Author Archives: Steven Schmidt

Interview with Derek Hyra, Winner of the 2023 Publicly-Engaged Scholar Award

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Derek Hyra, Professor of Public Administration and Policy and Founding Director of the Metropolitan Policy Center at American University, won the 2023 ASA Community and Urban Sociology section’s Publicly Engaged Scholar Award. Derek, an expert in neighborhood change, housing policy, urban politics, and race, served as board chair of the Alexandria Redevelopment and Housing Authority and Alexandria Planning Commissioner and is currently a member of the City of Falls Church Planning Commission. His research and advocacy have informed national legislative debates on the subprime lending crisis as well as secured greater affordable housing funds and improved mixed-income housing developments in Virginia. Thalia Tom reached out to him to discuss his research. Thanks to Derek for participating in our interview series!

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Chair’s Message: Summer 2024

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By Elena Vesselinov

July 12, 2024

Dear all,

As we approach the ASA Annual Meeting in Montreal, and therefore the end of my term as the section’s chair, I would like to share some reflections. I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to serve the section in many different roles over the years, including as chair. The most remarkable affair for me to witness, in this latest position, was the enthusiasm of our members to take part in all different section activities. Throughout the year, members readily responded to all calls for participation! For example, the section’s awards committees had the privilege of reviewing numerous excellent nominations and selected outstanding winners and honorable mentions for all awards. We will celebrate this successful award season at the CUSS reception!

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City Spotlight: Montréal

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In our summer issues, the CUSS newsletter team solicits a short piece that introduces CUSS members to the location of the ASA annual meeting. This year, Jan Doering (Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, jan.doering@utoronto.ca) generously agreed to write this year’s city spotlight. Thank you, Jan, for your introduction to Montréal! 

Montréal, a contradictory city

Montréal is unlike any other North American city, and I am not working up to the tired observation that Montréal is “so European.” What makes Montréal unique is its contradictory status as a multilingual and diverse city in Québec, a province that proudly insists on the dominance of the French language and Québécois identity. This contradictory status frequently pits Montréal against its province but also produces social conflict within the city, inflecting how debates unfold and how local issues are addressed (see also Carpentier 2022).

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Chair’s Message: Summer 2023

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Dear CUSS Members,

I hope everyone is enjoying summer.  I am looking forward to seeing many of you at our meetings in Philadelphia this week.  We have been busily planning our section events, starting with our reception which will take place on Thursday evening at the Post.   We have an exciting slate of section sessions that start the next morning with “Reimagining Urban and Community Sociology through Data Science”, followed by “Education and Urban Inequality”, “Climate Change, Urban Inequality, and the Future of Cities”, and “Critical Approaches to the Study of Policing of Urban Spaces”.   Our roundtable sessions cover the following themes: Contesting Urban Governance, Education in the Urban Context, Framing Diversity and Contestation, Gentrification, Getting Housed, Losing Shelter, Housing, Planning, and Politics, Neighboring and Community, Police and Spatial Surveillance, Race and Place, Urban Business and Property, and Urban Theory.  I would like to thank the session organizers for putting together a stellar group of papers.  Our business meeting will immediately follow the roundtables and will include our awards presentations. 

This has been a busy year for CUSS.  Many of the discussions that have taken place during my term have centered on ways to improve the section to foster broader involvement and inclusivity, particularly in both elected and volunteer leadership roles.  One of the most visible steps that has been taken towards this end has been in revamping our awards process, including in the constitution of committees, awards submissions, and evaluations.  We now have a portal for awards submissions that allows collects the same information from all applicants, as well as requiring text based only submission of articles aimed at mitigating some sources of potential bias in the review process.  We are open to suggestions about how to improve these processes moving forward.    

As my term concludes in August, I wanted to express how much of a pleasure it has been to serve CUSS as your chair. I am excited to welcome in the new leadership and opportunities to contribute to the continued growth and success of our section.

Best,

Mary J. Fischer

Practitioner Spotlight: Dr. Esther Hio-Tong Castillo

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Dr. Esther Hio-Tong Castillo is the Director of Racial Equity, Storytelling, and Community Impact for the City of Philadelphia. Previously, she served as the Programs Manager for the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Temple University in 2017. Benny Witkovsky interviewed Dr. Castillo about her work in Philadelphia earlier this spring. Thanks for speaking with us! 

Tell me about the work you have done in Philadelphia with the Asian community.

The first time that I worked directly with the Asian community in Philadelphia was when I volunteered as a Census trainer in Chinatown. In late 2019, the City of Philadelphia was recruiting multilingual trainers to ensure that everyone filled out the census, including immigrants and refugees. At that time, I gave a training presentation in Cantonese to about 100 older residents in Chinatown. To my surprise, they were very enthusiastic about filling out the census. Through this experience, I connected with the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation (PCDC), my former employer. They asked me if I would be willing to lead a program that aims to promote mental health and wellness in the Chinese immigrant community because they just received a grant from the Scattergood Foundation. I said yes. 

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City Spotlight: Landlord Strategies for Avoiding Evictions in Philadelphia

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By Melody L. Boyd (SUNY Brockport) and John Balzarini (Delaware State University)

If it’s been a while since you’ve been to Philadelphia, you’ll notice some shimmering additions to the skyline when you arrive for ASA 2023. You’ll likely need to reroute a block or two to navigate around scaffolding and closed streets as you head to dinner after a day of conferencing. You may want to bring a pair of ear plugs to minimize the construction noise as you move around the city. While Gritty was unveiled in 2018 as the Flyers mascot, the city has gotten quite a bit shinier and new in recent years. Of course, as sociologists we know that shiny and new—which on the surface may seem attractive—actually corresponds with increased inequality as competition for housing intensifies. In the context of these changes throughout the city we conducted research looking at the attitudes, perspectives, and experiences of one of Philadelphia’s most important housing providers—landlords. In this article, we highlight some of our findings from this research, focusing on how landlords navigate evictions amidst an increasingly hot Philly housing market.

