Colloquium Series
This site is maintained as an archive for past PPL events and publications. Click here for current PPL news and events.
2021-2022 Colloquium Series
September 23, 2021
Parks for Profit: Selling Nature in the City
Urban parks have become profitable in recent years, as city governments, corporations, real estate developers, philanthropists, and other elites have rediscovered parks’ cultural and economic potential. Embodied by linear postindustrial spaces like New York’s High Line, Chicago’s Bloomingdale Trail/606, and Houston’s Buffalo Bayou Park, new green interventions serve as civic shields for elite-oriented investments. Loughran reveals how elites deploy the popularity and seemingly benign nature of parks to achieve their cultural, political, and economic goals, and discusses the implications for parks equity.
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October 7, 2021
Local Public Finance Dynamics and Hurricane Shocks
Since 1980, over 2,000 local governments in US Atlantic and Gulf states have been hit by a hurricane. We study local government revenue, expenditure, and borrowing dynamics in the aftermath of hurricanes. These shocks reduce tax revenues and expenditures and increase the cost of debt in the decade following exposure. Municipalities with a racial minority composition 1 standard deviation above the sample mean suffer expenditure losses more than 2 times larger and debt default risk 8 times larger than municipalities with average racial composition in the decade following a hurricane strike. These results suggest that climate change can exacerbate environmental justice challenges.
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Nyron Crawford (Political Science)
October 21, 2021
Strike from the Record? Administrative Burdens in Take-up of Criminal Record Clearance
Too few people eligible for clearing their criminal record take-up the program, creating a “second chance gap.” While the policy was designed to help mitigate the collateral consequences of an arrest or criminal conviction – such as boosting employment rates, wages, and reducing re-offending – only a small share of justice-involved individuals proceeds through the administrative process, leaving many disqualified from public benefits. Why do so few people with criminal record petition for relief? This project explores different administrative burdens and how they affect record-bearers and record-clearance.
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Matthew Clair (Stanford University)
November 4, 2021
Privilege and Punishment in an Era of Mass Criminalization
The number of Americans arrested, brought to court, and incarcerated has skyrocketed in recent decades. Criminal defendants come from all races and economic walks of life, but they experience punishment in vastly different ways. How and why is the criminal court process unequal? This talk draws on findings from my book Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court (Princeton University Press, November 2020). Drawing on fieldwork and interviews in the Boston court system, I show that lawyers and judges often silence, coerce, and punish disadvantaged defendants when they try to learn their legal rights and advocate for themselves. These dynamics reveal how unwritten institutional and organizational norms devalue the exercise of legal rights among the disadvantaged, and that ensuring effective legal representation is no guarantee of justice. Drawing on other research and activism on the courts as an instrument of racialized social control, I conclude with reflections on how we might reimagine the criminal courts in relation to the movement to abolish police and prisons.
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Cheryl A. Hyde (School of Social Work)
November 18, 2021
Precarious Professionals: The Reasons for and Impact of Contingency Staffing on Personnel, Programs and Policies in Human Service Organizations
While contingency workers typically are associated with the gig economy, an increasing number are found within health, education, and welfare sector labor markets. This presentation calls attention to how over 40 years of neo-liberal policies essentially have undermined resources for and the legitimacy of these sectors with a particular focus on human service organizations and their use of contingent workers to provide essential services. Using interview data from a pilot study on contingent human service professionals, discussion focuses on the reasons for and consequences of using contingent staff to provide programs and services for not only the workers but for the organizations as well. Systemically, the precarity that results from this arrangement further erodes the human service sector.
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March 10, 2022
Neighborhood Improvement and Crime Reduction through Housing Intervention
Since the mid-twentieth century, a vast literature in sociology and criminology has argued that neighborhood characteristics have a profound impact on crime prevalence. These ideas coalesce in the so-called broken window theory, which states that neighborhood deterioration signals low surveillance levels to potential offenders and culminates in increased crime. To empirically assess this argument, we examine if a program to rejuvenate Chicago’s housing stock affected criminal activity. The Micro Market Recovery Program (MMRP) sought to rebuild and restore distressed communities, primarily by reducing the costs of homeownership and housing maintenance in targeted areas. Our results contribute not only to the study of broken window theory, but also to a broader debate over housing policy. The study finds that housing maintenance investments create externalities. We show that rejuvenating the existing private housing stock, as an alternative to constructing public housing or incentivizing new private development, also has positive effects on reducing local crime rates.
