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Announces the Ninth International Conference of the National Organization on Male Sexual Victimization from October 25 to 28, 2001 in New York City. Theme of the conference.

Critics often mourn a loss of publicness in cities due to the increased presence of antiterror security zones and related behavioral and access controls, although recent work suggests that security landscapes have shifted from the hard, intense, militarized architecture of the late 1990s-early 2000s to a softer, less obtrusive approach more commonly seen today. Nonetheless, these studies are mostly anecdotal in nature: few studies attempt to back these claims with empirical evidence and even fewer connect this physical security imposition with the policies and plans governing its implementation and operation. In this paper I describe results of site visits to Civic Centers and Financial Districts in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. In each neighborhood I catalog security landscapes using a simple tool to assess the intensity, duration, and location of individual security zones. I find that the security landscape covers between 3.4% and 35.7% of publicly accessible space in the districts studied, and that this landscape is most prevalent and intense in New York City. I also find that security zones governed by multistakeholder networks are more intense and militarized than zones managed by a single entity. By understanding how the policies impact physical security, albeit in a relatively small sample of cities and districts, we can better predict what the future of urban security measures might hold. This paper provides empirical grounding to more common theoretical speculations regarding the future of the urban security landscape in the global West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1996, Sotheby's in New York held a four-day auction of many of the possessions Jackie Onassis purchased during her lifetime. This paper is an ethnography of a loose social circle of gay men, some of whom attended the pre-auction display of these objects and who regularly hold their own informal Jackie ‘O’ celebrations. It looks at what their worshipping of a female figure, Jackie ‘O’, means and how a distinctive cultural capital is espoused by gay men which differentiates them from other Jackie collectors. To this end, the paper also focuses on ‘vocabularies of appreciation’ ( ), or kitsch consumption among this loose social circle and, in this process, categories of ‘us’ and ‘them’ are performed (see ; ; ). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses Sassen's model of informalization in advanced urban economies, and in particular, its application to the construction industry in New York City. The validity of the model is assessed in light of the ethnographic accounts of Irish construction workers, which deal with both the formal and informal economies within the construction sector. While the findings are generally compatible with Sassen' s model, the paper concludes that greater attention needs to be paid to the role of ethnicity as an independent variable operating in the labour market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the effect of the human capital characteristics of co-ethnic immigrant communities on foreign-born students' math achievement. We use data on New York City public school foreign-born students from 39 countries merged with census data on the characteristics of the immigrant household heads in the city from each nation of origin and estimate regressions of student achievement on co-ethnic immigrant community characteristics, controlling for student and school attributes. We find that the income and size of the co-ethnic immigrant community has no effect on immigrant student achievement, while the percent of college graduates may have a small positive effect. In addition, children in highly English proficient immigrant communities test slightly lower than children from less proficient communities. The results suggest that there may be some protective factors associated with immigrant community members' education levels and use of native languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there has been rapid recent growth in the volume of research on both whiteness and childhood within geography, these literatures have only infrequently intersected explicitly. In this paper, I argue that a focus on narratives of childhood and child rearing can significantly enrich current understandings of how imaginative geographies of American (non)whiteness are sustained and reproduced. I develop this argument using a case study of recent narratives concerning one well-known program for children living in New York City, the Fresh Air Fund, which arranges for 'inner-city' children (most of whom identify as black or Latino) to spend portions of their summers living with host families (most of whom are white) in rural and suburban areas. The activities of the fund generate regular media coverage in both New York City and many of the destination communities, contributing to a wider public narrative concerning what white families and spaces have to offer 'inner-city' children. Drawing on journalistic accounts produced over the past two decades within one important destination site for the program, the US state of Vermont, I examine the racialized imaginative geographies of city, country, and suburb mobilized and reproduced within these stories of the Fund and its effects. I specifically argue that these accounts (re)script whiteness such that it becomes a solution to, rather than a source of, inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary offerings at Ellis Island Immigration Museum do little to indicate that the millions of immigrants and, later, tourists who have passed through Ellis Island cannot all have been reproductively focused and gender normative; the site, too, seems oddly unembodied. In this paper I consider representations and absences around sex at Ellis Island, arguing for strategies of embodiment that attend to the particular bodies inhabited and to the complexity, messiness, and contradictions of sexed bodies in their historical specificity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses holy New York City's workfare program has structured opportunities for collective action by welfare recipients. As workfare blurs the distinction between wage workers and welfare recipients, it calls into question accepted understandings of the rights and obligations of welfare recipients and fosters new claims on the state. The concept of "cultural opportunity structures" can help to explain the political mobilization of workfare participants if it is linked to a Durkheimian tradition of cultural analysis attentive to symbolic classification. The dramaturgic approach to culture exemplified in the work of Erving Goffman can usefully complement this structural approach if a narrowfocus on frames and framing processes is broadened to include interaction rituals and ceremonial profanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes and interprets some of the events associated with the demographic and economic restructuring that has occurred in Flushing, in the Borough of Queens in New York City. Since the liberalization of the U.S. immigration laws in 1965, many of New York's neighborhoods have been transformed by the rapid influx of immigrants. In the case of Flushing, the majority of newcomers have been Asians, particularly from China, Korea, and the Indian subcontinent. The introduction of Asian capital and enterprise into the neighborhood has revitalized what was considered to be an ailing economy and a sluggish housing market. From the perspective of some of the long-term residents, however, the costs of progress have outweighed the benefits. The paper examines the public discourse accompanying the Asianization of Flushing, centering on the conflicts that have emerged between capital and community, immigrants and long-term residents, Asians and non-Asians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on two forces (stressors and resources) in the life stress process as they affect psychological distress. Utilizing three waves of panel data from a representative community sample in upstate New York, six causal models of the life stress process are tested with indicators of two types of stressors (social and physiological) and two types of resources (social and psychological). Both deterring and coping models are tested. Analysis shows that: (1) stressors and resources in the social environment have a direct impact on depressive symptoms, (2) social resources mediate the effects of social stressors on psychological distress, and (3) psychological resources indirectly affect distress by enhancing social resources. The critical role played by the social environment in the life stress process involving psychological distress is substantiated. The implications of these and other findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I attempt to advance the concept of embeddedness beyond the level of a programmatic statement by developing a formulation that specifies how embeddedness and network structure affect economic action. On the basis of existing theory and original ethnographies of 23 apparel firms, I develop a systematic scheme that more fully demarcates the unique features, functions, and sources of embeddedness. From this scheme, I derive a set of refutable implications and test their plausibility, using another data set on the network ties of all better dress apparel firms in the New York apparel economy. Results reveal that embeddedness is an exchange system with unique opportunities relative to markets and that firms organized in networks have higher survival chances than do firms which maintain arm's-length market relationships. The positive effect of embeddedness reaches a threshold, however, after which point the positive effect reverses itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]