Hierarchy Of Places Research Articles

Evaluating care: Anti‐Blackness and sexual assault sentencing in Milwaukee, WI

AbstractThis article considers how care emerges as an integrated phenomenon that enfolds defendants, victim‐witnesses, and their kin in complex ways. Care capacitates forms of racial sorting and resource allocations that manifest within sentencing hearings of persons found guilty of committing sexual offenses, a mode of dysselection as described by Sylvia Wynter. During sentencing hearings, the state asserts its authority to evaluate the inadequacies of the infrastructures of care to which the person being sentenced has access. While Black men are ostensibly the focus of these hearings, their participation in sentencing hearings becomes a portal through which the court scrutinizes Black women and girls who are often proclaimed to be inadequate caretakers. Simultaneously, the state claims that it can provide the care that will result in the rehabilitation of the person being sentenced, while protecting the community from the potential harms of the criminalized subject. The stark contrast between the state's characterizations of Black kinship and care, and the complex, subtle, and creative tactics narrated by Black interlocutors demonstrates the ways in which the state seeks to surveil Black mores of kinship, assign particular categories of worthiness or unworthiness to modes of care, and fix an anti‐Black racial hierarchy in place.

“We’re Expected to Be Homogenous”: Contesting Latinidad and the Myth of Panethnic Inclusion

The construction of Latines as a racially homogenous group in the U.S. obscures the various contestations and negotiations that differently racialized Latines undergo as a result of the racial dynamics in place within Latinidad. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Latine students at Overton University, I show the kinds of ethnoracial contestations that occur among Latines as they negotiate what it means to take on that panethnic identity. I find that Latines construct Latine ethnoracial legitimacy around notions of racial “Brownness” and cultural “Mexicanness,” and argue that these constructions, which are rooted in anti-Blackness, lead to the exclusion of those on the racial margins of Latinidad. I also argue that the existence of these dynamics in settings that are meant to foster inclusivity and community building demonstrates the limitations of framing Latines as a panethnic and racially homogenous group and highlights the need to understand the hierarchies in place among Latines in the U.S.

A Symbolic Hierarchy of Places: Global Inequalities in Tourism Narratives of the New York Times Travel Section

We study the symbolic value of places using the case of global tourism where places are explicitly objectified for valorization. Unlike most prior research that uses tangible measurements like UNESCO's World Heritage Sites for global comparison of place-based symbolic values, we harness the power of computational text analysis to measure the symbolic value of places based on travel writings of the New York Times Travel Section. Our results demonstrate that there is a symbolic hierarchy among places depending on the various meanings of culture and nature and the degree of engagement with either topic. NYT travel writers valorize European regions for cultural tourism according to the broadest meanings of culture, and often engage with the region's history as a main topic of the travel article. However, other regions – particularly the ones with legacies of past colonization – are valorized for their nature's scenic beauty while obscuring the significance of their “cultural” values. Even when a place's “cultural” values are recognized, the meanings of culture tend to be limited in non-European regions. Our findings have implications for the enduring symbolic inequality of places at the global level.

Maintenance of National Heritage Anglican Churches in Malaysia

This paper addresses the maintenance of National Heritage Anglican churches in Malaysia. A field survey is presented, describing the current defects of selected Anglican churches in Malaysia and proposing maintenance practices against the identified defects. The neglect in maintaining Anglican churches is alarming. The survey revealed that, aside from routine housekeeping, the majority of the churches surveyed had little to no regular maintenance. As the studied Anglican churches are Malaysian’s National Heritage, the study adopted AHP and ANP to determine the relative importance of building discipline and space type inside a church, ensuring that the maintenance shall not neglect the values of these entities. Collectively, the in-situ survey results, the maintenance practices recommended by past literature, and the relative importance of building discipline and space type were used to propose a maintenance plan. Instead of generalising areas inside a church, different areas within a church are weighted differently in terms of importance levels, especially due to the fact that churches have a substantially different occupancy rate than conventional buildings. With the proposed hierarchy, priority might be given to the most vital areas first. In addition, church assets differ from those of other types of buildings, and their features should not be addressed in the same way. The research gives an improved asset hierarchy for churches based on the findings of multicriteria decision-making analysis. With this hierarchy in place, building custodians or maintenance personnel may find it easier to prioritise maintenance activities at churches, especially when financial is often limited.

