Lower Class Neighborhoods Research Articles

Perceived severity and Barriers to Health Promotion of Male addicts in Early Recovery from Drug Use Disorder

Background: Drug addiction remains a significant public health issue globally, with substantial personal and societal impacts. Effective treatment and health promotion behaviors are crucial for recovery. Specific Background: In Iraq, the context of addiction treatment and the factors influencing health promotion behaviors among male addicts are underexplored. Knowledge Gap: There is limited understanding of the perceived severity and barriers to health promotion behaviors among male addicts in drug addiction centers in Iraq. Aims: Aims to assess the perceived severity and barriers to health promotion behavior among male addicts with a drug use disorder. Methods: A descriptive study design was utilized, with a convenience sample of 100 male individuals aged 15 to 45 from the Al-Ataa Hospital for Addiction and Psychological Rehabilitation. Data were collected via a questionnaire comprising socio-demographic characteristics and scales measuring beliefs regarding addiction. Cronbach's alpha for the perceived barriers and severity scales were 0.789 and 0.881, respectively. Results: The average participant age was 28 years, with 49% single, 71% living in lower-class neighborhoods, and 72% voluntary admissions. A significant relationship was found between educational level and health beliefs (p=0.00). The study revealed a high-level assessment of perceived severity and a moderate-level assessment of perceived barriers. Novelty: This study highlights the significant impact of educational level on health beliefs among male addicts, a relatively unexplored area in the region. Implications: The findings suggest that increasing awareness among patients and their families, establishing specialized hospitals, developing targeted policies, and leveraging media can enhance addiction treatment. This research underscores the need for comprehensive approaches involving various stakeholders to address drug addiction effectively. Highlights: High Perceived Severity: Addicts show high severity awareness. Education Impact: Significant link between education and health beliefs. Policy Recommendations: Establish specialized hospitals, targeted policies, media involvement. Keywords: drug addiction, health promotion, perceived barriers, perceived severity, Iraq

Cultural placemaking in the black suburbs of the tourist city

ABSTRACT This article examines how non-institutional(ized) street art tours and DIY parties in two racialized, lower-class neighborhoods in the outskirts of Lisbon generate different results. In the neighborhood of Quinta do Mocho, these street art tours and DIY parties arise as playfulness and multicultural experiences of opening up the communities to local white middle-class visitors and tourists. In the neighborhood of Cova da Moura, these actions culminate in a cultural festival that celebrates African and Afro-diasporic cultures, promoting the visibility of the talented artists of the neighborhood. In both cases, positive representations about these territories are produced, linked to a strengthening of the sense of belonging to Quinta do Mocho’s and Cova de Moura’s communities. The article concludes by suggesting that non-institutional(ized) street art tours and DIY parties arise as pioneering actions toward challenging and decolonizing urban thinking on contemporary Lisbon.

Social mix with a twist: Exploring new ways to alleviate pressure on stigmatized lower-class neighbourhoods

Social mix policy normally leads to the gentrification of poor neighbourhoods, which is neither beneficial for their original residents nor urban diversity. Conversely, in search of a possible way to ease mounting pressure on stigmatized neighbourhoods the article aims to uncover the middle class's attitude towards the construction of buildings with cheap rentals, a precondition of social mix policy. To this end, an innovative digital survey was conducted in 2020 in two recently developed inner-city neighbourhoods in the mid-sized Swedish city of Västerås. First, drawing on earlier research, our data confirms that there is a statistically significant negative correlation between young middle-class families, on the one hand, and their willingness to share “their own backyard” with presumptive low-income newcomers, on the other. Second, the analysis brings to the fore the fact that attitudes to social mixing are not just dependent on gender, but even on why one wants to move. Third, the predominance of an apparent elitist conception of housing is challenged by female and older residents who seek diversity. In sum, the findings imply that socially mixing certain kinds of middle-class neighbourhoods is possible if politicians fulfil three preconditions.

