Serving UIC's Great Cities Commitment: Solutions for Today's Urban Challenges

Video

In US cities, regions, and territories, low-income Latina/o populations often reside in communities sensitive to pollution and climate change events such as droughts, extreme heat, and wildfires. Public policy can often trigger these inequities by forcing people to live in precarious and underserved communities with limited access to resilient infrastructure, services, and opportunities. However, even though climate change disproportionately impacts and displaces Latino communities, there is sparse research within Latino Studies on how these experiences threaten their health, safety, and neighborhood well-being.

The overarching research question of the Climate and Environmental Justice working group is: How do Latino communities experience, cope, and contest the disparate impacts of pollution and extreme climate change events?

Our working group is composed of faculty and student fellows from the University of Illinois Chicago, the University of California Irvine, and the University of Texas Arlington. Specifically, our group reveals how Latino communities confront environmental injustices and adapt to extreme climate events. The four regions studied include Chicago, the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, Puerto Rico, and migrant urban/rural communities throughout California. This project expands research on the intersection of Latino Studies, environmental justice, and climate change.

This project is supported by the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative, which ignites cross-institutional and cross-regional comparative research, training of doctoral students, and new scholarship in emerging areas of inquiry about Latina/os. Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the initiative serves as the anchor of the Alliance of Hispanic Serving Research Universities, a consortium of R1 Hispanic Serving Institutions.

Please join us in this webinar to learn more about our projects. This event also marks the launch of a new website that will house detailed information about the climate and environmental justice projects conducted by the three universities participating in the Crossing Latinidades initiative.

Event Details:

Date: November 18th, 2024

Time: 12 PM to 1:30 PM Central/Chicago Time

Type: Virtual – Webinar

Please click here to RSVP.

PDF version of the flyer is available here.

To visit the Crossing Latinidades: Climate and Environmental Justice website, please click here.

UIC Great Cities Institute Director Teresa Córdova will interview UIC Professor Emeritus and former Chicago Alderman Dick Simpson about his new book, “Chicago’s Modern Mayors—From Harold Washington to Lori Lightfoot.” To contextualize the book discussion, Córdova and Simpson will explore how the UIC University Library’s special collections of mayors Richard J. Daley and Richard M. Daley are fundamental to understanding the history of Chicago politics.

Attendees will have an opportunity to make a donation to support the UIC University Library’s extensive political collections.

Book signing follows the program. Copies will be available for purchase.

Light refreshments will be served. 

For more information or accommodations, contact Valerie Hill at (312) 413- 3272 or vhill@uic.edu.

About Chicago’s Modern Mayors:

Chicago’s transformation into a global city began at City Hall. Dick Simpson and Betty O’Shaughnessy edit in-depth analyses of the five mayors that guided the city through this transition beginning with Harold Washington’s 1983 election: Washington, Eugene Sawyer, Richard M. Daley, Rahm Emmanuel and Lori Lightfoot. Though the respected political science, sociologist, and journalist contributors approach their subjects from distinct perspectives, each essay addresses three essential issues: how and why each mayor won the office; whether the City Council of their time acted as a rubber stamp or independent body; and the ways the unique qualities of each mayor’s administration and accomplishments influenced their legacy.

About Dick Simpson:

Dick Simpson is professor emeritus, former head of the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois Chicago, a former Chicago alderman and congressional candidate. His books include “Democracy’s Rebirth: The View from Chicago” and “Corrupt Illinois: Patronage, Cronyism, and Criminality.”

Sponsored by:

University Library, Great Cities Institute, and The Newberry Library

Event Details:

Date: November 13th, 2024

Time: 4 PM to 6 PM Central/Chicago Time

Location: The Newberry Library, Ruggles Hall; 60 W. Walton St., Chicago, IL 60610

Please click here to RSVP.

Video

The baby boom generation is retiring from every position in companies including ownership.  Small companies have no apparent successor or even a succession plan and are at risk of closing.  In Barcelona Spain, leaders in the business community, with government support have confronted this challenge with the creation of Reempresa.  This webinar serves as an introduction to this model.

Reempresa is based in Barcelona and represents best international practices in the area of ownership succession challenges and in acquisitions. Since 2011, they have had more than 11,210 enterprises for sale, more than 20,000 potential buyers and more than 4,800 acquisitions, and saving more than 13,400 jobs.

The Federation for a Manufacturing Renaissance believes that this is a model that should be taken to scale in the United States. We have organized this webinar as an introduction.

Event Details:

Date: October 29th, 2024

Time: 9 AM to 11 AM Central/Chicago Time

Type: Virtual – Webinar

Please click here to RSVP. PDF version of the flyer is available here.

Samuel G. Freedman (Columbia University) discusses his latest project, a riveting and revisionist account of the young Hubert Humphrey’s fight to embed Civil Rights in the Democratic Party platform in 1948 detailed in his latest book, Into the Bright Sunshine (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Freedman serves as an esteemed and award winning professor of journalism at Columbia University. In his decades-long career at the New York Times he wrote as a staff reporter and contributed award-winning journalism to the “On Education” and “On Religion” columns.

Event Details:

Date: October 28th, 2024

Time: 2 PM to 3:30 PM Central Time

Location: Behavioral Sciences Building, Room 153

Sponsored By: The Departments of History, Political Science, and Black Studies; the Jewish Studies program; the Institute for the Humanities; the Great Cities Institute; and the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy