A Tale of Two American Cities: Disaster,Class and Citizenship in San Francisco 1906 and New Orleans 2005

Destruction, notes David Harvey, “is often required to make the new urban geography out of the wreckage of the old.”² The history of San Francisco's Chinatown following the 1906 earthquake and fire and New Orleans' public housing following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 reveal how powerful class interests collude with the fog of disaster to lay claim to the urban spaces of the poor and marginal. In two historic U.S. disasters we witness the concerted efforts of urban elites to confiscate the spaces of two politically vulnerable populations: the Chinese in 1906 and low‐income African‐Americans in 2005. The widely varying outcomes of these two attempts reveal a good deal about the intersection of calamity, class, race, and citizenship in American history.     

美国中小城市的BRT

美国长期来推行低密度扩散的土地使用政策，小汽车成为市民出行的主要交通工具。20世纪后期，轻轨交通开始受到重视，很多城市建成轻轨交通系统后，赢得公众的好评。然而轻轨交通的建设受到投资的制约，因此美国联邦公共交通管理局（FTA）开始重视巴士快速交通（BRT）的推广。除了对符合条件的BRT项目给予财政上的资助以外，更重要的是指导地方政府和公共交通经营者如何把握好BRT的规划与建设。为此FTA编写了一份内容详实的文件。     

A Tale of Three Cities: Teaching Online to Students in Shanghai from Hong Kong and Texas

SUMMARY

The University of Hong Kong collaborated with the Fudan University in Shanghai to offer a Master of Social Service Management (MSSM) part-time degree for students in Shanghai. While most courses of the program were taught by instructors sent from Hong Kong and other overseas countries on weekends and holidays, the “Information and Communication Technology in Social Service Organizations” course was offered online and supplemented by several face-to-face sessions. Instructors in Texas and Hong Kong collaborated and offered the course to the students in Shanghai. Teaching and learning online was a completely new experience for the students. Technical, social, cultural, and linguistic issues arose throughout the four months during which the course was offered. This paper shares the teaching experience and reflection of the instructors as well as the learning outcome and evaluation of the students.     

Women in the American Political System

No abstract available for this article.     

大学生政治信任结构及成因

调查显示,当前大学生对国家和共同理想的信任度很高．对基本政治制度的信任度高,对政府机构的信任度中,对官员的信任度较低,对政治宣传的信任度低。大学生的政治信任度有随政治价值观的抽象程度降低而逐渐递减的趋势。影响大学生政治信任结构的主要因素包括历史经验和政治教育,政府活动和官员行为,公共政策的制定和执行,政治心理特征和民主权利意识。通过科学制定政策、规范政府官员行为和扩大政治参与渠道等途径,大学生的政治信任将得到提高。     

Food assistance and family routines in three American Cities

The major food assistance programs in the United States—the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the National School Lunch Program, the School Breakfast Program, and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children—all share the fundamental goal of helping needy and vulnerable people obtain access to nutritious foods that they might not otherwise be able to afford, but the programs may also affect households’ well-being in other ways. In this study, we examine how the receipt of public and private food assistance is associated with regular family routines, using longitudinal data on low-income families with children from the Three City Study. Estimates from fixed-effects regression models indicate that WIC participation is positively associated with homework routines and consistent bed times. However, receipt of other assistance is not strongly associated with family routines.     

Ideology and American Political Elites

This paper presents evidence that American political elitesthink and behave in an ideological way. Factor analyses of individualquestionnaire items drawn from elite studies in 1958 and 1972show only marginal evidence of the type of structuring impliedby the concept of ideology. However, similar analyses of a priori,multi-item scales constructed from the 1972 surveys clearlyshow evidence of structure for the elite sample, particularlyas compared to a parallel mass sample; this raises serious questionsabout the use of single item scales in past analyses of politicalideology. Further evidence of elite ideology is found in ananalysis of interest group ratings of U.S. Representatives in1970 and 1974. These findings provide strong support for theargument that ideology plays an important role in the perceptionsand behavior of American political elites.     

Political participation: A comparative view of Israeli and American youth

This study explored the ways in which adolescents in Israel and the United States perceived government, politics, and public affairs. A series of open-ended interviews were conducted with approximately 300 high school students in each country immediately prior to the national elections in 1980–1981. Differences were found in regard to the extent to which the young people felt affected by and capable of affecting the larger political system, the extent to which voting was viewed as an important rite of passage to adulthood, and the extent to which they perceived having real choices in candidates and parties, with Israeli youth generally demonstrating more engagement in national governmental affairs. Finally, the conditions and factors that were likely to lead adolescents toward concern, interest, and participation in public affairs were offered.     

Learning Economics: A Cautionary Tale

This essay supports Etzioni's (2015) “The Moral Effects of Economic Teaching” by conceptually analyzing the way that classical economics depicts the worldview of humankind and the methodology of its presentation to students and the general public. The essay concludes (with Etzioni) that this combination can create a morally corrupting paradigm for the student in search of truth.     

