Tarini Bedi

Bedi’s work broadly explores the emerging fields of transport anthropology and the anthropology of infrastructure. She focused on what happens to people’s lives and livelihoods in Asia when urban infrastructures change, particularly with the travel between Singapore and Mumbai.  Her project examined the social life of transport infrastructures in the city of Mumbai through the lens of the taxi trade. In 2013, she gave a lecture highlighting her work on “The Cultural Life of Motoring: Taxi Drivers, Infrastructural Aesthetics and Urban Subject in Mumbai.” She is writing a book, “Everyday Technologies of the Urban: The Cultural Life of Motoring in Asia” based on her research. In April 2014, she presented her most recent work, “Motoring, Materiality, and Policing Mobility in Bombay/Mumbai’s Taxi Trade” for the Means of Transport: Technology Mobility and Energy in Modern Asia workshop at Harvard University.

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Means of Transport: Technology, Mobility, and Energy in Modern Asia »
Violence, Infrapolitics and Everyday Insurgencies in Peri-Urban Mumbai »
Trans-Urban Imaginaries of Transport: Urban Labor and the Taxi Trade in Mumbai and Manila/Singapore Style »

Insecure Communities: Latino Perceptions of Police Involvement in Immigration Enforcement

Nik Theodore
Professor, Urban Planning & Policy
College of Urban Planning & Public Affairs
University of Illinois at Chicago

Abstract

This report presents findings from a survey of Latinos regarding their perceptions of law enforcement authorities in light of the greater involvement of police in immigration enforcement. Lake Research Partners designed and administered a randomized telephone survey of 2,004 Latinos living in the counties of Cook (Chicago), Harris (Houston), Los Angeles, and Maricopa (Phoenix). The survey was designed to assess the impact of police involvement in immigration enforcement on Latinos’ perceptions of public safety and their willingness to contact the police when crimes have been committed. The survey was conducted in English and Spanish by professional interviewers during the period November 17 to December 10, 2012.

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Marketing Diversity and the ‘New’ Politics of Desegregation: Insights from An Urban Education Ethnography GCP-12-1

Pamela Anne Quiroz and Vernon Lindsay

The views expressed in this report represent those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Great Cities Institute or the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Abstract 
Situating ethnographic methods within a framework of engaged research we offer a window into the adoption, implementation, and sociopolitical dilemmas of 15 African American males participating in an Initiative designed to maintain diversity at one of Chicago’s most successful and elite public high schools. The paper presents a four- year study (2007-2011) of an explicitly class-based and implicitly race-based attempt to engage the ‘new’ politics of desegregation and the microprocesses of integration. Promoted as reaching across geographic, race, and class boundaries, the Black Male Achievement Initiative [BMAI] at Selective Preparatory Academy [SPA] is just one of many attempts to satisfy stakeholders in a political environment that promotes school choice and voluntary initiatives to desegregate schools. Situated within the local context of Chicago school reform, the BMAI provides opportunities and builds relationships even as it raises questions about racial formation, the appropriation of space, the meaning of diversity, and how such educational programs are part of the broader processes of gentrification.

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Simone Buechler

Dr. Simone Buechler is an assistant professor in Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She was a post-doctoral fellow with the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University under Prof. Stiglitz after finishing an assistant professor/faculty fellowship in the Metropolitan Studies Program at New York University. Before returning to academia, she worked with non-governmental organizations and the United Nations Development Fund for Women setting up an international coalition on women and micro-credit with President Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham Sutoro. During her year as a GCI Scholar her two research foci were: urban inequality and the impact of economic globalization on low-income women’s employment in São Paulo, Brazil and Brazilian immigrants in Newark, NJ and the global economic crisis. She has conducted extensive qualitative and quantitative research in São Paulo since 1996 following the lives of two generations of women in three low-income communities. In May 2013, she gave a talk on “Perceptions of Inequality and Employment in Three Low-Income Communities in São Paulo, Brazil”. Her book, Labor in a Globalizing City: Economic Restructuring in São Paulo, Brazil will soon be published by Springer International Publishing AG.

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