The Eager Conformist, the Well-Rounded Collaborator, and the Independent Innovator: A Qualitative Exploration of Teachers’ Conceptions of the Ideal Student, the Hidden Curriculum, and Social Class

ABSTRACT This paper explores teachers’ conceptions of the ideal student, aspects of the hidden curriculum, and how each varies by neighborhood-level social class. I used a thematic analysis to analyze 30 semi-structured interviews with public elementary school teachers in the United States. Emergent themes indicate the creation of archetypes regarding the ideal student, their connection to social class, and their effect on the hidden curriculum. Most notably, teachers teaching in lower-class neighborhoods idealized the eager conformist; teachers teaching in middle-class neighborhoods idealized the well-rounded collaborator; and teachers teaching in upper-class neighborhoods idealized the independent innovator. Findings suggest that teachers’ conceptions of the ideal student reflect the social conditions of the neighborhood where they teach, which impacts aspects of their teaching pedagogy and classroom-management techniques.

The “NEET” category from the perspective of inequalities: toward a typology of school-to-work transitions among youth from lower class neighborhoods in the Brussels region (Belgium)

ABSTRACT This paper proposes a critical analysis of the NEET category. We argue that it is both too focused on individual responsibility and too homogenizing to enable the development of public policies and measures capable of responding to the needs of the most excluded youth. We respond to these needs using a qualitative approach that has allowed us to account for the diversity of young people, especially the most marginalized, living in lower-class neighborhoods of the Brussels region. Our approach generates a NEET/non-NEET typology that helps deconstruct NEET as a statistical category by identifying social situations that are both diverse and temporary. This typology challenges the tendency to reify young people and to hold them responsible for their own circumstances. Furthermore, our typology shows how NEET situations result from trajectories shaped by structural dynamics as well as relations and processes of inequality. These may stem from social class, experiences of migration, or the intersection of the two, and inevitably exercise an effect on both school and job market environments.

Dissenting poses

In the spring of 2014, an unprecedented wave of police raids swept over every lower-class (sha‘abi) neighborhood across Morocco. Dubbed “Operation Tcharmil,” the raids targeted young, lower-class men that matched viral online images in which track-suit-wearing teens boastfully displayed status objects and white weapons. Drawing on the theoretical apparatus of the “affective turn,” in this article I unpack the structural and historical factors that shaped both popular reactions and policing actions toward the sudden, online visibility of a politically and economically disenfranchised group. I situate this episode within current debates about the entanglement of neoliberal disciplinary regimes and the reproduction of particular social orders, and argue that attention to such outbursts can help us revitalize and rethink existing notions of class.

Human movement patterns of different racial-ethnic and economic groups in U.S. top 50 populated cities: What can social media tell us about isolation?

ABSTRACT Many studies have proven that human movement patterns are strongly impacted by individual socioeconomic and demographic background. While many efforts have been made on exploring the influences of age and gender on movement patterns using social media, this study aims to analyse and compare the movement patterns among different racial-ethnic and economic groups using social media (i.e. geotagged tweets) from the U.S. top 50 populated cities. Results show that there are significant differences in number of activity zones and median travel distance across cities and demographic groups, and that power-laws tend to be captured in both spatial and demographic aspects. Additionally, the analysis of outbound-city travels demonstrates that some cities have slightly stronger interaction with others, and that economically disadvantaged populations and racial-ethnic minorities are more restricted in long distance travels, indicating that their spatial mobility is more limited to the local scale. Lastly, an economically-segregated movement pattern is discovered – upper-class neighbourhoods are mostly visited by the upper-class, while lower-class neighbourhoods are mainly accessed by the lower-class – but some racial-ethnic groups can diversify this segregated pattern in the local scale.

