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Jason Coats

The civility of social capital - 0 views

www.sciencedirect.com/...S0363811113000052

publicrelations socialcapital publicsphere trust

shared by Jason Coats on 26 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • Jason Coats on 26 Sep 14
     
    Scholars have analyzed public relations' role in democracy via proxy concepts like the public sphere and civil society. However, some have critiqued the public sphere on grounds of equal access and portrayed civil society as a guise for first-world imperialism. These critiques have implications for the role of public relations in the public sphere and civil society. This article suggests the normative role of public relations in democracy is best perceived as creating the social capital that facilitates access to spheres of public discussion and in maintaining relationships among those organizations that check state power. To that end, the paper argues that social capital does much to advance public relations theory and prescribe the role of public relations in democracy. Several implications for public relations from a social capital perspective are offered, including the creation of generalized societal trust, the building of cross-cutting or "weak" ties, the engagement of media on behalf of subaltern counterpublics, and the (re)creation of community or a fully functioning society.
kharris216

The Political Power of Social Media | Foreign Affairs - 0 views

www.foreignaffairs.com/...olitical-power-of-social-media

social media technology politics change social media skepticism

shared by kharris216 on 31 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • kharris216 on 31 Oct 14
     
    On January 17, 2001, during the impeachment trial of Philippine President Joseph Estrada, loyalists in the Philippine Congress voted to set aside key evidence against him.
courtmulligan12

