Hucksters and Trucksters: Criminalization and Gentrification in New York City's Street Vending Industry
Year of Dissertation:
2013
The expansion of the informal economy since the 1970s developed in tandem with a growing militarization of urban public space, creating extreme precarity for street vendors, a leading occupational group within the informal sector. Based on over three years of participant observation and seventy interviews with street vendors and their advocates, this dissertation examines the present-day street vending industry in New York City, which has long been comprised of first-generation immigrants, but has in recent years seen a marked growth in highly educated, native-born gourmet food truck owners. The research illustrates how two processes, inherent to what I term the post-industrial complex, are increasing stratification within New York's street economy. First, there is a dramatic criminalization of immigrant street vendors who regularly encounter arrests and ticketing. This blocks their upward mobility, most acutely for women, and locates vendors in a liminal class position, possessing elements of proprietorship that are subjugated by the governance of public space. Second, a new wave of commercial gentrification has occurred within street vending, where more affluent native-born vendors are able to effectively capitalize on vending to rapidly establish brick-and-mortar businesses, and in so doing inflate the price of vending permits in the underground economy. These divergent conditions reveal how the governance of post-industrial urban space reinforces the criminalization of poor and working class people of color, while facilitating the advancement of more affluent and predominantly white professionals. The streets of the post-industrial complex are policed as a border for immigrant vendors, and are pioneered as a frontier by native-born food truck owners. Yet criminalization has produced street vendor solidarities, evidenced in a growing street labor movement amongst immigrant vendors in New York. Like most vendor organizations across the Global South, two immigrant street vendor worker centers in New York press the municipal government to uphold vendors' right to the city. In contrast, the city's native-born food truck owners have established a business association not to achieve social justice but to increase profitability. Post-industrial urban governance thus deepens inequalities within the informal economy while spurring new movements to claim the enduring resource of urban public space.
Black Males, Money and More: Conduits and Barriers to Academic Success
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Much ink has been spent and theories proffered unpacking the societal, school and community factors that impact educational outcomes of Black male students in the United States. Employing the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS), this dissertation seeks to add to this important discourse on academic achievement by contrasting the conduits and barriers to educational success for a nationally representative sample of Black males of low socioeconomic status versus Black males of not-low socioeconomic status across a series of demographic, behavioral, and attitudinal variables.
TOGETHER BUT APART: FILIPINO TRANSNATIONAL FAMILIES AND CARING FROM AFAR
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Advisor:
Carolina Bank-Munoz
For this dissertation, I conducted multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork for three years in New York City with Filipino domestic workers and their families in Manila, Philippines. This study makes three interventions to the scholarship on transnationalism, family and care by suggesting the model of "multidirectionality of care" to understand the reorganization of providers, definitions, and forms of care within families separated by migration. First, I prioritize both biological and fictive family members left behind as providers of care in a transnational family. Second, rapidly developing computer technology changes definition of presence and of care migrant mothers and families left behind participate in. Third, form of care expands as members of transnational families come to include other migrants in the diaspora in what I call "communities of care". Broadly, this project is concerned with impacts of globalization and migration on the intimate and material operations of families. Specifically, I propose that transnational families are using all the resources they have available to them to innovate and participate in care work to maintain family life despite separation. My dissertation contributes directly to studies in technology, immigration and transnationalism, family and motherhood, and globalization. Further it tackles issues in gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, and social inequality.
Own Nothing, Have Everything: Peer-to-peer Networks and the New Cultural Economy
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Advisor:
Patricia Ticineto Clough
This dissertation investigates the relation between digital piracy and the economic viability of reproducing and distributing cultural content online. While scholars often characterize piracy as resistant or oppositional to capitalism, I propose that peer-to-peer networks played an integral role in the success of markets for content online. Drawing from historical and technical documentation in information theory and network science, and from Marxist cultural criticism of film and television, legal analysis, and social and political-economic theory, I argue that peer-to-peer networks, in circumventing the technical inefficiencies and juridical obstacles that held back other forms of piracy, catalyzed a novel form of economic value native to the Internet. Responding to what Marxist cultural critics have written about film and television, I explicate how the Internet produces value not only though the attention of its users (as television does), but through the transmission of data--value realized by Internet Service Providers. This is made possible, I argue, by the socialization of a non-human mode of the time: the time of uploading and downloading data. Lastly, I examine how lossy digital audio compression technologies, such as the MP3, participate in the socialization of this "transmission time."
"Loose Lips Sink Ships": A History of Rumor Control in the United States
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Throughout its history, rumor control has been comprised of efforts to monitor, suppress and/or spread messages which travel through word of mouth communication. Fundamentally, rumor control is a form of propaganda, often used in concert with other techniques aimed at influencing attitudes and behavior. Organized rumor control emerged during World War II, when the FDR administration viewed rumors as a threat to social stability and war morale. As a result, in 1942 the Office of War Information recruited barbers, librarians, school teachers and other civilians to submit rumors they overheard to the government for analysis. These efforts coincided with poster campaigns warning people not to talk about the war. After the war, the CIA funded extensive rumor research to learn about the flow of word of mouth communication, including experiments in which thousands of leaflets were dropped on unsuspecting American towns. During the civil unrest in the 1960's, dozens of "rumor control centers" were established ostensibly to help control violence, but mainly functioned to provide information to police and reassure white citizens. During the same period, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI spread false rumors to destabilize Black political groups. Corporate advertisers turned to marketing techniques that drew upon rumor control principles in the 1990's as a result in the perceived decline in mass advertising. Indeed, contemporary public relations can be seen as a form of rumor control, given its focus on suppressing negative word of mouth and promoting the spread of positive messages from person to person. Using primary historical data and interviews, the dissertation reveals that the themes of power, surveillance and social control are evident throughout rumor control history, and sheds light on why and how our attitudes are monitored and shaped by corporations and the government.
