Dangerous Streets Research Articles

Ethnicity and gentrification. Exploring the real estate's perspective on the revaluation of a "dangerous" street in Leipzig (Germany)

The relationship between ethnicity and gentrification is understudied. However, it is a highly relevant albeit paradoxical relationship where upgrading due to “multiculturalism” and “authenticity” might be paralleled by discrimination and displacement. This paper takes up the case of Leipzig’s Eisenbahnstrasse as an arrival space with one of the highest shares of foreigners in East Germany. The media has labeled Eisenbahnstrasse as “Germany’s most dangerous street”. Simultaneously, considerable dynamics on the housing market are observed that add to the juxtaposition between medial perception and real estate. Our paper takes up this paradoxical situation and investigates the role of ethnicity on Leipzig’s Eisenbahnstrasse, seen from the supply side of real estate, which is an often neglected perspective. By means of qualitative interviews with local stakeholders, our aim is to understand their role in the revaluation process, and how ethnicity is linked to this process. Our findings reveal a gap between the predominantly negative news coverage and the neighborhood’s actual values from the real estate perspective. According to the interviewees, the image of the Eisenbahnstrasse prevents families from moving to the area but attracts students and artists who cherish the international atmosphere in the area. In this context, ethnicity plays a crucial but ambiguous role in the revaluation process. This paper also reveals how discrimination on the housing market takes place, and how real estate stakeholders construct ethnicity and apply strategies to promote a revaluation, which they consider as social mixing. Therefore, we present further evidence of the ongoing processes on Leipzig’s Eisenbahnstrasse and provide insights into the complex relationship between gentrification and ethnicity.

A gendered security dispositif: Mobilizing gender in Mexico City

This article concerns the security governance of gender in Mexico City. It begins by juxtaposing the alleged rape of a 17-year-old female by security officials against the policy responses that ensued: policies designed to make it safer for women to navigate dangerous streets. The article explores this radical turnaround: how an episode in violent opposition to security governance would ultimately sustain its implementation. It does so through what is called a gendered security dispositif – a dispositif consistent with the original formulation of Michel Foucault, albeit configured to an official account of gender-based violence that is confined to women. A gendered security dispositif renders a violent event intelligible to government by locating it in existing statistical and surveillance technologies, thereby reducing the alleged rape to citywide rates of violence and areas of high risk. Policy initiatives then target these high-risk areas, as practices of subjectification turn on the behavior of female inhabitants. The result is an official appreciation of gender-based violence that reduces the very matter of a violent event and its female victim to an administrative plane. What began as an episode contrary to security governance opens onto the production of gender and security in a manner derivative of rule.

Attributes of Working Children in the Philippines

It is the right of every child to have a healthy environment, formal education, and a loving family. However, poverty forces a child to work even in dangerous streets. In the Philippines, the Child Protection Law defined children as persons below eighteen (18) years of age or those over but are unable to fully take care of themselves or protect themselves from abuse, neglect, cruelty, exploitation, or discrimination because of a physical or mental disability or condition. Despite the existing legislations in the country and with the United Nations declarations promoting the protection of children from exploitation, the problem in the country continues to exist. The paper aims to determine the extent of child labor in the country and describe the conditions of their work. The analysis of this paper made use of statistical data from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA). Descriptive methods of analysis were utilized in analyzing the data. The results of the study showed that the continued pauperization in the countryside, especially in the urban centers brought about by population growth and capitalism, had increased the number of children joining the labor force. Although progress has been made in promoting and protecting the rights of these children in national legislation and policy, many remain unreached, especially children among the poorest families, who contribute significantly to family income. This limited access of children to basic services further put them into the life of drudgery that would impair their development, hence, their future in general.

Evenings with Molly: Adult Couples' Use of MDMA for Relationship Enhancement.