"The Post-Civil Rights Coming-of-Age Narrative in Contemporary African American Literature"

For black youth in contemporary America, coming of age is fraught not only due to the struggles they already face as ethnic minorities, but the pressure that arises from living in a post-Civil Rights Movement era, where the advancements made during the mid-20th century are not always reflected in their daily reality. In this article, three contemporary novels involving teenage African-American protagonists (Caucasia, The White Boy Shuffle, and The Hate U Give) will be compared and examined, with a focus on the ways in which they explore the conflicts arising from living in a Post-Civil Rights era and how African-American teenagers react to the complications of racism and protest in different ways. In Caucasia, Birdie’s biracial identity and the societies she lives in force her to constantly choose one race or the other, highlighting the focus on racial identification in the Post-Civil Rights generation. Gunnar Kaufman’s experiences in The White Boy Shuffle illustrate the ways that both blackness and whiteness are performed and contrasted against one another, particularly through the novel’s satirical tone and focus on popular culture. Angie Thomas’ depiction of the gulf between lower-class black communities and upper-class white neighborhoods in The Hate U Give represent the issues that come with traversing both communities, resulting in a novel that argues for the enrichment of black communities and for social progress rather than worrying about mainstream white opinions on what they should do. While the novels all tackle different subjects in different fashions, they all emphasize the ways that the Civil Rights Movement impacted America and where we can go forward from here.

Preschool children's indoor and outdoor playground HSV color preferences

AbstractProper use of colors, as an essential element of children's playground, can result in a more appropriate environment for children. Therefore, the current study evaluates the impact of Hue, Saturation, and Value (HSV) colors on preschool children's preferences at the ages of 5 and 6. 16 color palettes and 2 playground scenes were presented to children in order to identify their preferences. Results demonstrated that cool colors with a Saturation of 75 and a Value of 75 for indoor playground and warm colors with a Saturation of 75 and a Value of 50 for outdoor playground were the most preferred colors. Moreover, to investigate the impact of socioeconomic status on children's environmental color preferences, Mann‐Whitney U test was conducted and the results revealed a significant difference between the Value preference of children living in the lower class and upper class neighborhoods. However, no significant differences were observed in terms of HSV preferences between boys and girls and also between children at the ages of 5 and 6.

Salih Can Aç?ksöz, Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey

Reviewed by: Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey by Salih Can Açıksöz Sertac K. Sen Salih Can Açıksöz. Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. 272 pp. Paper, $29.95. ISBN: 978-0520305304. I watch as a kid from the rear window of our car a part of Istanbul I never knew existed, as my father drives the family through a lower-class neighborhood one weekend, at the peak times of the Kurdish conflict in the mid-1990s. As our car struggles uphill and downhill along the edges of the Aydos Mountain, I ask my father, then an officer serving in the military judiciary, where we are going. He curtly replies that he has to see an acquaintance, whom I later learn from my mother is an ex-conscript who was injured during his service in the Southeast, the primary geography of war and political violence in Turkey. Our car comes to a stop, and my father disappears beyond the wooden door of a small hut with a puffing chimney. Left wondering what and who lies beyond the wooden door, we console ourselves with the tandir bread neighborhood women conjure from a mysterious fireplace nearby. A product of fieldwork over twenty-nine months, Sacrificial Limbs is a riveting multi-sited ethnography that takes us beyond the proverbial wooden door, bringing into view the lives of disabled veterans—gazis—who were injured while fighting as mandatory conscripts in Turkey's protracted and ongoing war against the PKK. Meeting the disabled veterans in a gray zone where easy distinctions between victimhood and perpetration collapse under the weight of a drawn-out war that underlies the very social fabric we all weave and are caught up in, Açıksöz highlights the everyday lives of disabled veterans with great [End Page 275] ethnographic thickness, theoretical command, and attention to the gendered, classed, political, and moral double binds they involve. As Açıksöz navigates across "the multiple physical, mediatized, and virtual spaces in which disabled veterans [are] embodied, represented, and governed" (p. xv), he steers clear from representing the disabled veterans of the Kurdish conflict either as conduit perpetrators of sovereign violence or as ill-fated victims of war. Yet, Açıksöz also feigns no pretense of occupying a "neutral ethnographic position" (p. xxiii), for he stands opposed to his disabled veteran interlocutors along the political spectrum. Indeed, this generative tension between the author and his subjects marks one of the book's chief strengths, because rarely in the ethnographic literature on Turkey do we see an analytical engagement based on extensive participant observation with populations whose political allegiances and practices may seem unpalatable, if not openly hostile, to our political sensibilities and lifeworlds. The book traces the lives of disabled veterans from their pre-injury soldiering experiences to their post-injury coalescing around a collective gazi identity and subsequent politicization, often along ultranationalist lines. Açıksöz starts with the most central facet of war: that war makes and unmakes bodies. He shows the military's attempts at inculcating in soldiers "a new embodiment and sensorium" (p. 26), in line with the exigencies of counterinsurgency. While detailing the cultivation of a new soldier body and sensorium for fighting on the mountains, Açıksöz refrains from treating the body as a mere repository of physical capacities or as a flat surface of human agency and experience. Instead, the book fleshes out the soldier's body as a living, breathing, hurting, and a potentially hurtful entity that is physically and sensorially malleable, technologically mediated, and affectively infused, often brewing with unruly attachments from war experiences on the mountains that follow people through their post-injury lives, structuring their desires and dispositions. Then, Açıksöz moves to the post-injury lives of his interlocutors, detailing the ways that their embodied experiences as disabled veterans stand at the intersection of gender, sexuality, and class in a profoundly ableist society. His analysis hinges on a key diagnosis that gives disabled veteran lives in Turkey their distinctive character: That the heteropatriarchial contract binding the male citizenry to the state...

