Temple University Press’ Annual Holiday Give and Get

Posted on December 18, 2024 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, the staff at Temple University Press close out 2024 by suggesting the Temple University Press books they would give along with some non-Temple University Press titles they hope to receive and read this holiday season. 

Mary Rose Muccie, Director
Give: I’d give Tongyu Wu’s Play to Submission to a friend who worked in, and escaped from, the tech industry. It’s a terrific study of an unnamed tech company’s use of gaming to undermine and exploit employees and the impact it has within and beyond the workplace.

Get: (Is now the time to admit that I didn’t follow through on last year’s vow to read The Nix?) After seeing New York Times and NPR reviews of, and its inclusion on a few “notable titles” lists, this year I’d like to get The God of the Woods, by Liz Moore. I was a fan of her earlier book, Long Bright River, and can see spending time over the holidays with this one.

Karen Baker, Associate Director, Financial Manager
Give: Black History in the Philadelphia Landscape, by Amy Cohen. I know so many people who would appreciate the wealth of information packed in this book, and it is written so well that it is both easy and enjoyable to read.

Get: Gray Malin: Dogs: Photographs. I am an animal lover, and this book just caught my eye. I mean, who doesn’t want to see pictures of dogs?

Aaron Javsicas, Editor-in-Chief
Give: Building Ghosts: Past Lives and Lost Places in a Changing City, by Molly Lester and photographer Michael Bixler. This is a completely unique project in subject matter and format, identifying the traces of demolished row homes and other attached buildings as portals to the personal histories of everyday people and businesses that inhabited those structures. This project represents another key entrant in the Press’s developing library of books that make Philadelphia’s living history visible and meaningful to readers today. Other relevant recent titles in this vein include Philadelphia: Finding the Hidden City (which, like Building Ghosts, connects the Press to the important work of Hidden City Philadelphia), and our recent and forthcoming projects with Monument Lab.

Get: To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement, by Benjamin Nathans. The publisher describes it as, “A gripping history of the Soviet dissident movement, which hastened the end of the USSR—and still provides a model of opposition in Putin’s Russia.” Many of us could use some moral support in our continued pursuit of hopeless causes (my family has a long tradition of supporting such efforts), and this book feels especially relevant at the moment in a number of ways, even beyond Russia.

Ryan Mulligan, Editor
Give: The Big Story, by David Grzybowski. Come for Philadelphia’s most recognizable characters talking about their work, workplaces, and colleagues, stay to get a look at how news stations differentiate themselves from the competition in the modern media landscape. 

Get: James by Percival Everett. Mark Twain needs the favor this book loans him of raising him up a peg and taking him down a peg at the same time.

Shaun Vigil, Editor
Give: While it’s always difficult to choose just one title, I’ll certainly be gifting James T. Sears’ Queering Rehoboth Beach: Beyond the Boardwalk to a number of friends this year. In this book, Sears offers not only an incredibly in-depth, thoughtful history spanning across generations, but also presents a work of scholarship that never loses its grounding in narrative while fleshing out the lived experiences of the individuals and town it focuses upon.

Get: While my personal reading list has been a bit backlogged this year, one volume I’m looking forward to finally reading during some holiday downtime is Emil Ferris’ My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book Two. The first volume has stayed with me since its debut, and I can’t wait to see how the journey concludes.

Stephen Bassett Gluckman, Graduate Editorial Assistant
Give: Norbert Wiley’s Inner Speech and the Dialogical Self offers a thoughtful exploration of internal dialogue, examining how self-conversations shape our thoughts and identity. Treating the idea of an internal conversation seriously, Wiley’s book is a great read for anyone who experience racing thoughts or finds themselves frequently “talking to themselves.”

Get: I’ve been intrigued by Ed Park’s Same Bed Different Dreams, a sprawling alternate history of the Korean War that has been compared to Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Park’s novel weaves together multiple narratives, imagining a world where the Korean Provisional Government didn’t dissolve after WWII. Praised as both funny and deeply complex, it’s a book I’d be thrilled to receive this season.

