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Uprooting Urban America examines the social consequences of policies that change urban landscapes during the process of gentrification. In this book, scholars present contemporary research findings and innovative strategies within the fields of education, healthcare, geography, sociology and policy studies.

Urban America

United States. Congress. Joint Economic Committee. Subcommittee on Urban Affairs

Published: 1967

Total Pages: 322


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"A superior exploration of the consequences of the hollowing out of our agricultural heartlands."—Kirkus Reviews In the tradition of Wendell Berry, a young writer wrestles with what we owe the places we’ve left behind. In the tiny farm town of Emmett, Idaho, there are two kinds of people: those who leave and those who stay. Those who leave go in search of greener pastures, better jobs, and college. Those who stay are left to contend with thinning communities, punishing government farm policy, and environmental decay. Grace Olmstead, now a journalist in Washington, DC, is one who left, and in Uprooted, she examines the heartbreaking consequences of uprooting—for Emmett, and for the greater heartland America. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Uprooted wrestles with the questions of what we owe the places we come from and what we are willing to sacrifice for profit and progress. As part of her own quest to decide whether or not to return to her roots, Olmstead revisits the stories of those who, like her great-grandparents and grandparents, made Emmett a strong community and her childhood idyllic. She looks at the stark realities of farming life today, identifying the government policies and big agriculture practices that make it almost impossible for such towns to survive. And she explores the ranks of Emmett’s newcomers and what growth means for the area’s farming tradition. Avoiding both sentimental devotion to the past and blind faith in progress, Olmstead uncovers ways modern life attacks all of our roots, both metaphorical and literal. She brings readers face to face with the damage and brain drain left in the wake of our pursuit of self-improvement, economic opportunity, and so-called growth. Ultimately, she comes to an uneasy conclusion for herself: one can cultivate habits and practices that promote rootedness wherever one may be, but: some things, once lost, cannot be recovered.
This book examines the post-9/11 African American novels, developing a new critical discourse on everyday discursive practices of whiteness. The critique of everyday life in the racial context of post-9/11 American society is important in considering diverse forms of the lived experiences and subjectivities of black people in the novels. They help us see that African American representations of the city have political significance in that the “neo-urban novel” explores the possibility of a black dialogic communication to build a transformative social change. Since the real power of Whiteness lies in its discursive power, the book reveals the urgency to understand not only how whiteness works in everyday life in American society. But it also explores how to cultivate new possibilities of configuring and performing Blackness differently, as a response to the post-9/11 configurations of the culture of fear, to produce new ways of interactional social relations that can eventually open up the space of critical awareness for white people to work against rather than reinforce discursive practices of White supremacy in everyday life. This book explores how the multiple subjectivities and transformative acts of blackness can offer ways of subverting the discursive power of the white embodied practices. What defines post-9/11 America as a nation that is consumed by the fear of racialized terrorists is its roots in the fear of (‘uncontrollable’) Blackness as excess and ominous threat in the domestic terrain through which the ideology of White supremacy has constructed for governing through Whiteness. African-American urban novels published in the twenty-first century respond to the discursive power of normative Whiteness that regulates black bodies, selves and lives. This book demonstrates how black people contest white dominant social spaces as sites of black criminality and exclusion in an attempt to re-signify them as the sites of black transformative change through personal and grassroots activism through their performativity of Blackness as an agential identity formation in their interpersonal urban social encounters with white people. Hence, the vulnerable spaces of Whiteness in interracial urban encounters, as it pervasively addresses those moments of transformative change, enacted by Black characters, in the face of the discursive practices of whiteness in the everyday life. These novels celebrate multifarious representations of black individuals, who are capable of using their agency to subvert White discursive power, in finding ways in their personal and grassroots activism to transform the culture of fear that locates Blackness as such in an attempt to make a difference in the American society at large.