Holmes and Smith: Intergroup dynamics of extra-legal police aggression - 1 views

www.sciencedirect.com/...S1359178912000286

policebrutality police HUDS policeaggression

shared by courtmulligan12 on 09 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • extra-legally, as informal means of coercive control over those perceived as threats to police authority or personal safety
  • Nowhere is that possibility more apparent than in the treatment of racial and ethnic minorities in disadvantaged locales
  • most commonly (although not exclusively) in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods
  • ...69 more annotations...
  • Some explanations of the behavior identify individual differences among police officers or organizational differences among police departments as primary causal factors, approaches that generally lack empirical support
  • situational
  • exigencies, such as the race and demeanor of citizens, may determine the use of extra-legal police aggression.
  • conflicts of interest
  • tereotyping
  • egregation and discrimination
  • hypothesis that the police employ formal legal authority less vigorously in disadvantaged areas, Kane (2002) argued that, in the socially disorganized neighborhoods where lax enforcement occurs, various forms of police misconduct may become normalized by officers who encounter conflict with citizens and challenges to their legitimacy
  • social psychology of intergroup relations to develop a theory of the underlying causes and ecological variations in the use of various types of extra-legal police aggression.
  • Profanity and racial slurs, racially motivated stops and searches, and excessive physical force would generally constitute violations.
  • uch as police brutality and excessive force, are often used to describe the phenomena under consideration, but these concepts generally refer only to physical force
  • extra-legal police aggression is preferable for several related reasons.
  • ggression
  • any form of behavior that is intended to injure someone physically or psychologically.”
  • Both unconscious and conscious processes may trigger extra-legal aggression by the police.
  • he concept of aggression captures the critical point that the behaviors in question specifically aim to injure citizens.
  • Profanity, racial slurs, and gratuitous verbal threats degrade, humiliate and frighten citizens
  • An investigation conducted in six cities by the NAACP (1995) reported that verbal abuse and harassment are the most common forms of extra-legal police aggression and are standard operating procedure in minority communities.
  • erbal abuses as well as obscene gestures and spitting
  • An emerging focus of research on policing minorities is racial profiling, the practice of stopping and searching citizens on the pretext of suspicious or illegal activity but actually on the basis of racial identity alone.
  • A study of police stops in New York City showed that Blacks and Hispanics were stopped at higher rates than Whites in all areas, but those encountered in neighborhoods with relatively small Black populations were stopped relatively more frequently
  • intrusive searches subsequent to police stops, which likely occur more frequently in areas of concentrated disadvantage
  • The most extreme forms of extra-legal police aggression involve the use of excessive physical force, that which occurs “under color of authority, without lawful necessity”
  • Race appears to be an important correlate of its use.
  • cities of 150,000 or more population, percent Black and percent Hispanic
  • were related positively to criminal complaints against police officers
  • nvestigated by the FBI and reported to the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ from 1985 to 1990, found that
  • some research findings suggest a link between race and neighborhood characteristics.
  • percent
  • Black population and extreme Black segregation were related positively to sustained complaints of excessive force
  • Percent Hispanic was also related positively to sustained complaints, but Hispanic segregation was not.
  • Most studies include a small number of jurisdictions, rely on weak research designs with respect to causal generalizations, and/or use imprecise dependent measures.
  • minority suspects encountered in disadvantaged neighborhoods are at greatest risk of victimization at the hands of police
  • For example, Stewart et al. (2009) maintain that the police may discriminate against Black youth to defend the interests of White neighborhoods
  • Certainly the use of questionable practices by the police, such as stops and searches on the basis of racial profiling, may serve the interests of Whites in maintaining the boundaries of the “racial-spatial divide”
  • These findings support the proposition of a greater incidence and severity of extra-legal aggression in disadvantaged minority neighborhoods, but also suggest that lesser forms, such as unnecessary stops, may be used to handle “suspicious” Black citizens outside their neighborhoods.
  • Relevant dimensions of intergroup relations include complementary processes involving group conflict, emotions, and cognitions.
  • These social–psychological dynamics have been identified as primary contributors to aggressive behavioral responses.
  • he various models of intergroup relations and aggression suggest that distal background conditions of neighborhoods and proximate psychological responses elicited in situational encounters with citizens determine the specific targets (race) and general locations (place) of extra-legal police aggression.
  • 1) social, emotional, and cognitive preconditions to aggressive behavior, (2) activation of aggressive responses by a target perceived as threatening, and (3) social and individual mediators/moderators of aggressive behavior.
  • Group conflict
  • Several conflict theories hold that complex societies contain various interest groups and that conflict is an inevitable social process with predictable consequences for social organization and behavior.
  • ntergroup conflict arises as a collective reaction to real or perceived threats to group interests. T
  • The conflict theory of law maintains that the deployment of coercive crime mechanisms expressly seeks to regulate threats to the interests of the powerful
  • For example, police use of lesser forms of extra-legal aggression may accommodate the interests of Whites in affluent neighborhoods who can marshal political influence to dictate police practices
  • The police may more freely employ more severe forms of extra-legal aggression in areas of minority disadvantage, as there is less risk and more salient personal interests at stake
  • Realistic group conflict theory calls attention to the reality that the police constitute a distinct social group that possesses unique interests that do not always correspond to the interests of the dominant group of the larger society
  • maintains that the existence of such outgroup threats create hostility toward the source of threat, ingroup solidarity, ingroup identity, tightened ingroup boundaries, punishment of ingroup defectors and deviants, and increased ethnocentrism.
  • African Americans and Hispanics, who constitute the largest and most threatening outgroups in American society
  • hese disadvantaged neighborhoods pose a host of challenging circumstances—social isolation, poverty, crime, drugs, weapon availability, violence, and social disorder/incivilities
  • Much urban police work takes place in such locales.
  • Subcultural conflicts of group interests between police and minority citizens exist in these neighborhoods and create normative rifts that often place them at odds with one another.
  • he mutual perceptions of distrust and threat held by police and minorities in disadvantaged neighborhoods may generate group dynamics that reinforce ingroup solidarity and intergroup conflict that would not occur in more affluent locales.
  • Such intergroup conflict may elicit various less severe forms of extra-legal aggression by the police, which are seen as instrumental to maintaining authority and avoiding danger.
  • Conflict theories offer important insights into the background tensions that precipitate acts of extra-legal police aggression; however, other social psychological dynamics also must be considered.
  • Primary emotions such as fear and happiness comprise the foundation of the complex human emotional repertoire upon which inter- and intra-group relationships are formed—human behavior is deeply rooted in myriad emotional processes
  • Entering areas of concentrated minority disadvantage may routinely activate emotional responses among the police.
  • Police officers may become unconsciously and consciously conditioned to associate such areas, as well as certain types of people, with criminality and danger
  • While humans may become consciously aware of feeling afraid when faced with an aversive stimulus, unconscious mechanisms for acquiring, storing, and retrieving emotional memories may activate both a behavioral response to and the cognitive awareness of the emotion.
  • While emotions comprise internal states of individuals that may affect behavior, they are also social phenomena shaped by society and culture
  • Police use of extra-legal aggression in disadvantaged locales may, in part, reflect subcultural norms about the appropriate targets of anger and the relative power of police over disadvantaged citizens.
  • the challenging conditions of disadvantaged minority locales clearly provide a structural context in which apprehension, fear, and anger are always relatively close to the surface, ready to take hold of a police officer's conduct.
  • pro-social emotional bonds develop among officers who work these areas, amplifying the ethnocentrism that segregates the occupational subculture of policing from outsiders
  • Heightened fear and anger toward citizens, along with emotional bonds to fellow officers, prime the police officer for aggressive responses in the face of perceived threats, whether real or imagined.
  • Cognitions of ingroups and outgroups are analytically separable, and two distinct but closely related research traditions have developed
  • akes place in tasks involving reward allocations in very minimal groups that lack normal features such as face-to-face interaction, norms, and intergroup relationships.
  • he mere perception of group membership may be sufficient to produce biased judgments and discrimination
  • self-categorization theory maintains that intergroup dynamics involving social identity occur whenever group memberships are salient and group comparisons are made
  • Large perceived differences between groups give rise to the process of self-stereotyping, whereby individuals perceive themselves more as undifferentiated, interchangeable parts of a group and less as unique persons characterized primarily by individual attributes.
  • Perceived ingroup similarity enhances elements of group cohesiveness—mutual attraction, esteem, empathy, cooperation, and ethnocentrism—among members of the ingroup and triggers discrimination against outgroups.
sconzy