Ashley Petrucci, Senior Production Editor
Give: I would give John Fairfield’s Crossing Great Divides, as the concerns with environmentalism were relevant at the time of publication earlier this year but have become increasingly more so as we’ve approached the current moment, where environmental threats abound. I particularly believe the discussion about environmentalism from a rural vs. urban perspective is important.

Get: I plan on continuing to re-read the Redwall series over break and would welcome copies of any other than the handful of books from the series I already own. Sometimes, we just need a light series from childhood to get us through!

Faith Ryan, Production Assistant
Give: I would love to give out copies of Digital Girlhoods by Katherine A. Phelps. This book takes a close look at a group whose opinions and concerns are usually ignored—tween girls—and studies the ways they use and interact with social media, and how being constantly online can help and harm girls’ social lives and self-esteem in various ways. As successive generations become more and more entwined with social media at younger and younger ages, I think it’s very important to study its effects, especially on children.

Get: I would love to get Robert A. Caro’s The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson. I read Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York earlier this year, and it’s now one of my all-time favorite books. I’ve never read a biography of Johnson before, so I’m very curious to learn more about him beyond the bullet points, and to see how Caro tackles him as a subject, as well as American politics through the decades, over such a long span (four volumes and counting!).

Irene Imperio, Senior Manager, Advertising and Promotions
Give: Digital Girlhoods, by Katherine A. Phelps to my girl mom friends. Here’s hoping that we decode and understand the next generation!

Get: Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series. I need to catch up before the next installment!!

Gary Kramer, Assistant Director, Sales and Publicity
Give: William Gee Wong’s Sons of Chinatown. This memoir, a true labor of love, chronicles Bill’s life and work as a writer—as well his father’s experiences—in America. (n.b., father/son stories are my Kryptonite; so too are stories of writers and journalists.) The book, which is full of emotional moments, moved me deeply. Early on in Sons of Chinatown, Bill is told by his Chinese cousins that he had “youthlim,” or “had heart.” Bill writes with a lot of heart. It’s what makes Sons of Chinatown so endearing.

Get: If I get either Allan Hollinghurst’s novel, Our Evenings, or André Aciman’s memoir, Roman Year, I would likely ignore the stack of unread books on my nightstand to devour them. 

HAPPY HOLIDAYS AND BEST WISHES FOR 2025 FROM TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS!

Filed under: african american studies, american studies, art, asian american studies, Asian Studies, cultural studies, economics/business, Education, environment, gender studies, health, History, immigration, Labor Studies, law & criminology, LGBT studies, literature, Mass Media and Communications, Philadelphia, philosophy, photography, political science, race and ethnicity, racism, Religion, sexuality, sociology, transnational politics, Urban Studies, women's studies | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Advocating for disability arts

Posted on December 11, 2024 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Amanda Cachia explains why she wrote The Agency of Access.

I wrote The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art & Institutional Critique because it was important to me for the art world – and art historians specifically – to pay more attention to what is happening in the world of disability arts. Disability arts has received little scholarly scrutiny in the art history canon, and I am committed to challenging and changing that. Despite this, I do believe there is a significant sea-change in the air and disability arts is becoming embraced, theorized, practiced, displayed, and collected in art museums around the world. But there is still more work to be done. I hope my book will help provide some critical reflection, situated knowledges, lived experiences, and key suggestions for how best to move forward with incorporating disability into our arts and cultural spaces and into our teaching.

I have been fortunate that my book has been accompanied by the group exhibition, Smoke and Mirrors, held at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University. This exhibition included many of the artists whom I discuss in the book, including Carmen Papalia, Corban Walker, Finnegan Shannon, Alt Text as Poetry, Sugandha Gupta, Vanessa Dion Fletcher, Pelenakeke Brown, Fayen d’Evie, and Liza Sylvestre. The exhibition really animates the idea of access aesthetics and how artists approach using the tools of access including translation, alt text, image descriptions, captions and more to provide a window into thinking critically about access and its typical lack thereof in museums. I was fortunate to have been invited to curate this exhibition by the Zimmerli Director/Curator, Maura Reilly, who is a highly-regarded feminist art historian who has written several influential books, particularly Museum Activism (2019). Reilly and the Zimmerli recognized that it was important to feature an exhibition of contemporary disability art on its wall after consulting with a disability arts advisory group made up of community members.