Exploring the role of identitarian politics in the privatization of Newark’s public school system In Expelling Public Schools, John Arena explores the more than two-decade struggle to privatize public schools in Newark, New Jersey—a conflict that is raging in cities across the country—from the vantage point of elites advancing the pro-privatization agenda and their grassroots challengers. Analyzing the unsuccessful effort of Cory Booker—Newark’s leading pro-privatization activist and mayor—to generate popular support for the agenda, and Booker’s rival and ultimate successor Ras Baraka’s eventual galvanization of the charter movement, Arena argues that Baraka’s black radical politics cloaked a revanchist agenda of privatization. Expelling Public Schools reveals the political rise of Booker and Baraka, their one-time rivalry and subsequent alliance, and what this particular case study illuminates about contemporary post–civil rights Black politics. Ultimately, Expelling Public Schools is a critique of Black urban regime politics and the way in which antiracist messaging obscures real class divisions, interests, and ideological diversity.
By introducing a framework for culturally sustaining Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) praxis, Harman, Burke and other contributing authors guide readers through a practical and analytic exploration of youth participatory work in classroom and community settings. Applying an SFL lens to critical literacy and schooling, this book articulates a vision for youth learning and civic engagement that focuses on the power of performance, spatial learning, community activism and student agency. The book offers a range of research-driven, multimodal resources and methods for teachers to encourage students’ meaning-making. The authors share how teachers and community activists can interact and support diverse and multilingual youth, fostering a dynamic environment that deepens inquiry of the arts and disciplinary area of knowledge. Research in this book provides a model for collaborative engagement and community partnerships, featuring the voices of students and teachers to highlight the importance of agency and action research in supporting literacy learning and transformative inquiry. Demonstrating theoretically and practically how SFL praxis can be applied broadly and deeply in the field, this book is suitable for preservice teachers, teacher educators, graduate students and scholars in bilingual and multilingual education, literacy education and language policy.
Readers and acolytes of the vital early 1950s-mid 1960s writers known as the Beat Generation tend to be familiar with the prose and poetry by the seminal authors of this period: Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane Di Prima, and many others. Yet all of these authors, as well as other less well-known Beat figures, also wrote plays-and these, together with their countercultural approaches to what could or should happen in the theatre-shaped the dramatic experiments of the playwrights who came after them, from Sam Shepard to Maria Irene Fornes, to the many vanguard performance artists of the seventies. This volume, the first of its kind, gathers essays about the exciting work in drama and performance by and about the Beat Generation, ranging from the well-known Beat figures such as Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs, to the “Afro-Beats” - LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Bob Kaufman, and others. It offers original studies of the women Beats - Di Prima, Bunny Lang - as well as groups like the Living Theater who in this era first challenged the literal and physical boundaries of the performance space itself.
“Uprooted reveals how a late-life uprooting changed Dickey as a gardener.” —The Wall Street Journal When Page Dickey moved away from her celebrated garden at Duck Hill, she left a landscape she had spent thirty-four years making, nurturing, and loving. She found her next chapter in northwestern Connecticut, on 17 acres of rolling fields and woodland around a former Methodist church. In Uprooted, Dickey reflects on this transition and on what it means for a gardener to start again. In these pages, fol­low her journey: searching for a new home, discovering the ins and outs of the landscape surround­ing her new garden, establishing the garden, and learning how to be a different kind of gardener. The sur­prise at the heart of the book? Although Dickey was sad to leave her beloved garden, she found herself thrilled to begin a new garden in a wilder, larger landscape. Written with humor and elegance, Uprooted is an endearing story about transitions—and the satisfaction and joy that new horizons can bring.
Zusammenfassung: Spatial Futures invites readers to imagine power and freedom through the lens of the 'Black Outdoors', a transdisciplinary spatial concept that operates beyond the planetary, stratigraphic confines of the 'Anthropocene'. The chapters collectively point to the ontological-epistemological contradictions involved in forging liberatory spatial futures. Bringing new spatial imaginaries to bear in and outside geography, the book refuses the strictures of the 'cenic', entertaining difference as world-making