Impact of urbanization on the water quality,fish habitat,and fish community of a Lake Ontario marsh,Frenchman’s Bay

Frenchman’s Bay is a barrier beach wetland with a highly urbanized watershed located east of Toronto, along the north shore of Lake Ontario. Degradation of water quality has reduced the historically large stand of emergent vegetation to fringe emergent beds to the north and south of the Bay. Altered hydrology and runoff from the urban watershed and a nearby major highway have resulted in poor water quality, and warmer waters at the northern site. By contrast, the southern site has considerably cleaner and cooler water, as it is influenced by exchange of good-quality water with Lake Ontario. These differences in water quality were reflected in the composition of the fish assemblages that were sampled at the two sites over a 2-year period. Comparisons with past studies indicate that the dominant fish community of Frenchman’s Bay has been relatively stable for the last 20 years. Scores for the Wetland Fish Index, an indicator of wetland condition, were significantly higher in the south site than in the north site, which corresponded to significant differences in Water Quality Index scores. Although the northern portion of Frenchman’s Bay shows clear signs of degradation, the southern portion contains important fish habitat for western Lake Ontario.     

Nihilism and urban multiculture in outer East London

This paper discusses nihilism as it relates to contemporary urban multiculture in outer East London. It addresses how contemporary discourses on, and performances of, nihilism signal shifts in the constitution of urban multiculture. Attention is paid to acts of anti‐sociability (and sociability) for what they reveal about contemporary urban rearrangement, and in particular the re‐formation of urban multiculture in a moment defined by globalization, virtual communication, ethnic diversity and neoliberal marginalization. Through addressing discourses on, and performances of, nihilism the overall argument of the paper is for a renewal of the terms on which we understand and engage with urban multiculture, and for an appreciation of how relations between class, race and culture have shifted since key texts on the subject were published.     

“A Grain of Salt in a Pepper Shaker”: Interviewing Whites,Blacks, and Latinos about Their Neighborhood Preferences

Several perspectives dominate as explanations for neighborhood preferences: pure race, racial proxy, race‐based neighborhood stereotyping, and race‐associated neighborhood factors. This analysis extends and supports the pure race and race‐associated neighborhood factors arguments by showing that these theories are applied differently depending on respondents' social class, race and ethnicity, and whether they are talking about white, black, or Latino neighborhoods. Race‐associated factors are emphasized for white and black neighborhoods, but pure race serves as a better theoretical framework for understanding people's preferences for Latino neighborhoods. I analyze qualitative interview data, using maps of real neighborhoods and hypothetical neighborhood show cards, to examine the neighborhood preferences of 65 white, black, and Latino residents in Ogden, Utah, and Buffalo, New York.     

Commerce,class and ethnicity: Cape Town at the advent of the mineral revolution (c.1875)

This paper is about economic activity, social structure and ethnicity in the Cape Town of the 1870s. In an attempt to combine quantative methodology with insight gained from written records, I have made extensive use of the Census of1875. Cape Town in that year displayed many similarities with Stedman Jones’ Outcast London. In both cities economic power lay with “those whose income derived from rent, banking and commerce.” Seasonality of production, types of casual occupations and a strong artisanal sector characterised both labour markets. Units of production were small. There was in both cities a notable absence of one of Marx and Engels’ fundamental classes, the industrial proletariat. Instead, amongst a sea of casual labour there was the strong presence of the self‐employed resisters of proletarianisation. I have attempted to show how the white ethnicity of dominant class consciousness both conformed to, and confirmed, class position. This white ethnicity differed from white racism in that it did not condemn people it defined as “Other than White” to perpetual inferiority or cultural difference. The nature of economic activity in the city, together with the reality of both white and coloured? Capetonians in almost all gradations of the under classes, made a rigidly ethnically ordered society or ethnically hierarchical division of labour unlikely.     