Within the modern resurgence of psychedelics as medicinal agents for a range of conditions, the story of MDMA (Ecstasy, Molly) has been re-narrated from a dangerous street drug to a breakthrough mental health therapy. Even still, the story of MDMA remains incomplete within a binary discourse of deviant recreational use versus psychotherapeutic-medical use. The present research aimed to uncover an emerging model of MDMA use grounded in the experiences of adult couples using MDMA privately and in the context of their committed relationships. Eight adult couples who self-reported active MDMA use were recruited for confidential in-depth interviews exploring questions related to drug, set, and setting as a general framework for understanding their private experiences with MDMA. A general inductive coding process was used to arrive at four overarching themes: Conscious Use, A Tool for Exploring, Planned Recovery, and Difficult Experiences. Couples reported making purposeful decisions about MDMA use, collaborating together on becoming physically and emotionally "set" for their drug experience. Couples described positive effects on communication, intimate bonding, and providing a relationship "tune up," among other durable changes to the relationship. An emerging cognitive-relational model of "evenings with Molly" contrasts with existing models of use by suggesting the possibility of informed, non-problematic adult use of the drug for cognitive and relational enhancement. With a small, homogenous sample reporting generally positive experiences with MDMA self-administration, findings from this study cannot be generalized. It remains unknown what proportion of the total MDMA user population might align with the non-problematic adult use of MDMA explored in this study. Additional focused investigations might examine the prevalence and varieties of non-clinical use among adults in order to arrive at rational, science-based regulatory frameworks.

A Dangerous Street – an Educator’s Comments on the Revitalisation Process of Włókiennicza Street in Łódź

Włókiennicza Street in Łódź is currently undergoing a revitalisation process, which is also to include specific social activities for its residents. The revitalisation aims to raise the urban and architectural standard of this street, formerly known as Kamienna Street. The author describes Włókiennicza Street’s cultural transformation in the context of the theory of the relationship between the physical environment and crime. In particular, the author analyses the transformation from a street of wealthy residents to a street that is notorious for crime and poverty, and the contemporary hopes for changing the character of this part of the city as a result of a revitalisation project. Based on this, he raises the question about the necessary pedagogical and social measures in addition to strictly architectural measures.

Danger on the Way to School: Exposure to Violent Crime, Public Transportation, and Absenteeism

In this study, we propose and test a mechanism for the effect of neighborhood of residence on school outcomes: absenteeism that results from exposure to danger on the way to school. We first determine the most efficient route to school using public transportation for 4,200 first-time freshmen in Baltimore City public high schools. Then, we link the specific streets along the most efficient route to incident-level crime data from the Baltimore Police Department. We find that students whose estimated routes require walking along streets with higher violent-crime rates have higher rates of absenteeism throughout the year. We also show that absenteeism is not associated with exposure to dangerous streets while riding on public transit and exposure to property crime.These conclusions hold with and without adjustments for student demographic characteristics, prior school attendance, violent crime around homes and schools, and unobserved differences related to school preference and neighborhood selection.

Said Not Said by Fred Marchant

Reviewed by: Said Not Said by Fred Marchant Leah Miranda Hughes Fred Marchant. Said Not Said. Graywolf Press, 2017. Poet Fred Marchant delivers a remarkable combination of confoundedness and compassion in his new four-section poetry collection, Said Not Said. The poems pry into the deep complications of living and some of the most painful positions the living endure—or don’t endure. Since there is no cure for being on earth, as Samuel Becket notes in the epigraph, we must use our heads. Using our heads comes, however, with its own limitations, as Marchant shows. What, really, do we know—particularly about the pain of others and the suffering of people in other places? To what extent can we comprehend other cultures and perspectives—particularly in the onslaught of chaos? Let’s say we acknowledge our lack of knowledge and look to God for answers, will we get any, as the poem Psalm asks? And, on the off-chance that, inspired by nature or some chthonic voice, we have an answer, will we be able to find the words to articulate it? Marchant has never been one to shy away from human suffering. In each section of Said Not Said, the poet shows exquisite sensitivity to the pain of others, reaching from far away to deep down for subject matter in this fifth collection. The sections revolve around international hotspots and war zones, as well as holy sites and interior landscapes. Often leaning into autobiography, the poems use nature and elemental items as references for a world that anguish has made foreign and abstract. Marchant engages a vernacular of warfare frequently, even in poems discussing his sister’s fight with mental illness. The poems battle to compose an expression of his sister’s life and suffering: “The Name of the Painting” draws a parallel of madness stealing the present day by describing Titian’s rendition of the rape of Europa. Jupiter takes away Europa—the modern world—leaving her terrified family behind; in fact, everyone is terrified. Marchant’s parallel asserts that each day we fight for our sanity and our place in the modern world. In the absence of answers, sanity, or peace, the poet wonders if we can find a way to adapt, like a person would if he had a fishbone stuck in his throat but had to go on regardless. What if a person lived on a very dangerous street, how would he walk? What if only olive trees made sense or the air was nearly too hot to breathe? Adaptation, slow and awkward, does not present a perfect answer for mortal suffering, no better than using our [End Page 47] heads, anyway. Although “out of many hearts” comes one soul to do the job of cleaning up after war, the job then becomes keeping guard for peace. Marchant, the first Marine to receive an honorable discharge as a conscientious objector while on active duty, may not have exactly come to peace with coming home from the war for peace of mind, as the narrator receives a “quitter’s rose” instead of a medal when he returns home from the war alive: even at home, war haunts the speaker. In fact, war often frames the speaker’s perspective. The poems incorporate the words of war for tools, places, emotions, situations from battle destruction to the language of Dante’s hell. Equally present, the poems evoke the sacred. And, at times, the speaker pauses when words express “really little more than nothing.” In certain poems, the poet faces the world and wonders “if there is anything to say, more or less.” Sometimes, as in the story of the woman taken in adultery referenced in the title poem, what is not said has as much value as what is said, a difficult lesson for the poet, for whom life is about saying something. Sometimes, words end up as chalk dust, blowing away with everything learned in a day or believed in a lifetime. Sometimes, words fly up and away like birds or wash off like water. Sometimes, as Marchant acknowledges “In the Rapids,” we can “just…not say.” Not one to give up, the poet carries on...