Actors and networks in urban community garden development - 1 views

www.sciencedirect.com/...S0016718514000517

shared by sconzy on 08 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Harambee gardens have developed and survived through network connections between garden participants and external actors.
  • Connection to larger organizations also provides access to knowledge and information about processes of obtaining permits and applying for grants.
  • Examining the role of social networks in community garden development is important precisely because social networks contain power dynamics.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • s we will demonstrate, although networks enable Harambee community garden development, networks formed between citizen groups and other actors also contain unequal power relations and conflicts that can constrain the activities of community garden groups.
  • In gardens managed by Groundwork, groups of citizen volunteer organizers are responsible for regular maintenance and decision-making
  • State disapproval of green space often takes on racialized or classist implications, as the state may promote certain kinds of space at the expense of others, in ways that conscribe what kinds of people belong or do not belong in public space or what forms of public space are legitimate
raglandb

The Trauma of Racism: America's Original Sin - 0 views

web.b.ebscohost.com/...detail

postracialera racism huds

shared by raglandb on 20 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • raglandb on 20 Oct 14
     
    In the article, the author discusses the trauma of racism in the U.S. He cites the trauma experienced by children of color due to interpersonal and systemic racism, as well as the process of racial healing that includes teaching tolerance, transformation and relationships. He defines racism as a power plus prejudice. The opinion of theologian Brian Bantum on race is also cited.
howardkm3

Curbing Police Brutality: What Works? A Reanalysis of Citizen Complaints at the Organiz... - 2 views

www.ncjrs.gov/...192518.pdf

huds

shared by howardkm3 on 09 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • howardkm3 on 09 Oct 14
     
    This project reanalyzes the data collected by Pate and Fridell (1993) on citizen complaints against police use of excessive force. The current report includes two empirical studies on the citizen complaints about police brutality in two mutually excluding areas: the police use of excessive physical force and the police use of all other non-physical forces, such as abuse of authority and verbal abuse. It attempts to establish the baseline correlation of citizen complaint rates with various police organizational factors, and to identify the causal effect of police brutality. Using Tobit regression technique, the research tested a series of hypotheses deduced from theories advanced by Wilson (1968) and Lundman (1980) with a number of control variables. It is found that organizational behavior and organizational characteristics are important covariates of the citizen complaints against police use of excessive physical force and police abuse of power. The police administration can influence its officer's behavior by strengthening the in-service training, paying attention to the education achievements of its officers, and actively provide best training for qualified new police in the force.
tieshaedwards