This monograph attempts to build on the ideas featured in significant books by disability studies scholars who have influenced my thinking for some time. Key books include Tobin Siebers’ Disability Aesthetics (2010), Ann Millett-Gallant’s The Disabled Body in Contemporary Art (2010), and all the scholarship by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Petra Kuppers, Carrie Sandahl, Robert McRuer, and Richard Sandell have greatly informed access aesthetics. I acknowledge many other thinkers and artists in the book, but the scholarship of art historians who have especially paved the way for my book include David Getsy and Julia Bryan-Wilson, who both write on queer art histories, and Krista S. Thompson, Anna Arabindan-Kesson, and Sarah Elizabeth Lewis who all write on black visual representation in both historical and contemporary contexts.

One of the aspects about the book that excites me most is that Temple University Press generously agreed to include image descriptions in the book to accompany all 50 images. While image descriptions (or alt text) are typically featured in electronic versions of a book in line with contemporary publishing standards, the Press also agreed to include these descriptions in the hard and soft cover versions too. This makes the image descriptions visible to everyone (and not just made available and activated online for only the users who need it). This provides a deeper level of access, for sure, but it is also a politics of access that is important for this book to convey, so that the theory I espouse is very much in practice as well. I hope that TUP’s work in this area can be taken up by other publishers with more consistency in the future, particularly those in the business of producing art history books.

Filed under: american studies, art, Disability Studies, Education, History, Mass Media and Communications | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

The Big Story is The Mummers

Posted on December 4, 2024 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, in advance of the New Year’s Day parade, we offer an excerpt from The Big Story, by David Grzybowski, showcasing the Mummers, with quotes and observations from Steve Highsmith, the longest-tenured host of the Mummers Parade.

The Mummers Parade is held on New Year’s Day in Philadelphia. With well over ten thousand marchers and participants kicking off the start of each new year, the Mummers Parade is the oldest continuous folk parade in the United States. The parade is made up of five unique divisions: the Fancies, Comics, Fancy Brigade, Wench Brigade, and String Band. These divisions offer diverse floats, props, costumes, dancing (or strutting, as the Mummers call it), and musicianship. The tradition of the Philadelphia Mummers Parade started in the late seventeenth century, as a way to usher in the New Year.

In 1941, Philco Television (then Channel 3) hosted the first newscasts from the Mummers Parade. In 1949, WFIL/WPVI broadcast the parade and continued to do so until 1980. WFIL’s on-air talent included Phil Sheridan, John Corcoran, Harry K. Smith, Mary Durante, Charles King, Mary Dorr, Jean Sargent, Bill Webber, Roy Nassau, Anita Klever, and Connie Klever. WPVI talent included Dave Roberts, Hank Sperka, and Mummers expert Frank Conforti. In July 1980, WCAU filed a lawsuit in a Common Pleas Court, asking the court to declare illegal a provision in the recently expired contract between WPVI and the Mummers. The provision gave Channel 6 the right to broadcast the 1981 parade if it offered the Mummers a contract matching or exceeding another station’s offer. The Mummers Association also filed a lawsuit against Channel 6, seeking additional payments on the basis that the station had misrepre­sented its profits from previous parade broadcasts. The Mummers Asso­ciation voted to switch to Channel 10 because WCAU offered to pay the association $100,000 for the 1981 broadcasting rights; Channel 6 had paid the Mummers $15,000 for broadcasting rights to the 1980 parade. WPVI filed a countersuit, and as a result, a Common Pleas judge ruled that WPVI had lost its right of first refusal when it failed to match with­in two months WCAU’s offer to the Mummers. The Common Pleas judge ruled that the Mummers could break their relationship with WPVI and granted the rights for the parade to be broadcast on WCAU.

From 1981 to 1986, WCAU broadcast the parade and featured talent Larry Kane, Bill Baldini, Deborah Knapp, John Facenda, Diane Allen, Alan Frio, and James Donio. In 1987, KYW took over the parade broad­cast rights, which it held until 1991. KYW talent included Steve Bell, Pat Ciarrocchi, Jack Jones, Ray Murray, Jerry Penacoli, Dick Sheeran, and Beverly Williams. KYW’s coverage included a “Pride of Philadelphia” special, Mummers Eve, hosted by Murray and Ciarrocchi.