Celebrating Joan Acker: Sociologist,fearless feminist,friend

Joan Acker's life reflects a time when middle‐class women were expected to be satisfied with maintaining the home front, serving husbands and children, not having paid‐work careers. After living “the ideal” for 37 years, Acker took a new path by earning a Ph. D. and producing path‐breaking scholarship that challenged taken‐for‐granted beliefs about gender, family, work, and organizations. Acker spoke “truth to power” and was an academic heroine in posing feminist challenges to injustices involving gender, social class, and race/ethnicity, particularly (but not solely) related to the workplace. This overview lets Joan tell her story and offers reflections on her milestone publications as seen by Pat Martin.     

The White City: Race and Urban Politics

Urban regime analysis and growth machine theory offer critical tools to study power and inequality in cities. However, the field of urban politics has moved away from critically addressing race. I discuss these theories' potential contributions before suggesting scholars “bring race back” to urban politics in several key areas: studying “White urban regimes” in addition to Black urban regimes; examining how Whiteness factors into growth (and anti‐growth) coalitions; exploring how racial discourse shapes urban regimes; and accounting for the relationship between suburbs and “fringe cities” and the city, including suburban regimes.     

Living in the city: school friendships,diversity and the middle classes

Much of the literature on the urban middle classes describes processes of both affiliation (often to the localities) and disaffiliation (often from some of the non‐middle‐class residents). In this paper, we consider this situation from a different position, drawing on research exploring whether and how children and adults living in diverse localities develop friendships with those different to themselves in terms of social class and ethnicity. This paper focuses on the interviews with the ethnically diverse, but predominantly white British, middle‐class parent participants, considering their attitudes towards social and cultural difference. We emphasize the importance of highlighting inequalities that arise from social class and its intersection with ethnicity in analyses of complex urban populations. The paper's contribution is, first, to examine processes of clustering amongst the white British middle‐class parents, particularly in relation to social class. Second, we contrast this process, and its moments of reflection and unease, with the more deliberate and purposeful efforts of one middle‐class, Bangladeshi‐origin mother who engages in active labour to facilitate relationships across social and ethnic difference.     

Class, authenticity and the transition to higher education for mature students

The stated UK Government policy on Higher Education is to attract increasing numbers of non‐traditional applicants to Higher Education. Mature students are positioned as key within this policy initiative. However, the statistics suggest that recent policy changes have made it more rather than less difficult for non‐traditional students to attend university. This paper explores some of the sociological and psychological processes which make working‐class transitions to higher education problematic by focusing on the narratives of 23 mature students attending an inner London Further Education college. It is argued that class, although mediated by gender and ethnicity, always counts in the transition process. Also, within the working‐classes there are different class fractions with differing priorities in relation to risk, challenge and fitting in. These solidarist and individualist fractions within the working‐classes result in differing priorities, attitudes and actions in relation to the higher education choice process.     

Complaints‐Based Entrepreneurialism: Worker Experiences of the Employment Standards Complaints Process in Ontario,Canada

In Ontario, workers who face unfair working conditions have the option of filing an official complaint with the Ministry of Labour. Complaints making is characterized as a widely available, easily accessible, and free‐of‐cost avenue for workers who may have experienced a violation of the law. However, interviews with Ontario workers who have filed complaints tell a different story. This paper is based on a community‐university project on the enforcement of the Employment Standards Act in Ontario. We draw on 36 interviews with workers employed in precarious jobs in Sudbury, Toronto, and Windsor, who filed complaints to the Ministry. Workers characterize the complaints process as rife with bureaucratic complexity, risk, and unsuccessful payouts. Their experiences shed light on the efficacy of complaint‐based approaches that are often promoted as a form of “bottom‐up” enforcement of employment standards (ES). We demonstrate that the current ES complaints system requires workers to enact neoliberal entrepreneurialism (rather than agentic or collective entrepreneurialism) creating a highly stressful, enormously time‐consuming, and demoralizing experience. We document the increasingly individualized and contradictory avenues through which workers must act as entrepreneurs to navigate and self‐advocate when their rights have been violated. We argue that the current complaint processes limit the potentially empowering impact of this strategy.     

