Regional Sociology Commons^™

Documents, Futures: Palm Reading, Palmyra Leaves, And Planetary Prophesy, Bhuva Narayan

Proceedings from the Document Academy

I begin to feel as if I’d been wandering around with these false documents permanently tattooed to my hand, forcing me to walk through life in a story not really my own.

Nothing To Write Home About: Aphorisms Against Actuality, Daniel Kissinger, Maisha Manson

Proceedings from the Document Academy

We ask the reader to consider what the claiming of home and home-ness means. For you, for each of us, for our nation. We jump between different documents and documentations of what it means to be, to make, to keep, to establish, to live at home. We look, particularly, to the aphorisms that collect around the sense and feeling of home, and home-ness. We posit counter-documents from historical archives to these structures of feeling which function to make (some of) us feel “at home,” or at least a certain way, while pushing out those who are marked as unwanted, who …

Pension Fund Evictions: Lessons For Housing And Labor, Marnie F. Brady

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I analyze an institutional investor portfolio of over-leveraged multifamily rental housing in East Palo Alto, California to demonstrate how changing forms of landlordism produce both new and familiar targets for tenants organizing against displacement and for housing security. Venture capital investors in the first decade of the 2000s exploited the Silicon Valley regional conditions of racial exclusion, uneven development, and municipal rent control. I introduce the legacy of Black political organization in East Palo Alto as a way of contextualizing the tenants’ and the city leaders’ response to the monopoly investment purchase. The structure of this rental …

Emerson Garfield Community Commons Comprehensive Plan, Faith Keister, Mary Leu, Emma Phillips, Isaac Jang, Goldie Weers

Planned Communities: SO 375H

The content of this Community Plan is intended to be used by future community developers in order to create a Community Commons for the Emerson-Garfield Community. This document is a compilation of the potential resources such as an outline of costs, desired features and elements, possible funding sources, building plans, and more. The plot of land located at 127 West Mission Avenue is an ideal space for the community commons. This was determined to be the best way to meet the desires of the Emerson-Garfield Neighborhood Council.

Strengthening Slavery’S Border, Undermining Slavery: Fugitive Slaves And The Legal Regulation Of Black Mississippi River Crossing, 1804-1860, Jesse Nasta

The Confluence (2009-2020)

In the decades before the Civil War, St. Louis sat on a border between slave and free states. Jesse Nasta documents the role of common carriers—steamboats—on the Mississippi River for escaping slaves and the efforts of government to hold steamboat operators accountable for those escapes—efforts that reached all the way to the Missouri Supreme Court. This article is the recipient of the 2017 Tatom Award for the best student paper on a regional topic.

From Prairie To Destination: The Story Of South Grand, Andrew Weil, Josh Burbridge

The Confluence (2009-2020)

The business district on South Grand between Arsenal and Utah streets evolved from a prairie setting into a thriving business district when streetcars arrived. In this essay, Andrew Weil and Josh Burbridge chart the evolution of the business district through its architecture.

From The Editor, Jeffrey Smith

The Confluence (2009-2020)

No abstract provided.

Big Spring And Recharge Area And The Possibility Of Lead Mining, Quinta Scott

The Confluence (2009-2020)

In this second installment of her series of environmental studies, Quinta Scott examines the impact of lead mining on the region.

Spring/Summer 2017, Full Issue

The Confluence (2009-2020)

No abstract provided.

Emerson Garfield Neighborhood Beautification, Kristin Jensen, Madi Burke, Tristan Renz

Planned Communities: SO 375H

The purpose of this neighborhood action plan is to enhance the aesthetic appeal, cohesion, and overall safety of the Emerson-Garfield neighborhood -- creating an environment that community members are proud to live in, and where parents can safely raise their children. An enhancement of appearances will work towards the fostering of a classy, family friendly, and local identity. These improvements will promote collaboration among community members, strengthening the neighborhood’s appeal, and implementing needed changes.

Emerson Garfield Neighborhood: A Neighborhood Life Plan, Sarah Dixit, Joel Gabriele, Margot Spindola, Emily Wilson

Planned Communities: SO 375H

This comprehensive plan of Emerson-Garfield seeks to broaden the horizons within neighborhood life planning and assesses the strategies to create a more vibrant community. Our comprehensive plan focuses on neighborhood life because the residents have identified better opportunities for other residents in the neighborhood to interact and collaborate.

“The City Is Filled With Exhibitions & Places Of Amusement”: George And Clara Catlin In London, Jeffrey Smith

The Confluence (2009-2020)

George Catlin traveled to London and, later, Paris to exhibit and sell paintings of western Native Americans in the 1840s. His wife, Clara, joined him and sent these letters home about the experience.