The Threshold of the State: Civil Defence, the Blackout and the Home in Second World War Britain.

This article reconsiders the way that the British state extended its control of the home during the Second World War, using the implementation of air raid precautions and the blackout as a lens through which to view the state's developing attitudes to domestic space. Presented here is not the familiar story of pitch-dark, dangerous streets or altered cityscapes of fear and destruction; instead, by examining personal testimony the article inverts traditional treatments of the blackout to look at the interior of dwellings, demonstrating how the realities of total warfare impinged upon the psychological elements that constituted the home. What emerges not only expands historical understandings of the wartime experience of civilians, it also shows civil defence measures as highly visible points on an often antagonistic trajectory of state interactions with citizens concerning the privacy and security of the dwelling in the modern city. The requirements of civil defence, I argue, were not merely the product of exceptional wartime circumstances, but symptomatic of long-standing attempts to open up dwellings to state scrutiny. These attempts had both a significant pre-war lineage and, crucially, implications beyond the end of the war in private homes and on social housing estates.

The Alarming Career of Sir Richard Blackstone by Lisa Doan

Reviewed by: The Alarming Career of Sir Richard Blackstone by Lisa Doan Kate Quealy-Gainer, Assistant Editor Doan, Lisa The Alarming Career of Sir Richard Blackstone. Sky Pony, 2017 [200p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-5107-1122-8 $15.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-5107-1123-5 $15.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 4-6 Living on the dirty, dangerous streets of Victorian London is a more appealing option for twelve-year-old Henry than staying with his abusive parents, even with the trouble the boy meets the city’s shady underbelly. His fortunes change when he stumbles, quite literally, across Sir Richard Blackstone, a scientist urgently in need of an assistant, and Sir Richard offers him the position on the spot. Henry is soon whisked off to Sir Richard’s country estate, where he discovers that Sir Richard is a bit of an eccentric when it comes to science. When a giant tarantula, an unfortunate result of one of Sir Richard’s experiments, escapes, Henry joins Sir Richard in his hunt to track the creature down; in an odd twist, the process leads Henry to discover the secrets of his and his family’s origin. This is a quirky little romp through colorful history, with characters that stretch just far enough into wackiness to be entertaining but not overwritten. Sir Richard is an amiable eccentric, Henry makes a pleasing plucky hero, and the mustache-twirling (figuratively) and appropriately named Mr. Snidefellow serves as an excellent nemesis for Sir Richard. The mystery of Henry’s backstory becomes obvious fairly quickly, but readers are unlikely to care as they find themselves in Henry’s good company, tracking down an enormous arachnid, dealing with Sir Richard’s pet piranhas, and finding a cozy, weird home. Copyright © 2017 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Creating a Bus Rapid Transit Boulevard: Making Woodhaven Boulevard Select Bus Service Work for Transit, Traffic, and the Public in Queens, New York