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Interview with John Gilderbloom, winner of the 2022 Robert and Helen Lynd Award for Lifetime Achievement

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Against the Odds: The Real Power of Science, Data, and Facts to Win Progressive Victories

John Hans Gilderbloom is a Professor in the Graduate Planning, Public Administra- tion, Public Health, and Urban Affairs program at the University of Louisville. Dr. Gilderbloom is considered one of the most influential figures in urban affairs with an emphasis on sustainability, housing, health and transportation. His fingerprints are all over cities throughout the world. As the winner of the 2022 Robert and Helen Lynd Award for Lifetime Achievement, Dr. Gilderbloom has graciously agreed to be interviewed for our newsletter. Thank you, John, and congratulations!

I am a gunshot survivor. I am grateful to be alive.  But I prefer to let the enemies of science know I have learned to thrive.  The gunshot resulted in a partial loss of eyesight and hearing, and balance issues.  I have post-traumatic stress disorder, despite years of therapy.  Before the shooting, The Nation magazine in May 1979 quoted a letter stating that powerful people in the real estate industry were going to “neutralize me” if I continued to advocate for renter rights.  I was told I would never survive, yet 43 years later I am thriving with energy, passion, joy, and love.  I persisted.  

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Interview with Albert Fu, winner of the 2022 CUSS Teaching Award

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Albert Fu is a Professor of Sociology at Kutztown University. As both an urban and environmental sociologist, his research examines the intersection between built and natural environments. Dr. Fu is also interested in how “culture” creates, defines, and controls space. At Kutztown, he regularly teaches Principles of Sociology, Sociological Imagination, Social Inequality, Urban Sociology, and Environmental Sociology. As the inaugural winner of the biannual CUSS Teaching Award, Steven Schmidt reached out to Dr. Fu to discuss his teaching, and we’ve included his responses below. Thanks for participating in our interview series!

Who (or what) inspired you to become a teacher? Did you have any classroom experiences earlier that influenced how you teach now? 

I have had so many great teachers (at all levels) over the years that have impacted my teaching. A story I often share with students is how my high school English teacher Mrs. Karen Harwood recommended that I be moved from the regular curriculum to the honors/advanced placement curriculum – despite not being a 4.0 student. In this way, Mrs. Harwood had a massive impact on my life, and I think it’s essential to pay it forward as an educator. It’s important to look out for creativity and curiosity beyond traditional grades. 

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Interview with Jessica Simes, co-winner of the 2022 Robert E. Park Book Award

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Jessica Simes was the co-winner of the 2022 Robert E. Park Book Award for her book, Punishing Places: The Geography of Mass Imprisonment. CUSS publication team member Kyle Galindez reached out to Jessica to discuss the genesis of her book and what is next for her research agenda. Thanks, Jessica, and congratulations again!

What were the main findings of your research?

Punishing Places addresses a fundamental question at the intersection of urban and punishment research: How do place-based disadvantages and residential segregation shape patterns of incarceration in the United States? While mass incarceration has mainly been theorized as the result of macro-level policies or micro-level discrimination, place is an under-appreciated meso-level mechanism of high imprisonment rates and racial disparities. To fill this gap, I apply spatial analysis to administrative records with unprecedented geographic detail that include all prison admissions in Massachusetts spanning 20 years. I contextualize this analysis with U.S. county-level jail and prison admissions data, as well as interview data. I leverage these data to expand our understanding of mass incarceration in three key ways. First, I demonstrate a historically new and nearly universal shift in the location of high incarceration rates from large urban areas to small cities, suburbs, and rural communities. Second, I show why mass incarceration must be conceptualized as a legacy of racial residential segregation in the U.S. I find remarkable consistency in Black and Latino neighborhood incarceration rates despite recent geographic shifts in prison admissions and emergent trends in incarceration rates within white neighborhoods. Finally, I argue that existing measures of mass incarceration fail to capture its broad consequences for community well-being and social inclusion; I thus reconceptualize it as a form of community loss, and draw from environmental science to define a concept of punishment vulnerability.

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Interview with Kiara Wyndham-Douds, 2022 Graduate Student Paper Award Winner

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Kiara Wyndham-Douds, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis, was the winner of the 2022 Graduate Student Paper Award. Kiara’s innovative research agenda examines mechanisms that create and sustain racial inequality in contemporary American society. Their current research focuses on the intertwined nature of race and space to investigate the spatial production of racial inequality in suburbs. We reached out to ask them to discuss their research, and we’re including their responses below. Thanks to Kiara for participating in our interview series!

What were the main findings of your paper?

My paper – “The Diversity Contract: Constructing Racial Harmony in a Diverse American Suburb” – examines the dominant racial ideology in a highly racially diverse and affluent suburb of Houston, Texas, called Fort Bend. I conducted 109 in-depth interviews with residents and community leaders and found that, rather than adhering to colorblindness, the dominant racial ideology identified in other settings, residents adhered to what I call the diversity contract, a local racial ideology. Key elements of the diversity contract include the belief that the community is racially harmonious and has no racial inequality. Residents also contend that the community is racially exceptional and morally superior to other places. Though seemingly race conscious, the diversity contract ultimately functions to obscure racial inequality and uphold white domination.

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