Information Sharing, Transparency, And E-Governance Among County Government Offices In Southeastern Michigan, Lawrence Bosek

All NMU Master's Theses

The Internet has given rise to the availability of information at our fingertips. While the public, particularly consumers, are more commonly described as being the leading users and beneficiaries of electronic information services, businesses and governments are also players in the arena for sharing official information. Information can be easily stored on Internet websites for the public, businesses, and other governmental offices to search and peruse when needed. This study examined the ease of locating county governmental information, such as contact information for public officials and financial reports, and surveyed elected county officials for purposes of identifying how information is …

Las Ofrendas A La Tierra En Un Mundo Global \ Offerings To Land In A Global World, Alison Wuensch

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Esta investigación aborda si las ofrendas a la Pachamama en el Cusco responden a la desvalorización de las culturas andinas en un mundo globalizado por el turismo, la globalización, la modernización, y la urbanización. El turismo místico en el Perú ha crecido desde las noventas con la promoción del estado peruano de la cultura viva, y una de las ceremonias andinas más importantes es la ofrenda a la Pachamama. El objetivo era identificar y explicar los efectos del turismo, la globalización, la modernización, y la urbanización en las ofrendas a la Pachamama según los chamanes y la observación. Fui a …

Documenting Social Enterprises: A Wider Look Into Best Practices, Jacqueline Calamari

Honors Projects in History and Social Sciences

The Hunger Project is a global, non-profit, strategic organization committed to the sustainable end of world hunger. For my Senior Capstone Project, I applied to collaborate with The Hunger Project who then proposed a project to me. I have gained insight into the eight African countries’ current social enterprises supported by The Hunger Project, evaluated their success, and assessed what could be done to make them more successful. My project included completing three specific tas: first, cataloging the social enterprises, second, rating their profitability and social impact, and third, creating a leverage plan for those in need of improvement. These …

Where Ethnography Breaks Down: The Ethics, Miscommunications, And Failures Of My Independent Study Project, Natasha Shannon

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This paper will communicate a thick description and self-reflective critique of the research methods I used while conducting short-term ethnographic fieldwork at an NGO (non-governmental organization) in Rabat, Morocco. The research initially sought to answer the following question: How does the culture of a Moroccan NGO interact with the culture of its target client populations, and how does this impact the power dynamics of the NGO’s services? However, the ethical dilemmas of the research caused the question to shift to the following: What went wrong over the course of this short-term ethnography, and why? This paper will address my initial …

Smoking Trends Among U.S. Latinos, 1998–2013: The Impact Of Immigrant Arrival Cohort, Georgiana Bostean, Annie Ro, Nancy L. Fleischer

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

Few studies examine nativity disparities in smoking in the U.S., thus a major gap remains in understanding whether immigrant Latinos’ smoking prevalence is stable, converging, or diverging, compared with U.S.-born Latinos. This study aimed to disentangle the roles of period changes, duration of U.S. residence, and immigrant arrival cohort in explaining the gap in smoking prevalence between foreign-born and U.S.-born Latinos. Using repeated cross-sectional data spanning 1998–2013 (U.S. National Health Interview Survey), regressions predicted current smoking among foreign-born and U.S.-born Latino men and women (n = 12,492). We contrasted findings from conventional regression analyses that simply include period and duration …

2011-2015 Acs South Dakota Countries Population By Age And Sex, Wei Gu, Census Data Center

Center Demographic Datasets

This data present South Dakota county level demographics of population by age and sex.

Primary download file: File Type: Excel File size 111 KB
Supplemental file: File type: CSV File size: 24 KB

Governance As An Emergent Compromise: Modernization And Flexibility In The Pakistani Electrical Power Sector, Ijlal Naqvi

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Developing countries are often characterized by a mix of bad governance and development initiatives seeking to accelerate modernization. When inevitable cracks in the modernization process appear, they create opportunities for informalities to seep in where the influence of power relations and culture can lead to new forms of predation or allow governance compromises to emerge. The article explores this at the national and local levels of the Pakistani electrical power sector, with each level conceptualized as a field of strategic action. The aim is to recognize the importance of emergent compromises for producing workable accommodations of competing interests, improving access …

E-Cigarette Specialty Retailers: Data To Assess The Association Between Retail Environment And Student E-Cigarette Use, Georgiana Bostean, Catherine M. Crespi, Patsornkarn Vorapharuek, William J. Mccarthy

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

The retail environment is a major social determinant of health, yet little is known about the e-cigarette specialty retailer environment. The e-cigarette specialty retail environment may be associated with e-cigarette use by middle and high school students, an issue that was addressed in a recent article entitled, “E-cigarette use among students and e-cigarette specialty retailer presence near schools,” by Bostean and colleagues (G. Bostean, C.M. Crespi, P. Vorapharuek, W.J. McCarthy, 2016). We present data relating to e-cigarette specialty retailers in Orange County, California. We describe the data collection method (including the search methodology to identify e-cigarette specialty retailers), present descriptive …