American and international cities have delivered high-quality transit service at relatively low cost through the use of bus rapid transit (BRT). However, while improved transit service is critical for urban mobility, a tension exists between creating the best possible bus facility and designing an attractive urban environment. Cities face the challenge of developing street configurations that provide reliable, high-capacity transit service while providing a high-quality public realm for the transit riders and communities that the buses serve. Woodhaven Boulevard is an auto-oriented 14-mi (22.5-km) corridor in Queens, New York, that carries more than 30,000 bus riders daily. The corridor performs poorly for transit, is inhospitable to pedestrians, and is consistently ranked as one of the most dangerous streets in the city. The New York City Department of Transportation and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority Bus Company are leveraging the Select Bus Service (SBS) program to redesign the corridor with BRT features that include improvements to the public realm while maintaining sufficient capacity for all vehicles. This paper describes the planning process and challenges of the Woodhaven Boulevard SBS project and provides lessons on how to design and evaluate an urban arterial that accommodates many users, each with his or her own set of mobility and accessibility needs. While typical BRT projects focus on the traditional goals of maximizing transit efficiency and bus speeds, the preferred concept for Woodhaven Boulevard demonstrates how a wider array of goals that includes safety, aesthetics, and place making can and should be incorporated into transit projects.

The Drunkard's Directions: Mapping Urban Space in the Antebellum Temperance Drama

William H. Smith's The Drunkard (premiering in 1844) broke attendance records at Moses Kimball's Boston Museum and P. T. Barnum's American Museum in New York. Portraying the ills of intemperance, the melodrama also foregrounded thrilling scenes of local urbanity to inspire middle-class tourists to navigate convoluted and potentially dangerous city streets.

Sounding Brighton: Update on soundscape planning with a user centric approach

The potential of soundscape planning has been widely illustrated in recent years. Sounding Brighton is a collaborative initiative pioneered by the Noise Abatement Society and Brighton and Hove City Council in 2010 with the support of the former COST Action TD0804. The project continues and is exploring the positive effects soundscapes can have on health, wellbeing, and quality of life. It recently undertook a city-wide soundscape survey and interviews leading to “West Street Story,” a night-noise intervention pilot, to gauge whether ambient soundscapes might act as an antidote to the Saturday night drinking culture seen on the city's most dangerous street, and the follow on project: “West Street Tunnel” investigating the same approach in a disused pedestrian subway. The work has also gained inclusion in the Masterplan for the redevelopment of the city center, leading to its willingness to participate in and its acceptance into the European Union funded FP7 SONORUS project looking at holistic ways to include urban sound planning into city planning. This paper will provide an update of the project and its results so far.

A sustainable city environment through child safety and mobility—A challenge based on ITS?

Our cities should be designed to accommodate everybody, including children. We will not move toward a more sustainable society unless we accept that children are people with transportation needs, and ‘bussing’ them around, or providing parental limousine services at all times, will not lead to sustainability. Rather, we will need to make our cities walkable for children, at least those above a certain age. Safety has two main aspects, traffic safety and personal safety (risk of assault). Besides being safe, children will also need an urban environment with reasonable mobility, where they themselves can reach destinations with reasonable effort; else they will still need to be driven. This paper presents the results of two expert questionnaires focusing on the potential safety and mobility benefits to child pedestrians of targeted types of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Five different types of functional requests for children were identified based on previous work. The first expert questionnaire was structured to collect expert opinions on which ITS solutions or devices would be, and why, the most relevant ones to satisfy the five different functional requests of child pedestrians. Based on the first questionnaire, fifteen problem areas were defined. In the second questionnaire, the experts ranked the fifteen areas, and prioritized related ITS services, according to their potential for developing ITS services beneficial to children. Several ITS systems for improving pedestrian quality are discussed. ITS services can be used when a pedestrian route takes them to a dangerous street, dangerous crossing point or through a dangerous neighborhood. An improvement of safety and other qualities would lead to increased mobility and a more sustainable way of living. Children would learn how to live to support their own health and a sustainable city environment. But it will be up to national, regional and local governments, through their ministries and agencies and public works departments, to promote, fund, and possibly mandate such systems. It is clear that we need to offer an acceptable level of convenience, efficiency, comfort, safety and security to pedestrians but it is less clear if society will prioritize resources toward this.