CLASS, CULTURE, OR BOTH: ASSESSING CONSUMPTION PATTERNS WITHIN MUSIC AND TECHNOLOGY
Year of Dissertation:
2009
What is the best way of understanding contemporary consumption patterns in the United States? Using the classical theories of Marx and Weber, and the contemporary theory of omnivorousness developed by Richard Peterson, this research examines the consumption of a symbolic good (music) and a material good (technology). The data for this research comes from two nationally representative surveys. Music analyses were done using the 2002 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts (N = 17135). Technology analyses were done using the 2006 Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project's Annual Gadgets Survey (N = 4100). This research uses statistical methods - correspondence analysis and classification and regression tree analysis - that classify respondents. These methods were used in order to group respondents with similar music or technology preferences together. These homogeneous groups were then compared to the predictions made by Marxian, Weberian, and Omnivorous theories. This research suggests that the best way to explain contemporary consumption patterns in the United States is through a particular combination of Marxian and Weberian indicators, and that Peterson's theory of omnivorousness is less applicable. A new concept, lifestyle clusters, is proposed. Lifestyle clusters combine economic Marxian indicators and cultural Weberian indicators into one conceptual framework. The conclusions drawn from this dissertation suggest that the ways in which sociologists have traditionally understood consumption patterns need to be reconsidered.
Technologies of Spirit: The Digital Worlds of Contemporary Christianity
Year of Dissertation:
2012
This dissertation investigates the interrelation of religion, particularly American evangelical Christianity, and digital technologies. In showing both the religious use of technology and the religiosity of technological practice, it aims to contribute to recent discussions on modernity and secularism that have taken place in sociology as well as philosophy and anthropology. Specifically, it troubles the assumed link between secularization and modernization, which, in effect, views technology as largely a proxy of science, and therefore an instrument of "disenchantment." Contrary to this, my research suggests that the relation of new media and religion bears a more complicated picture than secularization theories would allow. Drawing from a variety of methods, including content and discourse analysis, ethnography and media studies, I examine the technological mode of worship and ministry increasingly favored by today's Christian churches, including the highly technologized contemporary worship spaces, which feature multiple projection screens and theater-grade audio and lighting systems, and online churches (i.e., churches that meet strictly online through web sites and social media such as Facebook). Additionally, I offer an analysis of the ways in which new media technologies have produced a certain religious, God-like mode of subjectivity especially evidenced in popular mapping software such as Google Maps. In this way, contemporary religion, specifically Christianity, and digital technologies, I suggest, hold an intrinsic and interimplicated relationship.
"The Japanese New Yorkers": "Adventurers in Adventure Land" in Globalized Environments
Year of Dissertation:
2012
After the Immigration Act of 1965, the volume of almost all Asian immigrants drastically increased; however, the proportion of Japanese immigrants, which used to be the largest in the prewar years, dropped to being the smallest. In mainstream studies of American immigration, contemporary Japanese migrants to the United States seem to have disappeared. If the lens of "immigrants" is removed, however, a quite different picture emerges. The number of native Japanese living in the United States today is actually three times as large as that of the prewar Japanese-American community on the U.S. mainland. Removing the lens of "immigrants" also enables us to see some new forms of contemporary international migration.
The Global Pigeon: A Comparative Ethnography of Human-Animal Relations in Urban Communities
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Despite the ubiquitous and socially patterned ways that humans interact with animals, sociologists know remarkably little about how relations with animals shape everyday life. Drawing on interactionist studies of animals, urban communities, and the environment, I follow the pigeon from the sidewalks to the rooftops of New York and beyond to answer two broad questions: 1. how do relationships with animals organize humans' self-conceptions and their social worlds; and 2. what does the place that people make or deny animals in their built environments reveal about how they experience and imagine these spaces? Through a series of qualitative case studies, this multi-sited project explains how pigeons are simultaneously: a medium for inter-ethnic sociability and intra-ethnic solidarity among groups of urban males who breed and fly them in New York and Berlin, respectively; a celebrated cultural attraction in Venice's Piazza San Marco; and an object of scorn and a target of institutional control in London, New York, and other locales. Studying how the pigeon "works" in these diverse ways leads us away from "natural" explanations and toward the sets of social relations and social conditions within which such human-animal relations are embedded. Thus, each case highlights how the ways that people manage relations with animals are structured by context.
THE RELATIONSHIP OF RACE AND SOCIAL INTEGRATION ON THE HEALTH STATUS OF OLDER ADULTS IN AN URBAN CITY
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Abstract