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Ajima Olaghere (Criminal Justice)
March 24, 2022
Who Do You Serve? And How? Reflections on Community-based Participatory Research in the Era of Evidence-based Policy and Practice
President Biden's 2021 Executive Order 13985, Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government, may be the most significant federal initiative to address the systemic racial and economic inequities first highlighted in the 1968 Kerner Commission Report. In today's era of evidence-based policy and practice, research is a fundamental component of how our society changes and reforms; of how we produce better outcomes for a better world. Accordingly, we face a critical task: How shall we center E.O. 13985's definition of equity and inclusion within evidence-based research? Recognizing the powerful role evidence synthesis plays in modern criminology, this presentation will reflect on lessons learned from implementing a community-based participatory research project where the primary objective is to align equity with the current paradigm of evidence-based policy and practice.
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April 7, 2022
Leveraging Neuroscience Research to Inform Mental Health Policy
The precursors, proximal causes, and consequences of mental health problems are complex, and influenced by individual differences in personality, neurophysiology, and responsivity to threats and rewards. This presentation explores this complexity, with a focus on social anxiety and challenges raised by the recent global pandemic. How does current policy succeed or fail to address mental health diversity? What are the economic ramifications of increasing mental health problems in the context of decreasing social safety nets? Most importantly, how can a deeper understanding of the causes and consequences of psychopathology enable us to improve outcomes at a societal level?
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Davarian L. Baldwin (Trinity College)
April 8, 2022
When Your City Becomes a Campus: Life in the Shadows of the Ivory Tower
In his recent book, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering our Cities, Davarian L. Baldwin, Trinity College, explores higher education's growing influence over the economic development and political governance of urban America. In this talk, Baldwin will situate the local Philadelphia experience within the larger national story of the rise of “UniverCities."
Davarian L. Baldwin is the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies at Trinity College.
PPL was delighted to cosponsor this event with the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History at Temple University.
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2020-2021 Colloquium Series
October 22, 2020
Protected Spaces: The Rise and Fall of the Public Bathroom in the United States: A Preliminary Research Report
Finding a public bathroom in Center City Philadelphia (or any other American city) isn’t easy. Sometimes the absence of a clean and accessible toilet is the punchline of a joke, but other times it is something far more menacing, like when two Black men asked to use the Starbucks bathroom near Rittenhouse Square and ended up in handcuffs and then on the nightly news.
“America,” NYU sociologist and toilet scholar Harvey Molotch told the Washington Post after that Starbucks moment in 2017, “has a public bathroom problem.”
But the US didn’t always have this problem. In the early years of the 20th C., cities from Philadelphia to York, PA to Lincoln, NE to San Francisco built public bathrooms. And these weren’t just metal stalls and sinks with concrete floors. They were “comfort stations.” Local officials bragged about the size, central location, and brass and marble finishes of these facilities. At one point, the New York Subway system had more than 700 public bathrooms. Today there are less than twenty and most of them are locked up tight or hidden from sight.
So what happened? Why did US policy makers tear down what they had once built? What does this officially sanctioned, systematic destruction of these key pieces of the urban “social infrastructure” tell us about governance, about race, class, and gender, about bodies and able-ness, about notions of privacy and public-ness, about what cities will fund and what they won’t support, about equal access to the public realm, and about the very day practice of inclusion and democracy?
These are the questions driving my current project, and there is perhaps no better way to get at them than through the public bathroom, and that is because there is, I would suggest, quite literally no way to have access to public space (bowling alleys, third places, or cosmopolitan canopies) without access to a public bathroom.
Michael Sances (Political Science)
February 4, 2021
When Do Reformer District Attorneys Run and Win?
Several large cities have elected district attorneys committed to using the power of the office to reduce mass incarceration. While there has been a good deal of journalistic attention to the small number of cases where these reformers win office, we know little about the reasons why these reformers win office, and we know even less about cases where reformers run, but don’t win. In this talk, I present preliminary evidence on the prevalence of reformer district attorneys as winners and losers in the largest jurisdictions in recent election cycles. I will also discuss the correlates of reformers’ electoral entry and electoral success. These results have implications for the efficacy of “bottom-up” efforts at reforming criminal justice policy.
