Research

This essay argues that the summer 2019 mobilizations in Puerto Rico and the renewed demand for a debt audit help to imagine anti-debt futures that disrupt the terms and temporalities of public debt and indebted lives. The essay discusses one form of debt resistance-a comprehensive citizen debt audit-as central to deepen the process of public reckoning marked by #RickyRenuncia and to build upon the landscapes of protest and solidarity emerging in its wake.

The Tale Of Two Community Gardens: Green Aesthetics Versus Food Justice In The Big Apple, Sofya Aptekar, Justin S. Myers

Publications and Research

There has been a vibrant community gardening movement in New York City since the 1970s. The movement is predominantly located in working class communities of color and has fought for decades to turn vacant land into beneficial community spaces. However, many of these communities are struggling with gentrification, which has the potential to transform access to and use of community gardens in the city and the politics around them. Drawing on separate multi-year ethnographic projects, this article compares two community gardens in food insecure communities in Queens and Brooklyn: one that is undergoing gentrification and one that is not. We …

Characterization Of Women And Leadership In Public Administration And Beyond, Maria J. D'Agostino, Meghna Sabharwal, Helisse Levine

Publications and Research

Women were 30% of the labor force in 1950 and 48.6% of the workforce today. Women are also currently outpacing men in the attainment of college degrees – 36% of women aged between 25- 29 years have a bachelor’s degree compared to 28% of males in the same age group and have surpassed men in college graduation rates. Despite these growing numbers, women have yet to reach a critical mass in leadership positions. Women represent less than 5% of CEOs in Fortune 500 companies. Out of 195 state heads around the world, only 15 are currently women. Less than 20% …

Minimizing The Dangers Of Air Pollution Using Alternative Facts: A Science Museum Case Study, David H. Lee

Publications and Research

A science museum exhibition about human health contains an exhibit that minimizes health impacts of air pollution. Relevant details, such as the full range of health risks; fossil fuel combustion; air quality statutes (and the local electrical utility’s violations of these statues), are omitted, while end users of electricity are blamed. The exhibit accomplishes this, not through outright falsification, but through selected “alternative facts” that change the focus and imply misleading alternate explanations. Using two classical rhetorical concepts (the practical syllogism and the enthymeme) allows for the surfacing of missing evidence and unstated directives underlying multimodal rhetoric. By stating multimedia …

Visualization And Analysis Of Environmental Data, Sean Macdonald

Publications and Research

The virtual exploration of place has been employed in a variety of learning environments across many disciplines, creatively expanding upon the experience of place. This chapter explores the value of mapping environmental data as a tool that can enhance students’ virtual exploration of place as they investigate local environmental policies and problems within their own urban surroundings. This visualization project engages students in making meaningful connections between the theoretical study of local and global environmental problems and the “observation” and investigation of these data using mapped data. The virtual learning environment is viewed as one that is interactive, exploring how …

Beyond Europeanization: The Politics Of Scale And Positionality In Lithuania’S Alternative Food Networks, Renata Blumberg, Diana Mincyte

Publications and Research

This article brings geographical insights to understanding the Europeanization of agri-food politics in new European Union member states. Most literature on agri-food policy and law in the European Union has conceptualized policy making and implementation as an institutional process involving multiple levels of governance. In this perspective, Europeanization is understood as a process through which stakeholders formulate, negotiate, and implement legal principles and procedures across various institutions at different levels of governance. By employing the conceptual tools developed in geographical research, we contribute a spatial and historical dimension to these studies. Our analysis shows how the politics of scale and …

The Concurrent Decline Of Soil Lead And Children’S Blood Lead In New Orleans, Howard W. Mielke, Christopher R. Gonzales, Eric T. Powell, Mark A. S. Laidlow, Kenneth J. Berry, Paul W. Mielke Jr., Sara Perl Egendorf

Publications and Research

Lead (Pb) is extremely toxic and a major cause of chronic diseases worldwide. Pb is associated with health disparities, particularly within low-income populations. In biological systems, Pb mimics calcium and, among other effects, interrupts cell signaling. Furthermore, Pb exposure results in epigenetic changes that affect multigenerational gene expression. Exposure to Pb has decreased through primary prevention, including removal of Pb solder from canned food, regulating lead-based paint, and especially eliminating Pb additives in gasoline. While researchers observe a continuous decline in children’s blood lead (BPb), reservoirs of exposure persist in topsoil, which stores the legacy dust from leaded gasoline and …

The Housing Crisis And The Rise Of The Real Estate State, Samuel Stein

Publications and Research

This article — an excerpt from my book, Capital City, with elaborations on a number of key points — argues that the housing crises endemic to contemporary capitalism must be understood as a result of the concentration of global capital into real estate and the the re-orientation of state planning capacities around the demands of the real estate industry. The first half of the article explains the dimensions of the crisis in the US and the rise of "the real estate state." The second half explores policy alternatives to contemporary urban neoliberalism and the kinds of movements necessary to …

Public Land Revisited: Municipalization And Privatization In Newark And New York City, Samuel Stein, Oksana Mironova

Publications and Research

Public land plays a central role in contemporary urban planning struggles. Using a comparative case study approach focused on the north-eastern US cities of Newark and New York City, we uncover patterns of land acquisition and dispossession that fit five broad and often overlapping periods in planning history: City Beautiful, metropolitan reorganization, deindustrialization, and devaluation, followed by hyper-commodification in New York City and redevelopment amidst disinvestment in Newark. Through this periodization, we find that accumulation and alienation of urban public land has largely taken place through two modes of municipalization (targeted and reactive) and two modes of privatization (community-led and …

The Anti-Fracking Movement And The Politics Of Rural Marginalization In Lithuania: Intersectionality In Environmental Justice, Diana Mincyte, Aiste Bartkiene

Publications and Research

While the environmental justice perspective focuses on the unequal distribution of environmental risks and benefits across different groups based on race, class, or gender, intersectionality approaches avoid the use of a priori categories to examine marginalization. We argue that intersectionality can broaden the scope of environmental justice studies by examining interactive, historically grounded processes through which categories of difference are produced. To support this argument, we present an illustrative case of the movement in Lithuania that challenged Chevron’s plans to prospect shale resources for potential fracking. We conduct a narrative analysis of public discourses surrounding the formation of the movement …

A Survey Of Doctoral Dissertations In Restorative Justice (1997-2018), Teresa A. Booker

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.