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.
Politics
Making Sense of Renaissance 2010 School Policy in Chicago: Race, Class, and the Cultural Politics of Neoliberal Urban Restructuring GCP-09-02
Chicago has long been a focus of national attention on urban education policy, and its latest plan to remake public education is no exception.
The New Chicago School – Not New York or L.A., and Why It Matters for Urban Social Science GCP-06-04
Michael Dear et al's "LA School" builds on a critique of the old Chicago school. This paper extends the discussion by incorporating broader theories about how cities work, stressing culture and politics.
So called Girl-on-Girl Violence is Actually Adult-on-Girl Violence GCP-05-03
As arrests of girls for violent offenses rose in the 1990s, public concern about adolescent girls’ aggression grew around the notion of girl-on-girl violence. This research briefly explores that idea and argues that young women are indeed experiencing violence, but not necessarily from each other, as much as from the effects of racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, and poverty.
Marketing Safe Sex: The Politics of Sexuality, Race and Class in San Francisco, 1983 – 1991
This paper explores the growth of two AIDS organizations in San Francisco: the San Francisco AIDS Foundation started in 1982, the largest AIDS service organization in the city and one of the largest in the nation, and the Third World Advisory Task Force (TWAATF), a community based organization formed in 1985 to focus attention on AIDS in communities of color to understand both the evolution of AIDS prevention work as well as how that process elucidates the larger political landscape of the 1980s.
From Daley to Daley: Chicago Politics 1955 – 2006 GCP-06-03
In the past fifty years Chicago has been transformed socially, economically, governmentally, and politically.
Financing Infrastructure in the 21st Century City: “How Did I Get Stuck Holding the Bag?” GCP-06-02
This essay identifies critical issues in financing city infrastructure and a realistic set of options available to policymakers.
Regionalizing the Global-Local Economic Nexus: A Tale of Two Regions in China GCP-06-01
The study of regions has been undergoing an intellectual “renaissance,” resulting in a growing literature on the renewed importance of new and more varied forms of regions and regionalism. This literature has focused on supranational regional schemes such as the EU, NAFTA, and APEC on one hand, and within-country dynamic or declining regions like the Silicon Valley, the industrial districts, or the heavy industrial areas in Europe or the United States on the other.
Reconstructing Regional Politics: Special Purpose Authorities and Municipal Governments GCP-03-01
I argue in this brief essay that the tendency of scholars to focus on city governments has meant that urban scholarship has missed the most dynamic politics driving urban development for decades – the emergence of institutions that often dwarf the fiscal, administrative, and political capacity of general-purpose governments. Unless these institutions are taken into account, most of the development occurring within urban regions cannot be explained or even accounted for.
The Politics of School Desegregation in Oak Park, Illinois GCP-00-1
Oak Park, Illinois, has more than 30 years of experience with policies expressly aimed at maintaining an integrated community. The policies address issues in housing, education, public safety, and economic development that policy makers believe contribute to resegregation.