Human group formation in online guilds and offline gangs driven by a common team dynamic

Quantifying human group dynamics represents a unique challenge. Unlike animals and other biological systems, humans form groups in both real (offline) and virtual (online) spaces-from potentially dangerous street gangs populated mostly by disaffected male youths to the massive global guilds in online role-playing games for which membership currently exceeds tens of millions of people from all possible backgrounds, age groups, and genders. We have compiled and analyzed data for these two seemingly unrelated offline and online human activities and have uncovered an unexpected quantitative link between them. Although their overall dynamics differ visibly, we find that a common team-based model can accurately reproduce the quantitative features of each simply by adjusting the average tolerance level and attribute range for each population. By contrast, we find no evidence to support a version of the model based on like-seeking-like (i.e., kinship or "homophily").

Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans. By Charles Hersch. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. xiv, 289 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-226-32867-6.)

Charles Hersch fills a historiographical gap by providing the first interpretive cultural study of early New Orleans jazz. This is surprising; the tropes, signifiers, discourses, and other indices of cultural conflict and change arising from the city's dangerous streets, shabby dance halls, multiracial brothels, lakeside bandstands, and parades and celebrations, circa 1880–1920, have long been ripe for theorizing. Earlier histories avoid such postmodern approaches, but they provide many suggestive illustrations of oppositional behavior, subversive textuality, and cultural hybridity among the Creoles of color, Sicilian and Irish immigrants, voodoo queens, pimps, roustabouts, and slumming white dance hall patrons who peopled the New Orleans scene. Hersch both repeats the narratives of other historians and realizes their inchoate interpretations. Like earlier histories, Subversive Sounds describes at length the Caribbean character of New Orleans society and the liminal social status of the city's Creoles of color, and finds both to be central to the formation of jazz. The degraded status of all African American residents in the era of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) reflected the dominant white view that blacks threatened Caucasian racial purity; jazz, Hersch argues, boldly injected “impurity” into American music and culture. This is perhaps his most original argument, countering popular notions of New Orleans jazz as a cozy gumbo or melting pot of amicable white, Creole, and black influences. Hersch's introduction of the concepts of the carnivalesque (Mikhail Bakhtin) and heterotopia (Michel Foucault), though, add little to his analysis of the vigorous expressiveness of New Orleans street life, which covers familiar musical sites such as Congo Square, second line parades, and funeral marches. As an interpretation, Hersch's book resembles a lively bull session that clothes well-known historical data in mostly predictable interpretations. As a result, it only slightly modifies the prevailing narrative about the music. Hersch is a political scientist whose attention to chronology and use of analogies is more casual than that of most historians. This adds to the book's playful and suggestive nature but detracts from the persuasiveness of its interpretation. In contrast, Thomas Brothers's Louis Armstrong's New Orleans (2006), while less provocative, is more empirically thorough and original in its description of how musical materials cohered in specific times and places to create early New Orleans jazz.

Road traffic injuries in one local health unit in the Lazio region: results of a surveillance system integrating police and health data

ObjectiveDifferent sources are available for the surveillance of Road Traffic injuries (RTI), but studied individually they present several limits. In this paper we present the results of a surveillance integrating healthcare data with the data gathered by the municipal police in the southeastern area of Rome (630,000 inhabitants) during the year 2003.MethodsThe Municipal police RTI reports, which list the exact location, circumstances and some risk factor of the crash, were searched in the emergency visit, hospitalization and mortality databases, to integrate them with the information on health consequences.A multivariate analysis was conducted to evaluate risk factors (crash circumstances, age ad gender of the casualty) associated with hospital admission following a RTI.Mapping of RTI locations was created. The locations with higher risk of accidents with severe health consequences and at higher risk for pedestrians were identified.ResultsAccording to police records 4571 RTI occurred in 2003, 75% of which led to emergency department admissions. Sixteen percent of these emergency visits ended in hospitalization, and 44 deaths were reported within 30 days of the event, most of which occurred in young men.The people with the highest risk of hospitalization after an RTI were the cyclists, pedestrians and followed by people on two-wheeled vehicles. The type of crash with the highest risk of hospitalization was head-on collision.Geographical analyses showed four clusters with higher severity of RTI. Specific attention was paid to pedestrian injuries. Analyzing the locations of RTIs involving pedestrians permitted us to rank the most dangerous streets. The roads at high risk for pedestrians identified problems in the bus stop constructions and in the placement of the zebra pedestrian crossings.ConclusionThis study proves the feasibility of an integrated surveillance system of RTI by using routinely collected local data. The high-risk locations identified with the geographic analyses method in this study highlighted infrastructural problems, suggesting immediate preventive interventions.

