Daina Cheyenne Harvey

Political gardening in a post-disaster city: : lessons from New Orleans

The study examines the emergence of urban gardening activities in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Drawing on ethnographic and qualitative research conducted throughout the city between 2009 and 2012, it examines the ways in which various gardening projects in New Orleans exhibit different levels and scopes of political engagement, with a particular focus on how they manifest (sometimes in contradictory ways) in the projects’ missions and practices. On the basis of these findings, it is argued that current conceptualisations of political gardening are too limiting and do not account for the nuances of how politics shape, challenge and materialise in urban gardening activities. By highlighting the ever-shifting social, economic, and political context of the post-disaster recovery, the study illustrates how urban gardening is inherently political, but cautions that the extent to which gardening can subvert social injustice in the city may be limited.

Rebuilding others’ communities: a critical analysis of race and nativism in non-profits in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina

The devastation of Hurricane Katrina and the federal levee failures facilitated the unprecedented proliferation of non-profits in some areas of the city. While the short- and moderate-term experiences of non-profits in the aftermath of Katrina have been examined, their long-term successes and failures remain unknown. In this paper we look at how race and nativism hindered the success of non-profits in rebuilding New Orleans. We likewise seek to demonstrate how the reactions on the part of non-profits to being the racial other or that of an outsider often further impeded the effectiveness of non-profits. The three authors, using data from participant observation, interviews, and ethnography, over a four-year period, describe generalisable lessons learned from rebuilding New Orleans’ communities, including the recognition of competing racial discourses in redevelopment; the valuing of local knowledge; and coming to terms with the paradoxes of the affect economy.

“Double Diversion” and the Environmental Good: Framing a Disproportionate Solution to An Ecological Threat as a Problem for the Commons

Abstract William R. Freudenburg conceived “the double diversion” as the simultaneous process of diverting environmental resources or rights shared by all to a small group of social actors, which was made possible by a second diversion – the acceptance of the taken-for-granted assumption that environmental harms benefit the common good. In doing so, Freudenburg was among the first to note the importance of looking at not only the distribution of environmental harms but also environmental privileges. In this chapter, we extend the conceptualization of the double diversion to include an instance where rather than framing environmental harm as being a public good, environmental action is framed as benefiting the public writ large, while larger issues of environmental injustice are ignored. In particular, we look at the disproportionate distribution of the urban tree canopy in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the framing of the mitigation of the environmental threat of the Asian Longhorned Beetle as a problem for the commons. Through an analysis of media, we demonstrate that organizations and social actors who have tried to address the effects of this particular ecological threat have nonetheless ignored previous disproportionalities in the environment–society relationship.

Social Policy as Secondary Violences in the Aftermath of a Disaster: An Extension to Naomi Klein’s Disaster Capitalism

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the federal levee failures plans for the rebuilding of New Orleans favored the redevelopment of some communities over others. Where residents of vulnerable communities, in particular the Lower Ninth Ward, protested the erasure of their communities, they have been largely socially abandoned as a retaliatory measure for not acquiescing to the elite plan of “Katrina Cleansing.” The implementation of this social abandonment as social policy and the various policies and conditions that have collectively punished residents of the Lower Ninth Ward who are trying to rebuild their community should be seen as uneven racialized capitalist development and as an important extension to what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism.” In this article, I conceptualize these policies and conditions as secondary violences and through three vignettes I provide a brief description of life in the Lower Ninth Ward where these violences permeate the warp and the woof of the community.

The Cultural Geography of Community Suffering

The Lower Ninth Ward was ground zero for Hurricane Katrina and the Federal levee failures. And yet August 29, 2005, was not the first time the community was placed in peril. Decades of dealing with flooding, failed infrastructure and underdevelopment, poverty, crime, and toxic events from nearby petrochemical plants have produced a particular way of making sense of suffering. In the Lower Ninth, suffering is normative; suffering permeates the warp and woof of the community; suffering helps construct the culture there. In this chapter I document what I call a culture of suffering—the cultural tools and worldview that helps residents mitigate their suffering and deal with it in ways that make life livable there.