Concrete Leviathan: The Interstate Highway System and Infrastructural Inequality in the Age of Liberalism

AbstractThis article explores how the construction of the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways prompted litigation that altered the course of administrative law and governance from the 1960s onward. By that time, the construction of the interstate system had become synonymous with thedestructionof neighborhoods and parks bulldozed to make way for the “concrete monsters,” as some came to call the interstates. Ensuing protests—“freeway revolts”—pressed for altered construction practices and participatory roles for citizens and communities in the state building process underway. This article explores the legal consequences of interstate highway protest, and advances two arguments. First, freeway revolts brought distinctive reforms to the practices of modern American state building, particularly when they produced the canonical Supreme Court caseCitizens to Preserve Overton Park v. Volpe(1971). Second, despite the reformist inclinations present inOverton Park, the case created an unequal legal and physical landscape of state building. ContrastingOverton ParkwithNashville I-40 Steering Committee v. Ellington(1967), a case dealing with racial discrimination and community destruction, reveals the mechanics of a legal regime that cemented racial and class hierarchies in place across long horizons of space and time via the interstate system's durable, nation-spanning asphalt limbs.

Reshaping the central place hierarchy of the urban hotel industry through O2O e-commerce

Online-to-offline (O2O) e-commerce has profoundly impacted the space of the urban hotel industry. Drawing on insights from flow space and central flow theory, this study establishes an electronic word of mouth (E-WoM) index system of hotels in Nanjing by using Dianping.com data and analyses the hotel central place hierarchy based on the consumption price and E-WoM score. The central place hierarchy based on the consumption price presents a core-edge hierarchical structure that conforms to central place theory, while that based on the E-WoM score presents a flat, multicentre network structure that conforms to central flow theory. This result not only shows the geographically rooted influence on cyberspace but also reflects the spatial mismatch between the service level and online volume level. Impacted by E-WoM information flow, a new spatial pattern of the virtual hotel industry based on cyberspace is formed, which may reshape the central place hierarchy of the traditional hotel industry.

AMERICA’S RACIAL STAIN The Taint Argument and the Limits of Constitutional Law and Rhetoric

AMERICA’S RACIAL STAIN The Taint Argument and the Limits of Constitutional Law and Rhetoric

Merchants and missionaries: Chinese evangelical networks and the transnational resacralization of European urban spaces

AbstractThis article sheds new light on the diverse modes in which migration and religion intersect in shaping everyday transnational practices by exploring the articulations of religion and business migration in an emerging Chinese‐led transnational mission field. Drawing on multisited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Wenzhou, Rome and Paris, I show how a large group of transnational Chinese merchants has adopted a vigorous homegrown evangelical Christianity as the spiritual and social anchor of their territorial mercantile culture in diaspora. These merchants have actively engaged in producing religious activities and events that link China to Europe and in resacralizing secular real estate and attaching evangelistic meanings to Europe's historic urban spaces. For rural‐originated migrants who embrace a global hierarchy of places, the evangelical discursive distinction between the mundane and the transcendent spheres finds expression in their perceived opposition between the peripheral local and the modern global centre in the global market economy.

From culinary modernism to culinary cosmopolitanism: the changing topography of Beijing’s transnational foodscape

ABSTRACT In the early 1990s, foreign foods were reintroduced into the everyday life of ordinary people in Beijing. As the city ascends to the top on the global hierarchy of urban places, its transnational food practices have evolved drastically. Proposing “co-bricolage” as a useful framework to rethink transnational culture, this article examines the changing modality of trans-local foodways in Beijing from the 1990s to the 2010s, and identifies a transition from culinary modernism to culinary cosmopolitanism. Whereas in the 1990s the foreign-local relations were perceived through a structural contrast between modernity and lack thereof, cosmopolitanism of the 2010s is underpinned by an eclectic disposition that considers the global and the local to be affinal and combinatory. The discussion demonstrates the potential of “co-bricolage” to historicize the global-local processes move beyond the dialectical model for understanding trans-local connections and dynamics.