In a Fevered Land (review)

232Southwestern Historical QuarterlyOctober Secondly, the book's beautiful black-and-white photography by Clark G. Baker shows how naturally these churches and their surroundings fit into the prairie/wooded landscape, and also captures details of the buildings (both interior and exterior) and graveyards. Especially revealing are those photographs of people associated with the churches, which humanize the rich but humble stories associated with each church. The combination of open landscapes, dominant sky, simple architecture, rich details, and people of varied backgrounds is especially engaging. Happily, die quality of these photographs is excellent; their content, detail, and contrast harmonize with the informative text. Rock Beneath the Sand is recommended for all who wish to know more about how faith is manifested in the Lone Star State generally, and in central Texas particularly. The University ofTexas at ArlingtonRichard Francaviglia In a Fevered Land. By Irene Sandell. (Austin: Sunbelt Eakin, 2003. Pp. iv+264. ISBN 1-57168-765-3. $24.95, paper.) Set in rural Texas during the late 1920s and early 1930s, Irene Sandell's characters personify the struggle of those tied to the nation's agricultural economy as the "flapper era" devolved into the Great Depression. The nation's farmers of the 1920s suffered from the end of the Great War until the Second World War. While much of industrial America celebrated the Roaring Twenties, farmers realized increasingly smaller profits and, for those faced with the twin demons of large surpluses and competition from international producers, years of breakeven, or less, operations. Sandell offers a version of what happens when people without hope abandon familiar endeavors to pursue a living and life in the unknown. Readers meet Lon Prather and his cousin, Emory Campbell, in 1928, as the teenagers sneak drinks of moonshine from a tenant farmer's stash. The boys are near the end of high school, and the futures of their farm families are in doubt. Lon's father has always produced a good cotton crop and owns two farms, the one he works and the property of his deceased wife's family, which he rents to the moonshiner. The Prather farms are part of Lon's heritage on both sides of his family, and provide the basis for the family's roots in their community and the depth of die trouble that would drive Lon Prather to the Texas oilfields. Emory accompanies his cousin to Wink in search of a life other than farming, one with financial promise. Lon relies upon common sense, a long-range perspective, and caution to navigate the dangerous streets, bars, and dance halls of oilfield boomtowns , while Emory, Lon's psychological opposite, embraces "the moment" as well as the sins of the masses. Lon Prather is nothing if not determined. With a woman he loves back at home, he relentlessly pursues financial advancement and stability in the everchanging landscape of the "oil patch." Much ofwhat good happens to Lon is the result of his perspective and the way he treats others. He selects the men with whom he'll work and treats others with a good measure of respect and compassion , particularly those dealing with problems greater than his own. He is appeal- 2??8Book Reviews233 ing because he doesn't speak ill of or ignore those shouldering unthinkable burdens , but tries to help his fellow men, in the main, with findingjobs, knowledge, or lasting relationships. The young man's view of the world, once limited to his hometown, family, farm, and church, has expanded through travel, risk, adversity , and pluck. By remaining principled and equitable Lon reinforces the notion that fair and honest dealings will ultimately result in an improved life, rather thanjust continued survival. In a Fevered Land revisits familiar territory. Times of exceptional adversity reveal a person's mettle, which, when tested, illuminates strengths and weaknesses of both body and spirit. Lon Prather would seem old beyond his years except for the fact that prior to October 1929, rural folk seemed better positioned than their urban counterparts perhaps were to comprehend the uncontrollable realities ofweather, scarcity, surplus, the international economy, and health. This presumption permits readers to accept Lon's remarkably prescient view of life. But this is a view...