Gangsters and wheelchairs: urban teachers’ perceptions of disability,race and gender

This investigation provides inquiry into Disability Critical Race Studies to analyze the intersecting attributes related to race, gender and disability. The application of Disability Critical Race Studies revealed the ways in which race/ethnicity and gender merge to erroneously typecast African-American men who are wheelchair users as reformed ‘gang bangers’ or ‘victims’ of neighborhood gun violence. This investigation examines urban pre-service teachers’ understandings of disability and underscores the challenging intersection of race, gender and disability within urban communities.     

Effects of urbanism,race, and class on happiness and physical health

The joint effects of urbanism, race, and socioeconomic status on self reported health and happiness are studied. Relationships of “neighborhood fear” and unemployment with health and happiness are also studied within different urban/rural race‐class categories. It is hypothesized that 1) lower socioeconomic status (SES) blacks residing in central cities will report the poorest health and lowest happiness and 2) “neighborhood fear” and unemployment will be most strongly related to health and happiness among central city lower SES blacks. The sample is pooled data from the 1972–1983 National Opinion Research Center (NORC) General Social Surveys. Findings indicate that urbanism has a modest negative relationship to happiness, but low SES urban blacks are not uniquely low in happiness. Contrary to the central city hypothesis, neighborhood fear is most strongly related to health among suburban blacks with less than high school or high school graduation attainment. A relative deprivation explanation is advanced. Unemployment negatively relates to the happiness of blacks and whites in a variety of urban‐SES‐race categories.     

The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, and the Atlantic Working Class in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract This article uses the myth of the many-headed Hydra, commonly employed by members of various ruling classes around the Atlantic to describe the class struggles that surrounded them, to illuminate the history of the working class in the eighteenth century. It concentrates on two groups of workers, wage laborers (especially sailors) and slaves, two zones of the Atlantic, Europe and North America, and four moments in the history of the Atlantic working class: 1747, when, in the Knowles Riot in Boston, sailors and slaves fought the King's press gangs and in so doing created one of the central ideas of the 'Age of Revolution' 1768, when, in the London port strike, sailors, Irish coal heavers, and others pioneered one of the central ideas and activities of the modern working-class movement, the strike; 1776, when, in the American Revolution, sailors and slaves helped to instigate and win the world's first colonial war for liberation; and 1780, when, in the Gordon Riots, the polyglot working class of London liberated the prisons amid the greatest municipal insurrection of the eighteenth century. It argues that fixed, static notions of race, ethnicity, and nationality among historians have obscured a vital world of cooperation and accomplishment within a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, international working class.     

The influence of land use type and municipal context on urban tree species diversity

Recent research has focused on the ways urban forest patterns vary in relation to level of urbanization and socioeconomic characteristics, with most studies limited to one urban land use type or multiple non-differentiate land uses. Additionally, the majority of studies examining urban forest patterns focus on canopy cover extent, with less attention given to patterns of species diversity. This study explores how tree species diversity varies across different urban land uses and municipal boundaries to better understand the role of land use types in shaping urban forest patterns. The goal is addressed through an exploration of plot-level tree data in the urban municipalities of Peel Region located in the Greater Toronto Area (Ontario, Canada). Species composition and standard diversity metrics are calculated for eight land use types and four municipalities. Our results show that differences in diversity metrics and species composition are greater between urban land uses than municipalities. Moreover, Peel’s urban forest has relatively high alpha diversity but many species are present on only one land use type. The results suggest that different causal processes are associated with each land use type, and that urban forest managers should adopt land use-specific strategies to meet species composition goals within the urban forest.     

On the Front Lines: The Voices and Experiences of Racialized Child Welfare Workers in Toronto,Canada

Drawing on focus group data highlighting the perceptions and experiences of racialized child protection workers in the Greater Toronto Area, this article explores the ways in which race operates in the Ontario child welfare system. Most study participants experienced the agencies in which they worked as White-normed environments characterized by systemic racial discrimination in promotion and advancement as well as ongoing instances of racial microaggression—common, everyday practices that denigrate people of color. Several participants spoke of having to contend with White-normed and middle-class-oriented policies, tools, and practices that often prevented them from meeting the unique needs of racialized service users. The article concludes with participants' recommendations for creating a more equitable child welfare system.     