Teaching Humanist Sociology

Most members of our association were drawn in large part to academia because of teaching. We have watched with despair and heartache as teaching at many institutions has become a distant priority. The specter of ‘‘publish and perish’’ that haunted ‘‘research one’’ institutions for the last few decades of the 20th century now has liberal arts colleges firmly in its grasp. Likewise, in some of the institutions where teaching was most sacrosanct, service and grant work now have measurable weight. In an age of changing expectations where education has simply become a cost–benefit analysis and spending for the humanities and social sciences is constantly being reexamined by trustees, teaching in a way compatible with our humanist beliefs is increasingly difficult to do. At the same time, we are witnessing the corporatization of the academy. Consequently, we are constantly pressured to ‘‘prove’’ our value in quantitative and cost– benefit assessments. For many of our colleagues, teaching has become a means to some evaluative end. The sociology for people (Lee 1978) that we cherish has increasingly become the ‘‘sociology for the institution.’’ For the humanist sociologist, dedicated to social activism and public sociology, these trends have placed serious constraints on what we do and who we are. Rather than retreat, however, many members of the Association for Humanist Sociology have continued to ask the question ‘‘sociology for whom’’ by finding new ways of teaching sociology to ‘‘solve problems and improve lives,’’ thereby

A Passion for Society: How We Think about Human SufferingA Passion for Society: How We Think about Human Suffering, by WilkinsonIainKleinmanArthur. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. 328 pp.

The study of suffering has for some time now struggled to find its place within sociology. It eludes a succinct, yet complete definition; it crosses subfields; it can be subdivided into various typologies; it is often written about without being named. And while these are merely academic issues, pragmatic issues also abound. Whose suffering should we address first? How should social scientists who study suffering ‘‘be in the world’’—that is, can we simultaneously ‘‘do sociology’’ and alter contemporary social conditions for the betterment of all? In A Passion for Society: How We Think about Human Suffering, Iain Wilkinson and Arthur Kleinman seek to deal with many of these issues and set a new path both for the study of suffering and, more generally, social science itself. Their argument is that the discipline of sociology has devolved to the point where we ignore ‘‘the social question.’’ We are, to evoke the reason for their title, no longer passionate about society. Too much of what passes for sociology today does not benefit society; it is bereft of humanitarianism. This lack of a ‘‘critical humanism’’ (p.18) can be seen in, but also, they hope, saved by the study of suffering. The authors’ goal is thus to relocate social science in part as a service to those who suffer (and perhaps likewise to relocate the study of suffering in service to sociology). To accomplish this, they firmly plant their vision for the study of suffering in the history of sociology, in essence reclaiming for their new social science some of the pioneers of sociology. Wilkinson and Kleinman begin the book by locating the use of the term and the idea of social suffering in modernity. Worrying about others becomes a way to socialize, civilize, and perhaps control the eighteenthcentury individual. The authors attempt to demonstrate that sociology has its origins firmly rooted in suffering and sympathy. The only unfortunate aspect of the chapter is that it westernizes our understanding of suffering, which is odd given their desire to go beyond familiar geographies of suffering. The next chapter is a historical review of the fear that stories and images of suffering would be used to elevate sentimentalism and thus dull critical inquiry into the structural causes of suffering. Wilkinson and Kleinman use these concerns (and, in subsequent chapters, particularly in their review of the Chicago School) to establish that the foundation and institutionalization of sociology eschewed humanist projects. Here the corollary to social suffering, social sympathy was the antithesis of early sociology. These two chapters taken together show that the study of social suffering, while coterminous with the origins of sociology, was quickly sacrificed to professionalize sociology and separate it from social work. Here Wilkinson and Kleinman mirror the recent trend in revisiting the disputes surrounding the origins of sociology to understand how women and black men who were concerned with social reform were often written out of the canon (or forced to play lesser roles) and how this helped to create a ‘‘hermeneutics of suspicion’’ (p. 79) surrounding the canon. For the authors, this alone should make us rethink the place of suffering and sympathy in sociology. Three of the next four chapters then set out to claim sociology for humanists by examining some of the pioneers. This begins with the assessment that, ironically, one of the primary individuals that sociologists claim as a founding father, C. Wright Mills, repudiated the type of sociology in vogue today. With Weber, they focus on his ‘‘being in the world’’; Weber’s struggle with the irrationality and paradox of modernity—at least for Wilkinson and Kleinman, is similar to that found in the study of suffering today. The final of the three chapters that focus on the origins of our discipline pits Jane Addams against the Chicago School. Here again, but perhaps argued more clearly, they show how the professionalization of sociology unfortunately won out over the actual ‘‘doing’’ of sociology. The fourth chapter, Reviews 489