Death Is All around Us: Corpses, Chaos, and Public Health in Porfirian Mexico City

Death Is All around Us: Corpses, Chaos, and Public Health in Porfirian Mexico City

Gods, Gurus, Prophets and the Poor: Exploring Informal, Interfaith Exchanges among Working Class Female Workers in an Indian City

This article revolves around the narratives of Sabita (Muslim), Radha (Hindu) and Sharleen (Christian), migrant women in their mid-forties, who have been working as maids, cooks and cleaners in middle-class housing colonies in Kolkata, a city in eastern India. Informal understandings of gendered oppressions across religious traditions often dominate the conversations of the three working-class women. Like many labourers from slums and lower-class neighbourhoods, they meet and debate religious concerns in informal ‘resting places’ (under a tree, on a park bench, at a tea stall, on a train, at a corner of a railway platform). These anonymous spaces are usually devoid of religious symbols, as well as any moral surveillance of women’s colloquial abuse of male dominance in society. I show how the anecdotes of struggle, culled across multiple religious practices, intersect with the shared existential realities of these urban workers. They temporarily empower female members of the informal workforce in the city, to create loosely defined gendered solidarities in the face of patriarchal authority, and reflect on daily discrimination against economically marginalised migrant women. I argue that these fleeting urban rituals underline the more vital role of (what I describe as) poor people’s ‘casual philosophies’, in enhancing empathy and dialogue between communities that are characterised by political tensions in India.

Weaponizing Quietness: Sound Bombs and the Racialization of Noise

This paper discusses the role of design and material practices on the weaponization of quietness through the deployment of sound bombs by the Military Police of São Paulo, Brazil. Probing the contradiction of using a device that produces loudness to enforce silence laws, I offer an account of how designed artifacts and techniques can be instrumentalized by the State for the policing of racialized bodies and their sonic and musical practices. These artifacts and techniques create and reproduce mechanisms that produce both physical and social distance between bodies perceived to be “loud” and their silence-enforcing counterpart (i.e. the police). This extends the reach and scope of the segregation of (auditory) space with techniques besides architecture and urban planning alone. I begin with an analysis of a few, violent strategies employed by the Military Police to enforce silence laws in lower-class neighborhoods in the city, as depicted in a filmed raid edited and posted on their own social media channels. I then read these practices through the history of the so-called “stun grenade,” or sound bomb, and its use in both military and civilian contexts. Lastly, I examine a semi-fictional proposition found in Adirley Queirós’ 2015 film Branco Sai, Preto Fica (White Out, Black In) for disrupting the enforcement of silence, which in turn proposes a decolonizing shift in the perception of loudness and noise vis-à-vis racialized bodies.

