Browsing by Subject "Place"
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Item Open Access "Construyendo Nuestro Pedacito De Patria": Space and Dis(place)ment in Puerto Rican Chicago(2009) Secrist, Karen SerwerThis dissertation explores the relationship between identity and place in the imagination, performance and production of post-World War II Puerto Rican urban space in Chicago. Specifically, I contend that the articulation of Puerto Rican spatiality in the city has emerged primarily as a response to the threat of local displacement as a byproduct of urban renewal and gentrification. I further argue the experience of displacement, manifested through territorial attachment, works to deepen the desire for community and belonging. Through a performance and cultural studies approach, this project works to track this recent history of Puerto Rican geographic and psychic displacement within Chicago as it is evidenced by various performative spatial interventions and manifested within the community's expressive culture.
My topics of study include the 1966 Division Street Riots, the Young Lords Organization (YLO), Humboldt Park's Paseo Boricua and spoken-word poet David Hernández. Through these interventions and forms of expression, I argue that physical, political, discursive, and affective claims are made to local territory, articulating a Puerto Rican cultural identity inextricably connected to urban space. In so doing, I aim to endorse the theoretical utility of concepts of "space" by highlighting the enduring material and metaphoric significance of place for Puerto Ricans, arguing against a tendency in contemporary Puerto Rican studies to equate circular migratory movement with transnationalism by virtue of its opposition to territorially grounded definitions of identity.
Item Open Access Poverty and Place in the Context of the American South(2015) Baker, Regina SmallsIn the United States, poverty has been historically higher and disproportionately concentrated in the American South. Despite this fact, much of the conventional poverty literature in the United States has focused on urban poverty in cities, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest. Relatively less American poverty research has focused on the enduring economic distress in the South, which Wimberley (2008:899) calls “a neglected regional crisis of historic and contemporary urgency.” Accordingly, this dissertation contributes to the inequality literature by focusing much needed attention on poverty in the South.
Each empirical chapter focuses on a different aspect of poverty in the South. Chapter 2 examines why poverty is higher in the South relative to the Non-South. Chapter 3 focuses on poverty predictors within the South and whether there are differences in the sub-regions of the Deep South and Peripheral South. These two chapters compare the roles of family demography, economic structure, racial/ethnic composition and heterogeneity, and power resources in shaping poverty. Chapter 4 examines whether poverty in the South has been shaped by historical racial regimes.
The Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) United States datasets (2000, 2004, 2007, 2010, and 2013) (derived from the U.S. Census Current Population Survey (CPS) Annual Social and Economic Supplement) provide all the individual-level data for this study. The LIS sample of 745,135 individuals is nested in rich economic, political, and racial state-level data compiled from multiple sources (e.g. U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Department of Agriculture, University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research, etc.). Analyses involve a combination of techniques including linear probability regression models to predict poverty and binary decomposition of poverty differences.
Chapter 2 results suggest that power resources, followed by economic structure, are most important in explaining the higher poverty in the South. This underscores the salience of political and economic contexts in shaping poverty across place. Chapter 3 results indicate that individual-level economic factors are the largest predictors of poverty within the South, and even more so in the Deep South. Moreover, divergent results between the South, Deep South, and Peripheral South illustrate how the impact of poverty predictors can vary in different contexts. Chapter 4 results show significant bivariate associations between historical race regimes and poverty among Southern states, although regression models fail to yield significant effects. Conversely, historical race regimes do have a small, but significant effect in explaining the Black-White poverty gap. Results also suggest that employment and education are key to understanding poverty among Blacks and the Black-White poverty gap. Collectively, these chapters underscore why place is so important for understanding poverty and inequality. They also illustrate the salience of micro and macro characteristics of place for helping create, maintain, and reproduce systems of inequality across place.
Item Open Access The Demands of Integration: Space, Place and Genre in Berlin(2012) SchusterCraig, Johanna EThis dissertation argues that the metaphor of integration, which describes the incorporation of immigrants into the national body, functions as a way to exclude "Muslim" immigrants from German national identity, as these groups are those most often deemed "un-integratable" (unintegrierbar). By looking at cultural products, I explore how the spatial metaphor of integration is both contested and reproduced in a variety of narratives.
One of the recurring themes in integration debates focuses on finding a balance between multiculturalist strategies of population management; the regulation and enforcement of the third article of the German Basic Law, which guarantees gender parity; and the public religious life of conservative Islamic social movements like Salafism, which demand gender segregation as a tenet of faith. Discourses of women's rights as human rights and identity politics are the two most frequent tactical interventions on the integration landscape. My dissertation explores how identity, performance and experience of gendered oppression manifest in the autobiographical novels of Turkish-German women, comic books, journalistic polemics, activist video and the activities of the social work organization Projekt Heroes. Reading a broad array of cultural products allows me to explore the tension between the metaphor of integration and the reluctance of some to reenvision German national identity, with specific attention to how this tension plays out in space and place. Through literary analysis, participant-observation and interviews, I explore how the language of integration shapes the space of the nation and limits what the space of the nation could become. I argue that the tone of integration debates over the past decade has become increasingly shrill, and propose that limited and strategic silence may offer potential as a political strategy for reenvisioning modes of immigration incorporation.
Item Open Access The Predicament of Place: Lesslie Newbigin and a Missionary Theology of Place(2017) Porter, David StevenThis dissertation examines the role of place in the theology and practice of Christian mission with special reference to the life and thought of missionary bishop Lesslie Newbigin. The study addresses the conspicuous absence of a missionary perspective within the burgeoning literature on religion and place and its corresponding neglect in mission studies. What difference does a commitment to place make for the church’s witness in late modernity?
Placing theology in conversation with geography, I argue that a missionary commitment to place strengthens the church’s witness by resisting modern distortions of Christian mission and forming a critical element in the church’s response to late Western culture. The argument develops in three broad steps: description, construction, and demonstration. The first step describes how traditional bonds between people and place in early Christianity grew weaker over time as impersonal global forces grew stronger. A survey of the ambiguous history of place within Christian mission further confirms the collapse of such commitments, which Newbigin interpreted as an urgent missiological challenge. Next, the second step responds to this collapse by constructing a missionary theology of place that enables the church to recover a commitment to place that is constitutive of her mission rather than in opposition to it. This involves a classical reconstruction of the missio Dei, which provides the framework for a trinitarian account of place as sacred creation, sacred journey, and sacred construction. Finally, the third step demonstrates the potential of a missionary commitment to place to strengthen the church’s witness in the context of Newbigin’s own life and thought. Informed by his distinguished missionary career in South India, Newbigin established an international research program on the relationship between the gospel and Western culture, which featured a congregational commitment to place.