29.95 paper. ISBN: 9780520287235.

In this introduction to the special issue on “The Precarious Nature of Environmental Activism”, I describe my own path to environmental activism and the articles contributed to the special issue. In this special issue we look at the changing role of environmental activism. In particular, the authors focus on how the role of the activist is mediated by one’s relationship to the community or those individuals tasked with making environmental decisions. Relatedly, these papers also look at how activism and the relationship between activist and scholar roles can often be challenging and how many activist-scholars work in changing environments.

The Precarious Nature of Environmental Activism

Agency: Integration and Expansion in the Baseball World,’’ ‘‘A Piece of Property: The Making and Meaning of Free Agency,’’ ‘‘Two Strikes: Star Power and Solidarity in the United States and Mexico,’’ ‘‘On the Borders of Free Agency: Dominican Baseball and the Rise of the Academies,’’ and ‘‘Constructing Ichiro’s Home Field: Seattle, the Mariners, and the Politics of Location,’’ makes an important contribution to understanding the business of baseball. I was particularly impressed with the sections describing the struggle of baseball players to establish the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) and the important roles of Curt Flood and Marvin Miller in that struggle to end the reserve clause and establish free agency. Gilbert describes these actions as involving players’ agency and their attempts to collectively control their own commodification. In Chapter Three, by drawing a comparison between newly elected President Reagan’s ‘‘ruthless treatment’’ of striking members of PATCO (the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization) and the successful 1981 strike of the MLBPA, Gilbert identifies the power of baseball players in their irreplaceability and thereby skillfully shows the difference but also the connection between two seemingly different areas of work and labor-management conflict. As it turned out, the difference would be critical in the success or failure not only of baseball players’ struggles, but also of other sport professionals, such as football, basketball, and hockey players as well as other American workers during a period of strong antiunion and anti-worker sentiment in the United States. Gilbert’s chapter on the rise of the baseball academies in the Dominican Republic and Venezuela is also striking, as it clearly demonstrates the exploitative aspects of MLB as a business whose intent was not to give opportunity to poor Latino youth (as they advertised) but instead to save money by exploiting their cheap labor. In his concluding paragraph, expressing an optimism informed perhaps by his own praiseworthy research, Gilbert writes:

Crisis Cities: Disaster and Redevelopment in New York and New Orleans

This chapter examines a set of intellectual and ethical dilemmas that characterize the study of suffering. Drawing from two separate studies, one on the survivors of Hurricane Katrina and the other on middle-class parents whose children have an array of problems, we highlight the gap between sociological and self-referential claims to suffering. How do we conceptualize the experiences of people who appear to suffer but are reluctant to identify themselves as suffering? Should studies of suffering include the experiences of privileged people whose hardships seem comparatively trivial? By addressing these questions, we call attention to what we call “the micro-politics of suffering” and simultaneously address the interactional nature of suffering and scholars’ participation in the construction of what constitutes “legitimate” distress. We also consider what scholars might gain from comparing the lived experiences of seemingly disparate groups of sufferers.