Community-Based Organizations Motivated by Religious Ideology as A Driving Force Behind Shaping Urban Governance: The Israeli Case

ABSTRACTThis study analyzes and highlights the political culture of community-based organizations (CBOs) as a powerful mechanism that shapes a certain mode of urban governance. The empirical section demonstrates this by presenting and analyzing a case study of the urban coalitions created by the Israeli government and various CBOs engaged in social activity on behalf of lower-class neighborhoods and towns, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Although at first sight such a bi-partnership reflects a common universal mode of governance, findings of political cultural analysis reveal a unique pattern in which the civic body is operated and energized by a religious missionary and paternalistic base, driven by highly passionate and motivated ideological activists, which clearly influences the nature of urban governance (the governance logic, strategy and the services given to community). These findings shed a critical light on theoretical approaches and frameworks that exclude the humanistic base of knowledge. The study outlines a better way of dealing with the complicated relationship between politics, religion, culture, and geography.

Inequality in the Los Angeles Unified School: Ethics and Public Responsibility

This research paper defines the problems facing Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The district does not address the concerns of lower-class students, and as a result their education system is inadequate. It is urgent for people to recognize the assistance that the district and each of its schools can provide in order to abet the process of educating children from lower-class neighborhoods. This paper explains the situation existing in LAUSD, examines different alternatives to improve education for lower-class students, and suggests a course of action.

Ciudad de México, quince años de desarrollo urbano intensivo: la gentrificación percibida

Fifteen years of intensive urban development have given rise to exclusive and exclusionary urban landscapes in the central areas of Mexico City. Obsolete industrial districts, derelict urban land and relatively abandoned and well-connected middle and lower-class neighborhoods –which have been regarded by authorities as “run-down areas” – are some of the areas that have benefited the most from public and private investment. This paper explores the perception of local residents, caputured in an extensive survey conducted with more than 3,000 inhabitants in August 2014 from 10 central areas, about the transformation and gentrification of their neighbourhoods –which have been subject to real estate pressure. This research: a) describes the theoretical references and methodological strategies developed throughout the research, b) analyzes the intensive urban development and the increase in investment, presence of international real estate firms and public megaprojects; and c) studies the perception of dwellers about the transformation and gentrification of neighborhoods after a decade and a half of “sustainable” urban development, which has led to the reinforcement of historical socio-spatial inequality in central urban areas and the transformation of the urban and social landscape as the result of the emergence of exclusive central neighborhoods.

Culture as a mediator of gene-environment interaction: Cultural consonance, childhood adversity, a 2A serotonin receptor polymorphism, and depression in urban Brazil

Research on gene-environment interaction was facilitated by breakthroughs in molecular biology in the late 20th century, especially in the study of mental health. There is a reliable interaction between candidate genes for depression and childhood adversity in relation to mental health outcomes. The aim of this paper is to explore the role of culture in this process in an urban community in Brazil. The specific cultural factor examined is cultural consonance, or the degree to which individuals are able to successfully incorporate salient cultural models into their own beliefs and behaviors. It was hypothesized that cultural consonance in family life would mediate the interaction of genotype and childhood adversity. In a study of 402 adult Brazilians from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, conducted from 2011 to 2014, the interaction of reported childhood adversity and a polymorphism in the 2A serotonin receptor was associated with higher depressive symptoms. Further analysis showed that the gene-environment interaction was mediated by cultural consonance in family life, and that these effects were more pronounced in lower social class neighborhoods. The findings reinforce the role of the serotonergic system in the regulation of stress response and learning and memory, and how these processes in turn interact with environmental events and circumstances. Furthermore, these results suggest that gene-environment interaction models should incorporate a wider range of environmental experience and more complex pathways to better understand how genes and the environment combine to influence mental health outcomes.