Celeste Winston (Geography and Urban Studies)
March 11, 2021
Abolition Policy and the Long Movement for Black Lives
Although police abolition is gaining new traction in the US policy arena, everyday practices of living beyond policing have always shaped communities located at the margins of US society. This presentation draws on research in historically Black communities in the United States shaped by longstanding challenges to policing. The long movement for Black survival and abolition offers grounded evidence of the possibility of a world beyond policing that an ever-growing group of scholars, political organizers, and now policymakers are calling for.
Elise Chor (Political Science)
April 8, 2021
Does Money Matter? Preschool Funding, Program Quality, and Child Development
Preschool programs targeted towards low-income children can be effective at narrowing socioeconomic disparities in children’s skills at kindergarten entry, but preschool effectiveness varies widely across centers, potentially due to differences in per-pupil funding. This study investigates the relationships among preschool funding, program quality, and child development, with policy implications for the promotion of kindergarten readiness and expansion of opportunity into adulthood.
2019-2020 Colloquium Series
Caterina Roman (Criminal Justice)
October 3, 2019
Why is it so Difficult to Reduce Community Violence? The Challenges of Street Culture, Delinquent Peer Networks and Gangs
Although long-term, national trends in violent crime indicate we are at historic lows, some urban neighborhoods, such as those in North Philadelphia, still suffer from disproportionately high levels of shootings and violence. Crime reduction initiatives come and go, with little dent in the homicide numbers. This presentation will outline the challenges facing urban neighborhoods where the street code of violence is high and youth often remain loyal to their anti-social peers. The presentation draws on a study with Philadelphia street gang members that sought to understand the dynamics of street crime and group violence, and how social networks might impede or facilitate withdrawal from crime and gangs. The presentation will also discuss the study’s implications for policy and practice.
Hamil Pearsall (Geography and Urban Studies)
October 17, 2019
A Walk in the Park? Challenges to Developing, Managing, and Maintaining Urban Public Spaces for a Just and Equitable City
This presentation examines inequities in urban public spaces through a series of questions, including: Do low-income and minority communities have lower levels of access to public spaces than wealthier and/or whiter communities? Are privately owned and/or privately managed public spaces less publicly accessible than publicly owned and managed spaces? What are the primary challenges to overcome to improve public space accessibility?
Fenaba Addo (Department of Consumer Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison)
November 14, 2019
Wealth Inequality and the Black Middle Class
Fenaba R. Addo, Ph.D. is the Lorna J. Wendt Assistant Professor of Consumer Science at the UW-Madison. She also a faculty affiliate of the Center for Financial Security, Institute for Research on Poverty, Center for Demography and Ecology, La Follette School of Public Affairs, and Department of Sociology. Her research agenda examines how inequalities in debt and wealth create and recreate family, social, and health inequities. She is also interested the role that consumer and family policies serve in reinforcing these relationships and the consequences for economically vulnerable populations in the U.S., in particular communities of color, young adults, and older women.
Karolyn Tyson (Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
February 13, 2020
Trust in Times of Crisis and Change: Implications for Policy and Practice
Karolyn Tyson is Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received a doctorate in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley and a B.A. from Spelman College. Dr. Tyson specializes in qualitative research focused on schools and processes of social inequality. She is particularly interested in understanding the complex relationships between quotidian schooling processes, how people define their experiences, and individual action and outcomes. She is currently working on a book about trust in the aftermath of desegregation. Dr. Tyson is the author of Integration Interrupted: Tracking, Black Students, and Acting White after Brown as well as numerous articles examining the schooling experiences, attitudes, and outcomes of black students.
February 27, 2020
To Trust, or Not to Trust: How the Brain Shapes Social Decisions in Older Adults
Older adults are at increased risk for financial exploitation and also age-related health problems, including neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease. Yet, we have little insight into how we can reduce risk of (or delay) the associated cognitive decline and functional impairments, including those associated with vulnerability to financial exploitation. In this talk, I will present some of the ongoing work from my lab that uses functional magnetic resonance imaging to explore the underlying brain mechanisms that shape how older adults make social decisions, particularly those that involve trusting other people. Our goal is to understand how these brain mechanisms are related to financial exploitation and the functional impairments associated with risk of developing Alzheimer’s Disease. We believe that developing a better understanding of the relations between these factors is an important step toward early identification and creating interventions that might eventually be used to improve outcomes in older adults.