Settlement evolution in the Arena society in the urban field

Post-modern spatial relationships at the outer edge of Toronto's urban field are interpreted within the context of the Arena Society and urban field concepts. Custom census tabulations of commuting and migration show that although there are strong migration ties between Toronto and communities in the south Georgian Bay study area, most work trips are short and link settlements to the next place up the local settlement hierarchy. Migration from rural townships to urban areas, and between communities in the study area is also significant. A case study of Thornbury demonstrates that it is an ‘Amenity/Affinity/Niche’ community as suggested by the two concepts. It has developed a strong retail/service sector in response to the post-modern conditions facilitating economic links to Toronto and the ‘Golden Horseshoe’, but has also attracted tourists and residents because of its accessible location and appealing amenity characteristics. Local diversification as suggested by the Arena Society concept has combined with the economic interaction proposed by the urban field literature to stimulate settlements in the study area. The Arena Society and urban field concepts are mirror images and should be employed together when interpreting post-industrial settlement evolution.     

Multi‐sited ethnography: Opportunities for the study of race

Multi‐sited ethnography (MSE) is an underutilized research method that presents particular challenges and unique possibilities for generative research that can build upon existing theories of race and ethnicity. This review discusses the theoretical and methodological components of MSE and provides examples of both transnational and translocal ethnographic studies. These examples illustrate how MSE as a method can enrich analyses of race and ethnicity by enabling ethnographers to identify site‐specific phenomena as well as social processes that transcend a single locale. MSE, when intentionally paired with methodological framings in line with research priorities, can enable scholars to produce rigorous sociological analysis and theory building. Multi‐sited ethnographies of race can provide a set of analyses that complement a range of other sociological research tools, including single‐sited ethnography and quantitative studies, to deepen our understandings about the production and maintenance of racial and ethnic categories in the United States and transnationally.     

Does (mixed‐)race matter? The role of race in interracial sex,dating, and marriage

Though sociologists have long focused on the role of race as a dynamic in romantic and sexual relationships, there is currently limited research on the experiences of mixed‐race people and the ways their racial identities may be influencing how people navigate race and/or ethnicity as part of these intimate relationships. Due to the increase in the number of Americans—in both opposite‐sex and same‐sex relationships—reporting partners of a different race or ethnic background between the 2000 and 2010 censuses, race, and intimacy remain at the forefront of mainstream social concerns. However, research exploring how multiracial people—a rapidly growing population—fit in these trends is underrepresented. In this review, I discuss the existing research on race, dating, and marriage, particularly the meanings attached to interracial relationships in an online era. I also assess how recent research has begun to discuss the impact of mixed‐race identity on intimate relationships both online and offline.     

Whose Best Friend? Dogs and Racial Boundary Maintenance in a Multiracial Neighborhood

In human–animal studies, dogs are often framed as promoters of interactions among strangers. Yet very few of these studies discuss how racial structure shapes human‐to‐human engagement. Similarly, race scholarship and urban studies have failed to incorporate human–animal studies fully to better understand racial dynamics and inequality in U.S. cities. I use in‐depth interview data from an 18‐month study of Creekridge Park, an urban, multiracial, and mixed‐income neighborhood in Durham, North Carolina, to explore the role of dogs for white residents. I focus on identifying if dogs helped bridge social differences between white residents and their Black and Latinx neighbors in a racially and economically diverse neighborhood. I find that while my white respondents shared many examples of dogs facilitating neighborly relationships and friendship, these relationships were largely between same‐race individuals. By reinforcing a white, urban, middle‐class habitus, white residents used dogs to maintain interracial boundaries and feelings of safety, as well as navigate racial‐ethnic differences between themselves and their Black and Latinx neighbors. These findings point to the necessity of more research that addresses racial structure and human–animal studies to better understand contemporary urban spaces.