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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Public Library As Resistive Space In The Neoliberal City, Sofya Aptekar
The Public Library As Resistive Space In The Neoliberal City, Sofya Aptekar
Publications and Research
With reduced hours, decaying infrastructure, and precariously positioned staff, local public libraries provide much needed services in cities devastated by inequality and slashed safety nets. In this article, I draw on ethnographic research of a small public library in a diverse, mostly working class neighborhood in Queens, New York. I show that in addition to providing an alternative to the capitalist market by distributing resources according to people’s needs, the library serves as a moral underground space, where middle class people bend rules to help struggling city residents. Although the library occasionally replicates hegemonic ideologies about immigrant assimilation, it provides …
Studying The Gang Through Critical Ethnography, David C. Brotherton
Studying The Gang Through Critical Ethnography, David C. Brotherton
Publications and Research
Added to the paucity of critical lenses through which the gang has been viewed criminologically is the increasing influence of the US criminal justice system on the global gang discourse. Such a lens has increased in importance as many nation states have followed the example of US repressive gang policies in thinking about crime and deviance, essentially mirroring its adoption of neo-liberalism in thinking about the political economy. In such an approach it is assumed that a coercive social control system is required to discipline and warehouse those “problem populations” excluded by the concentration of wealth and power. Across the …
The Unbearable Lightness Of The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Accomplishment Of Diversity At An Urban Farmers Market, Sofya Aptekar
The Unbearable Lightness Of The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Accomplishment Of Diversity At An Urban Farmers Market, Sofya Aptekar
Publications and Research
This article provides a critique of work on urban public space that touts its potential as a haven from racial and class conflicts and inequalities. I argue that social structures and hierarchies embedded in the capitalist system and the state’s social control over the racialized poor are not suspended even in places that appear governed by civility and tolerance, such as those under Anderson’s “cosmopolitan canopy”. Durable inequality, residential segregation, nativism, and racism inevitably shape what happens in diverse public spaces. Using an ethnographic study of an urban farmers’ market in New York City, I show that appearances of everyday …