Power at the Roots : Gentrification, Community Gardens, and the Puerto Ricans of the Lo... - 1 views

site.ebrary.com/...reader.action

garden

shared by tieshaedwards on 16 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • tieshaedwards on 16 Oct 14
     
    New York City Lower East Side residents fighting against the Mayor of New York, who was trying to bring gentrification into that area. The article focuses more on the large Hispanic community in the Lower East side and gives the history of why and how Community Gardens in the 70's and 80's came about. The community gardens are being threaten by outside developers
prithak11

Setting stone decay in a cultural context: conservation at the African Cemetery No. 2, ... - 0 views

www.sciencedirect.com/...S0360132303000878

evergreen preservation cemetery

shared by prithak11 on 07 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Cemetery conservation should be more than the diagnosis, documentation and treatment of decaying materials; it should also meet the demands and needs of the citizenry that care for and value the material and cultural heritage of the site.
  • Preservation of cemeteries is not only important for preserving cultural heritage, but also for protection against unwanted social and cultural changes or, conversely, for its role as a catalyst for identity, economic or political strength.
  • In other words, conservation practice must become participatory conservation, through inclusion of the community. Conservation is a complex process which goes beyond a practitioner treating the various symptoms of stone decay; it requires sensitivity to the specific social, cultural, political and economic contexts of the entire site.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The ultimate purpose of conservation is not only to increase the heritage value of this site, but to also contribute to the struggle for economic benefit, political power and identity in this community.
  • Conservation is intrinsically bound up with the continual process of valuing heritage, as the practice of stabilizing or treating any stone used in an artifact actively interprets, values, may even legitimize, the object itself
  • baileycj2 on 07 Oct 14
     
    Management of stone artifacts requires understanding the driving forces for change, whether natural or anthropogenic, in order to implement effective conservation strategies. Physical, chemical and biological processes of stone decay must be understood in order to remediate the damage they cause. It is not merely the stone itself which is to be conserved, however, but also the cultural, social, religious or artistic ideas that it represents; these values are changeable and must be defined in the context of contemporary heritage processes. Cemetery stone in Kentucky, USA, provides an example of the importance of a holistic approach to stone conservation, which integrates scientific knowledge of decay processes with conservation theory and the needs of stakeholders.
  • baileycj2 on 07 Oct 14
     
    Management of stone artifacts requires understanding the driving forces for change, whether natural or anthropogenic, in order to implement effective conservation strategies. Physical, chemical and biological processes of stone decay must be understood in order to remediate the damage they cause. It is not merely the stone itself which is to be conserved, however, but also the cultural, social, religious or artistic ideas that it represents; these values are changeable and must be defined in the context of contemporary heritage processes. Cemetery stone in Kentucky, USA, provides an example of the importance of a holistic approach to stone conservation, which integrates scientific knowledge of decay processes with conservation theory and the needs of stakeholders.
kariannyo

Social Dynamics and Sustainable Urban Design - Springer - 5 views

link.springer.com/...fulltext.html

evergreen eastendcemetery restoration cemetery eastend

shared by kariannyo on 09 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • improve human well-being, understanding that such well-being depends on a healthy ecosystem
    • kariannyo
      kariannyo on 09 Oct 14
       
      Improving the state of East End cemetery may postively affect the community.
  • increases opportunities for experiencing happiness and beauty
  • Quality of life is enhanced
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • understanding current social dynamics of cities so that designs are sensitive to the broad demographic and economic trends of urbanization. Urban design has the power to help societies move toward a more just and sustainable future.
  • kariannyo on 09 Oct 14
     
    The designed, built environment is the most obvious expression of urbanization, but cities are made of people, too. Any efforts to design resilient or sustainable cities must therefore take into accou
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