Provocative landscapes: a study of everyday cultural landscapes at the outskirts of agglomerations

The paper describes research principles and preliminary results of collaborative interdisciplinary research project aimed at the study of everyday cultural landscapes on the periphery of the Yekaterinburg and Tyumen urban agglomerations. The research design of the project implies a paradigm shift from expert reading of the landscapes to communicative learning of the environment, from the perception of the territories in question as resource reservoirs to their exploration as a domain of affordances providing opportunities for endogenous eco-nomic development. In 2020, an expedition worked in the villages of Tobolsk Zabolotye, in the cities of Irbit and Polevskoy of Sverdlovsk Oblast, and in the village of Belozerskoye of Kurgan Oblast. The cases and places deemed perspective in view of the application of the research method were characterized. This paper mainly pro-vides an overview of the methodological principles that underpin our ongoing study, which should be considered only as an outline of the preliminary results of the first year of field work. The main source of the theoretical inspi-ration for the project design was the idea of affordances, coined by the American psychologist James J. Gibson, who studied the problems of perception. The main methodological objective of the project is to apply the theory of affordances to the field study of strategies for everyday landscape choice. In the 2020 field season, the design of the project, envisaging comparative perspective and increased mobility of researchers, was significantly influ-enced by the method of traveling interview. While working in Tobolsk Zabolotye, we followed everyday patterns of mobility, conducting interviews along the way, discussing with the respondents the hierarchy of places and territo-ries, criteria for identifying vernacular regions, capacity of communication channels, modes of the mobility and its limitations. Concurrently, we were gaining the experience of non-discursive, embodied in materiality and corpore-ality, movement and recording local narratives of identity.

Hierarchy profiling: How and why a job's perceived impact on inequality affects racial hiring evaluations

Prior work suggests that high-status group members are favored for hierarchy-maintaining roles, while low-status group members are favored for hierarchy-attenuating ones—but the mechanisms driving this phenomenon are largely unknown. The current work examines this phenomenon in the domain of race, testing three potential mechanisms: role status, representativeness, and hierarchy profiling. According to a role status account, hierarchy-maintaining roles are seen as higher-status than hierarchy-attenuating ones, driving effects. A representativeness account suggests that hierarchy-maintaining roles are seen as including more White (or fewer minority) job-holders than hierarchy-attenuating ones, driving effects. Finally, a hierarchy profiling account suggests that evaluators see the typical hire for hierarchy-maintaining roles as more conservative (or less liberal), driving effects. In three studies, White evaluators rated a White male applicant a better fit for a hierarchy-maintaining role (e.g., CEO of a hedge fund) than a hierarchy-attenuating one (e.g., CEO of a nonprofit). There was, however, no impact of a role's perceived impact on inequality on ratings of Black male or Latino applicant fit (Studies 1–3). This effect persisted regardless of role status (Study 2), negating a role status account. However, a final study supported representativeness and hierarchy profiling accounts. White evaluators rated the typical hire for a hierarchy-maintaining role as more White and conservative, mediating ratings of White applicant fit (Study 3). Three supplemental studies replicated all results. Findings reveal the mechanisms that can hold social hierarchy in place, keeping high-status group members in hierarchy-maintaining roles and low-status group members in hierarchy-attenuating ones.

Ill-neoliberalism

In a recent contribution Hendrikse (2018) has coined the concept of neo-illiberalism to signify mainstreaming of illiberal doctrines among neoliberal elites, thereby signifying a ‘mutation and restoration of transatlantic neoliberalism’. After a critical appraisal of his concept, this contribution argues that it is too early to claim that neoliberalism is mutated and suggests that the present conjuncture can better be termed ill-neoliberal instead. Following numerous scholars who have argued that we have arrived at an interregnum, I argue, also by applying Gramscian framework, that neoliberalism is increasingly malfunctioning, ‘ill’ or even dying, while something new is yet to be born. Yet in contrast to those who apply a Gramscian approach, I do not regard the rise of Trump or the European far right as ‘morbid symptoms’, but as attempted remedies (or authoritarian restorations) for neoliberalism. Neoliberal elites, somewhat reluctantly, welcome illiberal actors and doctrines in an effort to keep existing hierarchies in place or even restore old ones, now by even more authoritarian means. This transformation in the transatlantic neoliberal heartlands towards more illiberal regimes differs, then, from the emerging (and already) illiberal or authoritarian world powers such as China. If we were to accept the validity of the term ‘neo-illiberalism’ this should be exclusively applied to those regimes that are consistently illiberal, but increasingly rely on an ever-growing private economy (cf. Aiyar. 2016). Yet, whether such powers will be able to install a new (global) order depends foremost on the ability of the transatlantic heartlands to overcome neoliberalism. The article therefore concludes by pointing at some outlooks for the renewal and further contestation of an increasingly malfunctioning neoliberalism.