La representación discursiva del desplazamiento de la lengua maya en la colonia San Marcos Nocoh, Mérida

El objetivo de este trabajo es investigar las representaciones discursivas sobre el desplazamiento o mantenimiento del maya yucateco de mayahablantes bilingües en español de un barrio de clase baja de Mérida,Yucatán. Esta investigación es relevante a la luz de cambios positivos recientes en las actitudes hacia esta lengua indígena (Sima Lozano et al. 2014). Se investigó tanto la representación de la transmisión a los descendientes como la del uso del maya yucateco para funciones cotidianas. Para ello, se diseñó un estudio cualitativo, aplicando un cuestionario sociolingüístico. Se encontró que, si bien los hablantes reportan usar el maya yucateco para un gran número de funciones, en casi todas ellas se reporta una tendencia clara: más hablantes prefieren usar el español para realizarlas y menos hablantes prefieren el maya yucateco o la alternancia de códigos. Además, los informantes reportan que la transmisión intergeneracional es muy poco frecuente hacia los hijos e inexistente hacia los nietos.

“Battlers” and Their Homes: About Self-Production of Residences Made by the Brazilian New Middle Class

The article presents preliminary results and qualitative analysis obtained from the doctoral research provisory entitled “How do Brazilian ‘battlers’ reside?”, which is in progress at the Institute for European Urban Studies, Bauhaus University Weimar. It critically discusses the contradictions of the production of residences in Brazil made by an emerging social group, lately called the Brazilian new middle class. For the last ten years, a number of government policies have provoked a general improvement of the purchasing power of the poor. Between those who completely depend on the government to survive and the upper middle class, there is a wide (about 100 million people) and economically stable lower middle group, which has found its own ways of dealing with its demand for housing. The conventional models of planning, building and buying are not suitable for their technical, financial and personal needs. Therefore, they are concurrently planners, constructors and residents, building and renovating their own properties themselves, but still with very limited education and technical knowledge and restricted access to good building materials and constructive elements, formal technicians, architects or engineers. On the one hand, the result is an informal and more or less autonomous self-production, with all sorts of technical problems and very interesting and creative spatial solutions to everyday domestic situations. On the other hand, the repercussions for urban space are questionable: although basic infrastructure conditions have improved, building densities are high and green areas are few. Lower middle class neighbourhoods present a restricted collective everyday life. They look like storage spaces for manpower; people who live to work in order to be able to consume—and build—what they could not before. One question is, to what extent the latest economic rise of Brazil has really resulted in social development for lower middle income families in the private sphere regarding their residences, and in the collective sphere, regarding the neighbourhoods they inhabit and the urban space in general.

A família e a maternidade como referências para pensar a política

Supondo que a divisão sexual do trabalho seja determinante de identidades de gênero e de perspectivas sociais distintas, as quais têm impactos políticos, a pesquisa de que trata este artigo teve por objetivo captar representações sobre gênero e política por meio de entrevistas qualitativas com mulheres e homens residentes em bairros de classe média e popular no Distrito Federal. A importância da socialização de gênero para o entendimento de como se articulam os discursos políticos fica evidenciada pela forma como a casa e a política se inter-relacionam, isto é, como papéis e valores familiares/morais são usados para pensar a política. As concepções que respaldam a divisão sexual do trabalho não constituem guias apenas para relações familiares, mas para o entendimento de todo o mundo social. A participação da mulher na política é vista comumente na forma de estereótipos, relacionados a uma suposta superioridade moral decorrente da maternidade.