Finding Utopia in the Collapsing Shit Factory

I’m naked, lying on my back on the fifteenth floor of an apartment full of stink and people in a city of a million other citizens. I’m at the centre of this booming metropolis and yet I’m ENTIRELY ALONE. I hate my life, my job, the city I live in and this screwed-up world that continues to disengage itself from me. I spend the next four hours staring at the water-stained stucco ceiling imagining ways to “off” myself. I don’t have the stomach or the courage for suicide, so the time is wasted. I kill (pardon the pun) another hour being angry that I threw away precious hours on something I never intended on carrying out. Is this what a breakdown feels like? Should I see a shrink to get some prescription drugs to numb me? But of course, I don’t trust doctors and the only drugs I’ve ever managed to digest are Vicks cough drops. I reach for the remote and turn the television on. There’s an Oprah feature about her new Leadership Academy for young girls in South Africa. I weep so hard I get hiccups as two young girls talk about how their father shot their mother and then himself in front of them. From my upside down position on the carpet, I see the girls emerge from their dirt floor to enter the dangerous streets of their community with hope. They study, read, dream, thank God for their blessings and find ways to play childhood games without the luxury of Nintendo Wii. I begin to feel a glimmer of relief that we’re not living in the apocalypse, but the glimmer is soon washed away by an overwhelming wave of guilt. I live in one of the most prosperous, safe countries on the globe, with the added luxury of studying my love/hate of performance, and I can’t even get myself off the floor to get dressed. Oprah’s girls remind me that I am a pathetic, self-indulgent, self-pitying western idiot. I remember the words of dead people. Kierkegaard tells me the “sickness unto death” I’m experiencing is “despair.” St. John of the Cross reassures me that a “dark night of the soul” is a journey to enlightenment. Camus reminds me that life is both “meaningless” and “important.” To hell with the philosophy of corpses, I need a live person to talk to. My brother, a cog in the Microsoft wheel, is on a conference call with a dozen other cogs. The most I can hope from my husband is a “cheer up,” since he is working one of his three jobs to pay for this overpriced dump. I telephone my best friend, and he’s wading through his own meaningless bullshit and brushes me off, but not before saying, “I’m miserable too.” Finally, my retired dad tells me he’ll call me back, since he’s “in the middle of driving terminal cancer patients around.” Did he just say that in front of them? I feel like a prick for even calling him. It’s bloody Sunday for God’s sake! Is there no one who has time to talk? Or is this world turning us all into selfish assholes who don’t care about each other anymore? Where’s the community? If I were honest, I’d admit to not trying very hard to find it. We bitch about the bubbles we’re in, but we’re too damned afraid to see what’s outside of them. I hate feeling cynical, self-absorbed, nihilistic and whiney, but I can’t help wondering if my symptoms are a result of something wrong in the wider social realm. I can’t worry about that now. Everyone else is working in their bubbles and so should I. I have six enormous papers to write, two performances to prepare for and endless reading to do – all of which is due within the next six weeks. And still, I cannot get myself off the floor. One of my tasks: ’finish book review for CTR.“ So, I decide to tackle that first, only because the subtitle of the book has the word ”suicide“ in it AND I’m a big fan of the author. Still lying on my back, I read the opening sentence, ”The world is a collapsing shit factory“ (11). Ah, ok. So, I’m not alone in my misery.

Navigating Dangerous Streets: The Sources and Consequences of Street Efficacy

The concept of street efficacy, defined as the perceived ability to avoid violent confrontations and to be safe in one's neighborhood, is proposed as a mechanism connecting aspects of adolescents'“imposed” environments to the choices they make in creating their own “selected” environments that minimize the potential for violent confrontations. Empirical models using data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods suggest that street efficacy is substantially influenced by various aspects of the social context surrounding adolescents. Adolescents who live in neighborhoods with concentrated disadvantage and low collective efficacy, respectively, are found to have less confidence in their ability to avoid violence after controlling for an extensive set of individual- and family-level factors. Exposure to violence also reduces street efficacy, although it does not explain the association between collective efficacy and individual street efficacy. Adolescents' confidence in their ability to avoid violence is shown to be an important predictor of the types of environments they select for themselves. In particular, adolescents with high levels of street efficacy are less likely to resort to violence themselves or to associate with delinquent peers.

The Romantic and Dangerous Stranger

The Romantic and Dangerous Stranger