The Future of Latin American and Caribbean Cities: Urban Bias and Political Fragments in Place

In this chapter I provide some reflections on the fragmentation of Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) urban landscapes and some speculations about the future of urban bias and inequalities in the decades to come. Latin American and Caribbean societies will no longer be divided according to the classic urban/rural, industrial/agricultural, worker/peasant, capital city/periphery set of cross-cutting cleavages, but through their fragmentation within and between cities, and a hierarchy of place within urban spaces. Despite the colonial legacy a “triumph” of middle-sized mestizo cities inherited from the colonial era, non-urban areas that are predominantly indigenous will remain increasingly critical to the planetary future. Non-urban areas will be critical due to the interaction of their original peoples with the remaining “wild” spaces in the hemisphere. Rainforests, deserts, and mountains – that up till now had remained relatively untouched by human activity–, will need to be preserved as global public goods, reservoirs of biodiversity, carbon sequestration, climate, and hydrologic regulation. The safekeepers of those natural resources will most likely have to be indigenous and Afro-descendant communities that live in the fringes that surround those wild areas. Indigenous communities will hence remain the custodians, safekeepers and buffers that may prevent cities from overtaking these precious remaining natural environments.

From omniscient narrator to involved participants: Places and spaces “activated” in the EHEC O104:H4 crisis 2011

Crisis management is often conceived from the position of an omniscient narrator, albeit the general consensus that crises are subjectively interpreted and experienced. The paper makes an analytical attempt to de‐homogenize the notion of crisis. We argue that the perception of crises differs and present a spatial perspective on crisis to foreground the positionality of different actor groups. By referring to the EHEC outbreak 2011 in Germany, we explore two spatial configurations that seem to be of particular relevance: territories embedded in a nested hierarchy and topologies of interconnected places. State authorities think and act strongly in terms of territorial borders and along sectoral boundaries. From their point of view, the crisis tends to be threatening due to its “transboundary" character. Medical experts, in contrast, coped with the crisis in trans‐local networks of colleagues. For this group, the crisis was also an opportunity to substantially enhance professional knowledge.

Distancing from a stigmatized social identity: State of the art and future research agenda on self‐group distancing

AbstractDespite equal rights, minority groups such as ethnic minorities, LGBTQ + people, and people with mental or physical disabilities face discrimination on a day‐to‐day basis in subtle and hard‐to‐recognize forms. As discrimination slips beneath the surface, it becomes difficult to fight the stigma using collective social identity coping mechanisms. Instead, individual mobility responses such as distancing the self from the stigmatized identity (“self‐group distancing”) become more viable as a way to improve one's individual standing. In this overview of the state of the art, we take a social identity lens to reflect on the current empirical knowledge base on self‐group distancing as a coping mechanism and provide a framework on what self‐group distancing is; when, where and why self‐group distancing likely occurs; and what its consequences are at the individual and the collective level. The contributions in this special issue provide novel insights into how these processes unfold, and serve as a basis to set a future research agenda, for example on what can be done to prevent self‐group distancing (i.e., interventions). Together, the insights highlight that while self‐group distancing may seem effective to (strategically and temporarily) alleviate discomfort or to improve one's own position, on a broader collective level and over time self‐group distancing tends to keep the current unequal social hierarchy in place.

Contemporary echoes of segregationist policy: Spatial marking and the persistence of inequality

The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), established in the US during the Great Depression to provide relief to a failing housing market, had a lasting effect through institutionalising the segregationist practice of denying mortgages to communities of colour. Over subsequent decades, ‘redlining’ funnelled billions of US dollars away from minority neighbourhoods and shaped segregation patterns – constituting perhaps the most influential example of institutional intervention in the hierarchy of places. This history of racialised exclusion via the process of ‘spatial marking’ is reflected in contemporary housing inequality, which remains one of the most severe sites of racial stratification. This article combines newly-digitised archival data with data describing recent mortgage outcomes to investigate the role of institutional classification of place in the persistence of housing finance inequality. I show that borrowers in the 21st century were at a severe disadvantage when pursuing mortgages in neighbourhoods redlined by HOLC appraisers in the early 20th century. Such applicants were more likely to be denied loans and to receive subprime loans net of measures of selection and ecological disadvantage. This article shows that the geographical patterns of exclusion and exploitation are remarkably stable, and highlights the role of persistent institutional marginalisation in replicating racial and spatial inequalities.

