Community and Urban Sociology

CUSS Newsletter, 2019 Winter, Vol 32, No 1

● Several CUSS members received the Association of Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) 40 for 40 Fellowship. CUSS members receiving fellowships include: Prentiss A. Dantzler, Colorado College; Jacob Faber, New York University; Michael Gaddis, UCLA; Philip Garboden, University of Hawaii at Manoa; and Eva Rosen, Georgetown University. A full list of fellows is available at the website: http://www.appam.org/meet-the-recipients-of-the-40-for-40-fellowship/

●Jeni Cross, Sociology, and Deana Davalos, Psychology, Colorado State University, and their research team received the inaugural Emerging Community Engagement Scholarship Award from the Office of Engagement and the Office of the Provost. The Emerging award celebrates a new initiative that has shown potential for long-term impact, achievement and scholarship. The BSHARP program is a community engagement effort launched in 2015 that provides dyads (persons with dementia {PWD} and their caregivers), tickets to attend five Fort Collins Symphony Masterworks concerts and social hours. The study explores factors such as the impact of the program on cognition in PWD, relationships with caregivers, and the degree to which participants feel supported by the community. Our collaboration has led to emphasizing facets of the concerts that participants endorse having the greatest impact (the appreciation of the Maestro’s recognition at the concerts) and understanding the course of change in the participants.

●Jerome Krase, Brooklyn College CUNY co-led with Małgorzata Bogunia-Borowska and Anna Sarzyńska a Graduate Visual Sociology Workshop, “Seeing Krakow Change: 1997-2018,” at the Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland (May 7-10). Subsequently, during his Fulbright Specialist Scholarship Assignment in Prague, at the Charles University (May 11-25) he was honored to give the Ernest Gellner Nationalism Seminar, Sponsored by the Czech Association for Social Anthropology and the Czech Sociological Society, in Cooperation with the Institute of Sociological Studies of the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University. With his daughter Kathryn Krase he published “Undermining Governmental Legitimacy at the Grass Roots: The Role of Failed Promises and Inflated Expectations of Community Accountability,” In Legitimacy: Ethnographic and Theoretical Insights, edited by Italo Pardo and Giuliana B. Prato, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2019: 169-92. When he returned in the Fall, he was elected Vice-President, City University of New York’s Academy of Humanities and Sciences.

●Meghan M. O’Neil is Social Science Research Fellow with University of Michigan Law School, Postdoctoral Fellow Affiliate with Population Studies Center at the Institute for Social Research, and Faculty Expert at Poverty Solutions. O’Neil is co-investigator on over $2.7 million in grants to conduct empirical legal research to increase access to justice for vulnerable Americans and better understand the economic barriers facing people who interact with the criminal justice system. She is the lead investigator for the State of Michigan on a mixed methods multi-state study of fines and fees assessed for parolees on Community Corrections Fines and Fees sponsored by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. O’Neil led a team of students and won two INNOVATE awards in a public service pitch campaign for her study, Removing Barriers to Recovery: Community Partnering for Innovative Solutions to the Opioid Crisis while completing her dissertation earlier this year. O’Neil has obtained support from seven courts, two treatment centers, and a tech-startup to provide no cost legal tools to 10,000 community members seeking recovery from addiction services over the next year. Echoing Desmond and Western (2018), she acknowledges that poverty is multidimensional and is a matter of “justice,” not merely economics. Her scholarship relies upon empirical evidence to improve our understanding of American poverty and help identify paths to overcome the challenges of achieving intergenerational mobility, especially for minority families. Her recent work is forthcoming in Law and Contemporary Problems and a special issue of Phylon sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. and WEB Du Bois.

●Diane M. Sicotte (P.I.), Associate Professor of Sociology, Drexel University, and Kelly A. Joyce (co-P.I.), Professor of Sociology and the Center for Science, Technology and Society, Drexel University, were awarded $345,270 from NSF through the Science, Technology, and Society program for a three-year project, titled “Societal Aspects of Energy Infrastructure Expansion.”Through interviews, fieldwork and content analysis, the research team will examine the opinions of labor union leaders and members on efforts to develop and expand gas infrastructure versus renewable energy sources. The technical and scientific expertise of unionized workers will be studied in order to understand how, and if, such expertise impacts technology design and use, or is used in political claims-making and policy formation.

●Michael Timberlake, former CUSS secretary/treasurer and past North American editor of Urban Studies, retired at the end of June from the University of Utah.  Though retired, he is still working on three projects: Chinese cities in the world system of cities (collaborative with John Stevens and Xiulian Ma); urban transformation in Seoul in global perspective (with K. Shin), and race and the persistent under-development of the lower Mississippi Delta.  Now living in Seattle, he would enjoy meeting other social scientists doing related work living in the area and hearing about their research.  Mike can still be reached at timber@soc.utah.edu