Gender-as-Knowledge and AIDS in Africa: A Cautionary Tale

This article is based on my experience with translating research about AIDS, masculinity and risk in Malawi into the public sphere. My work was misinterpreted as demonstrating that African men want to get AIDS because they think it reaffirms their masculinity. I use the concept of gender-as-knowledge to organize my analysis of this response. I argue that media representations of AIDS in 21st century Africa are filtered through a centuries-old prism of racialized gender knowledge, in which African men are presumed to be irrational, sexually voracious, and uninhibited. This article concludes with cautions about the complexities of translating social research into the public sphere.     

Theory as Story: A Postmodern Tale

After locating postmodernism in its historical and epistemological contexts, this article takes the postmodern position that the behavioral theories that have informed clinical social work practice over the last century are stories with texts written by authors whose place in historical time, life experience, and personal proclivities shaped both the plots of the stories and the manner in which they were told. A review of the most influential theory-stories lays the groundwork for addressing two questions: What can postmodernism do for clinical social work? And what can clinical social work do for postmodernism?     

Before the Emergence of Critical Citizens: Economic Development and Political Trust in China

Political trust has been declining among the publics of almost all advanced industrial societies in recent years. This has been attributed to a Materialist–Postmaterialist value shift, which has given rise to a public that is less deferential to authority and increasingly ready to challenge government. This phenomenon has been interpreted as a ‘crisis of democracy’. Although one might expect to find low level of political trust in repressive authoritarian societies, survey data indicates that political trust in China is actually very high. Does this simply mean that people are afraid to express any opinions that might be viewed as critical of authority? As this article will demonstrate, this does not seem to be the case. The Chinese public expresses fairly strong criticism of some aspects of Chinese society – but they express high levels of confidence in the national government. Although rich democracies provide both a higher standard of living and more personal freedom than is available to the average Chinese citizen, the Chinese public expresses higher levels of confidence in government than those found in most advanced industrial societies. We conclude that economic development has the immediate effect of enhancing public support for the government – but in the long run it also leads to value changes that promote critical citizens. At least for now, the regime-enhancing effect of economic development still dominates the regime-eroding effect. The effect of changing values on distrust of government is largely overwhelmed by the support for government brought by the increased level of affluence.     

Shaping the Political Arena: A Comparative Approach Between American Lobby and Euro-Groups

Nowadays, interest groups are regarded as the efficient alternative to political parties, due to the pejorative image acquired through the process of ‘politicization’ of the latter. However, the efficacy of these representative institutions depends on the political system in which they activate. Therefore, a comprehensive difference should be noticed between the European pressure groups and the American ones. The most significant distinction is given both by the influencing environment and the strategic pathways followed in the lobby process. This article also analyses the similarities between the two political actors, focusing on the legitimacy in the name of which the interest groups formulate and implement their lobbying strategies.      

Political education in post-Second World War Germany and the American South

Abstract

Both American and European adult educationalists saw the Danish folk high school as a model for how to educate citizens for more active involvement in their communities. This article examines the experience of Wislade Folk School in Germany and the Highlander Folk School in the United States after the Second World War. In the German case, Wislade was unable to persuade local people to confront the evils of Nazism, but did facilitate the practical tackling of pressing social and economic problems. Highlander struggled to retain support from white Southerners as the School increasingly addressed the evils of segregation, but developed one of its most effective programmes in conjunction with African Americans as part of the emerging civil rights movement. The study concludes that political education is most effective when it addresses people's aspirations, and builds upon existing social capital.     

Trust games: A meta-analysis

We collect data from 162 replications of the Berg, Dickhaut, and McCabe Investment game (the “trust” game) involving more than 23,000 participants. We conduct a meta-analysis of these games in order to identify the effect of experimental protocols and geographic variation on this popular behavioral measure of trust and trustworthiness. Our findings indicate that the amount sent in the game is significantly affected by whether payment is random, and whether play is with a simulated counterpart. Trustworthiness is significantly affected by the amount by which the experimenter multiplies the amount sent, whether subjects play both roles in the experiment, and whether the subjects are students. We find robust evidence that subjects send less in trust games conducted in Africa than those in North America.     

The Tale of Two Obamas

In this paper I trace the tensions between structure and agency, the racial and the postracial, as they intersect and clash in the body of Barack Obama, and the US Presidency more broadly. These tensions are examined in the context of contemporary neoliberal political economy and its hyper-extenuated condition, neo-neoliberalism. Finally, the condition of postraciality is read through a critical analysis of the writings of Shelby Steele on Obama and a conceptualization of Obama the Person and Obama the Phenom.     

Immigrant Incorporation in American Cities: Contextual Determinants of Irish,German, and British Intermarriage in 1880

This study adds to a growing body of research on the contextual determinants of marriage choice and provides new information on ethnic intermarriage in the late 19th century. Census microdata for 66 major cities in 1880 are used to estimate a multilevel model of assortative mating of Irish, German, and British immigrants. Results demonstrate that marital choices made by individuals are significantly affected by the local urban context where they live. In addition, the very large disparity in endogamy between the British and other groups can mainly be attributed to the smaller size of the British population in these cities.     

白哈巴：国境线上的北欧童话

如果说喀纳斯的美名远扬,那么白哈巴则是喀纳斯还未被开垦的美的延续;没有多少游人,放眼不尽的草原与满山的羊群,星星点点的小木屋炊烟袅袅,雪山在阳光的照射下闪闪发光。这就是白哈巴,中国边疆线上的欧洲童话世界。