Self-sacrifice in Train to Busan (2016)

In order to recognize and calibrate the two parts to its structure, self-sacrifice in zombie cinema will be examined in terms of survival-based and emotion-based motivational frameworks. The interaction of these frameworks will be unpacked and their properties, differences and similarities will be appraised and questioned. Examinations of this kind require three different analytical methods that therefore determine the structure of this article. The first section will outline how the survival and emotional-based motivational frameworks exist within the same sequence in Train to Busan (2016). The implications of this will be addressed in relation to the organization of modern neo-liberalism and what Paul Verhaeghe coins the neoliberal meritocracy. The second section examines the temporal projections of the characters in the sequence (specifically how the sequence depicts a character’s understanding of the future and how their present situation fits into that). These projections are cross-referenced with the specific example of the neo-liberal South Korean economic climate to add credence to the proposition that the need (or fetishization) of survival is a neo-liberal symptom and a hangover from the pressures that are ceaselessly exerted to keep its hierarchies in place. The final section of this article examines abjection and identity in relation to the chosen sequence in Train to Busan. It explores the generation of identity in relation to self-sacrifice and concludes that self-sacrifice is a necessary enforcer of a specifically neo-liberal competition.

Pili‘Oha/Kinship: (Re)Imagining Perceptions of Nature and More-Than-Human Relationality

This essay draws from a larger ethnographic study looking at the complex contextuality of biodiversity conservation in Hawaii. This article uses vignettes to communicate its focus. These vignettes are autoethnographic by nature, but are pushed further through the use of diffractive methodology (Barad) to include social-media visuals, multispecies encounters, and Native Hawaiian (kanaka maoli) perspectives. Through my ontological and methodological approach, I seek to challenge normative discourses on human exceptionalism, nature-culture dichotomies, and the manner in which industrialized societies place hierarchies on species and matter, as well as how these conversations might impact conservation. In this article, and through these vignettes, I explore what it means to be native and how my own positionality situates studying the social and cultural milieu of conservation issues in Hawaii.

Island as a memorial site in the sacral landscape of the Arctic regions of the Russian North

Sacral localities along with the works (monuments) of hierotopic art intrinsic to them hold the most prominent positions in the hierarchy of landmark places and constitute the backbone of establishment (elaboration) of the remembrance landscapes for local and ethnic communities in the Arctic Regions of the Russian North. Sacral topoi are the focal points for storage and transfer of the ultimate, comprehensive and innermost knowledge (memory) of all aspects and modalities of the universe constitution. Fundamental memorability of a sacred place is determined by its appeal to metaphysics, to the origins and the arche, the principles and foundations of existence, as well as by its commitment to the supertemporal rhythms of remembering the eternal (eternal memory represented in the chronotope of the myth of eternal return). The system of sacral places serving as the sacred framework of the remembrance landscape for the Arctic peoples places special emphasis to the topos of the island which became the protosymbol of the Russian civilization due to its powerful numinous potential and semiotic status. This research was conducted in reliance upon folklore and ethnographic materials as well as ecclesiastical and historical sources revealing the semiotics and commemorative generating potential of the island developmental site in the sacral landscape of the Russian North Arctic regions. Studying the island topos as a place of remembrance in the sacral landscape of the Arctic territories and aquatic areas allows for the conclusion that all cult sites and sanctuaries of the northern indigenous peoples (the Sami, the Nenets and the Vepsians), as well as all the monuments of the orthodox hierotopy specific for the island territories of the Russian North, manifest themselves as eternal keepers of enduring values, commandments and implications of human existence in the sacred space of the high latitudes.

City Limits

This essay explores the idea of city limits, real and metaphorical walls, and boundaries raised within and around the urban environment. The focus is on American urban epicentres, and by analysing two literary works, John Fante’s Los Angeles novel Ask the Dust and Lorraine Hansberry’s Chicago play A Raisin in the Sun, it interrogates what form the walls within those spaces might take, why they are raised, and what effects they have on the city’s inhabitants – especially the marginalised groups who tend to be either excluded, restricted or enclosed by them. In this essay, I suggest that boundaries are created or enforced as a result of a fear of loss of space and power within the urban environment which leads to the consistent marginalisation of the Other as exhibited in both texts. In other words, the essay will demonstrate that the physical and fiscal boundaries represented in the novel and play are masking a more complex set of boundaries of racial exclusion and hierarchies in place within the American urban space.