Comparative Studies

This study of the community garden preservation movement on the Lower East Side of New York examines the role of movement framing by activists in their struggle to save hundreds of gardens from destruction. In repeated confrontations with the Giuliani administration, gardeners successfully de-routinized the process of urban redevelopment by portraying the loss of a garden as an unimaginable violation against themselves, and the city. This process of re-framing urban development helped activists to compensate for their disempowered political status, and was instrumental in forcing the Giuliani administration to negotiate to save the gardens. Focusing on framing by movement activists demonstrates the purposive and strategic character of neighborhood identity. Emphasizing the strategy of neighborhood identities is a useful corrective to the many studies of community movements that emphasize their emergence from a relational, presumably nonstrategic, local reality.

Through direct engagement with gardeners, activists, and residents, Miranda Martinez shows the breadth and diversity of the community gardening movement.  She demonstrates how real people are effective as social forces amid large scale urban change and looks at the complexities and contradictions involved in transformations of urban neighborhoods. One of the most important contributions of this study is its focus on the Puerto Ricans of the Lower East Side and their struggle to sustain its Latinidad. It goes deeply into the ethnic and cultural significance at the neighborhood and personal level to show the contradictory meanings of gentrification to Puerto Ricans and others, and more importantly, the ways that the history and culture of Puerto Ricans are ignored, devalued, and erased. By going to the grassroots, this book vividly demonstrates how Puerto Ricans interact with the global and local trends involved in gentrification and how the struggles against displacement can alter the boundaries of the process.

Studies of organizational dynamics examine the manner in which an organization's immediate environment defines the "rules and requirements to which individual organizations must conform in order to receive legitimacy and support" (Scott, 1992:132). In this paper we consider the question of how an organization can achieve legitimacy and support without necessarily compromising its organizational forms or practices to isomorphic pressures. We frame the question in terms of the boundaries between organizations and their environments. Where the population ecology studies show the survival value of adopting known organizational forms and practices, and neoinstitutionalism addresses the need to display compliance with accepted forms, our case study demonstrates the possibility of removing an organization or set of organizations from the familiar interaction by naming it as a subfield of the organizational field, sharing the environment, but "out of the way" of predefined norms and practices.

Financial coaching is intensive, long-term counselling intended to foster "financial capability", defined as a state of heightened self-efficacy and knowledge that facilitates the exercise of financial agency. Coaching is a behaviourist technology intended to intervene in the cognition and affect of subjects, and that relates to neoliberal imperatives to fashion disciplined market-oriented subjects. However, it can also be understood as a contested element of envisioned financial agencements used by local organisations to shield vulnerable financial consumers from financial predation. Analysis of policy documents and interviews is used to capture the meanings attached to financial coaching by local actors, and to offer a more textured, affectively complex description of the dilemmas of inclusion confronting financial consumers who experience the terrain of everyday consumer finance as predatory.

Arts of Protest and Arts of Solidarity are necessarily different because they address different audiences.  I examine examples from throughout Latin America but concentrate on materials generated during and immediately following the 2009 Coup in Honduras.

Local character narratives offer a fruitful corpus for exploring the relation between community belonging, identity and narrator stance. After summarizing North American scholarship on the local character genre, I explore the ways two narrators establish their storytelling rights to a rural Maine narrative tradition. Adopting an interactionist orientation toward discourse, I map the ways that the narrators position themselves with respect to each other and to their internalized other, the local character. I demonstrate that community belonging, and the storytelling rights that such belonging confers, is a discursive accomplishment that transcends stable class and geographic positions. The character story offers narrators a way to simultaneously identify with the most marginal, most emblematic members of their community while at the same time distinguishing themselves as normative citizens. Recognizing identities as plural, multi-voiced and sometimes conflicting, I challenge folklori...

The GriteriTa in Miami: A Nicaraguan Home-based Festival Katherine Borland Indiana University Although Nicaraguans have migrated to Miami in significant numbers only in the last thirteen years, they have already begun to make their mark on the city. Catholic Nicaraguans, for ...

The unprecedented situation of COVID-19 has created a unique response from village-based projects in rural Bulgaria. My research from 2019-2020 followed three projects that facilitate urban-rural intergenerational connection as a form of rural reinvestment. With project planning uncertain and interactions between generations discouraged due to the pandemic, my research, and the cultural work I am following, took an unexpected turn. Rather than fulfilling their core missions of connecting young and old, rural and urban people together to pass on rural culture, these projects transformed their rhetoric and practices to support the elderly in a time of crisis. By drawing on my experiences in the field throughout Bulgaria’s early onset of pandemic and lockdown measures as well as “virtual ethnography” (being in the virtual spaces where communication and online events are happening), I explore how two of the intergenerational projects aimed at heritage-based rural reinvestment in Bulgari...

The text is preceded by an introduction describing the manuscript itself, Chief Gibson, Goldenweiser, the history of scholarship on the text, the process of reelicitation, and the text format. This is followed by a detailed discussion of the text. The opening, which describes the founding of the League, is summarized carefully, with useful explanatory notes. The second part of the text lays out the rituals of the Condolence Council, the ceremony held to mourn the death of a chief and install his successor. This ceremony is extremely complex, lasting, as Woodbury notes, anywhere from six to eight hours when performed. She provides an effective analysis of its structure and detailed description of the performance of the rituals that comprise it. She demonstrates how the ritual structure is reflected in grammatical structure. Because it was necessary to work from a dictated manuscript rather than an oral performance, Woodbury notes that certain aspects of rhetorical style could not be recovered; nevertheless, drawing primarily on annotations in the original, on observer accounts of performances, and tape recordings of fragments, she is able to make a number of inferences about the formal oratorical style. Surveys follow of attestations of the text in English and in Iroquois languages (Onondaga, Mohawk, Oneida, Cayuga) of the League Tradition and the Condolence Council in particular, and of observer accounts of performances. Three appendices conclude the volume, the first a list of abbreviations, the second a comparison of the Goldenweiser and modern orthographies, and the third a very helpful, comprehensive discussion of Onondaga phonology. This is a monumental work, the result of years of collaboration between a highly skilled, dedicated linguist (Woodbury) and extraordinarily gifted speakers (Webster, Henry, Thomas, Williams). It is certain to be consulted and treasured by generations of Iroquois people, linguists, and other scholars.