After contract complications with KYW for the upcoming 1992 pa­rade, the Mummers had no broadcast agreement just weeks before New Year’s Day. Two cable operators—the Lenfest Group and Comcast—agreed to underwrite the broadcast of the parade. As part of the agree­ment, WHYY (Channel 12) carried the broadcast and helped produce the program live, and KYW provided the on-air personalities. The 1992 parade broadcast aired from 8:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., with an average Nielsen rating of 11.5 and a 21 percent share of the viewing audience, beating college football bowl games and other out-of-town parades. The Mummers parade returned to KYW for two more years in 1993 and 1994.

In 1995, WPHL took over the parade broadcasts. In the station’s first year, a multitude of on-air talent was featured on the broadcast, including Pat Ciarrocchi, Gene Crane, Mike Strug of WCAU, Ed Cun­ningham of WHYY, and Steve Highsmith and Larry Cosgrove of Chan­nel 17’s Inquirer News Tonight. Former Mummer and judge Jake Hart offered commentary on the WPHL parade broadcast for twenty years. Highsmith is the longest-tenured host of the Mummers Parade, with twenty-eight years; he started in 1992. Highsmith and Hart retired from the booth after the 2020 parade. As of 2023, the Mummers Parade is now televised on WFMZ-TV and WDPN-TV with Larry Mendte and Dawn Stensland-Mendte.

Steve Highsmith, Anchor and Reporter, WPHL and WCAU:

There are Mummers in other parts of the world, but each of the cities that have Mummers has its own little take on it. Philadelphia’s take on it is unique. It was joyful, and we continued with that. I got to know a lot of the people behind the makeup, masks, and the sequins. I realized these people were amateurs, and they were not professionals doing this. These are people who are working really hard during the day at some other job, and they were carrying on tradition that they may have begun with high school classmates who carried on from their parents or great-grandpar­ents. The tradition is basically to go out and have a good time on New Year’s Day. I think that the vast majority of Mummers who do it simply do that. They want to celebrate on New Year’s Day and be a part of a tradition of celebration of fancy display that entertains people. That is the mindset of the vast majority of Mummers that go out there.

What I also learned about [the Mummers] throughout the years was that so many of them are very giving people and charitable people in their churches and community and in the wider community. They have been goodwill ambassadors. Mayors have often called them up and said that there are dignitaries coming in from the airport, “Can you go to the airport and give them a Philadelphia welcome?” and they did that. There are a lot of ways the Mummers can be appreciated. We all learn about histories and things over time. We need to face those things and have an awareness of how we got to where we are. I think the city has an oppor­tunity if it chooses to seize it, to not put aside but to embrace all of its major festivals, celebrations, parades, and really emphasize the position aspects of each. Share them and educate them and, as I said, make aware and incentivize inclusion and inspire inclusion. That’s what celebration and the mosaic of America should be all about. I think that the majority of people in the city want peace, but it begins with humility. Everyone who is a Mummer and everyone who is not a Mummer. I’m not preach­ing here, but let’s start with humanity, and let’s talk about self-awareness and about fairness, and just appreciate the celebrations and good dia­logues and actions that will come out of it. That’s kind of the take on it.

The personal memories of it are the people. The late Bob Shannon Jr. and Judge Hart and all of the other people I worked with. The soup contest at the Mummers Museum. The serenades along 2nd Street, for example. Going into the warehouses ahead of time, many of them cold at the time, or the clubhouses and all of the sneak peeks you get. The sewing that is going on. The gluing that is still going on. The people that get to hang out together. People were always trying to feed me. The best soup, meatball, and gravy that anybody could ever have was because I got an opportunity to emphasize the positive aspect of Mummery.

Filed under: american studies, History, Mass Media and Communications, Philadelphia, sociology, Urban Studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Announcing a new series: Theorizing from Within

Posted on November 27, 2024 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, we are proud to announce the new Temple University Press book series, Theorizing from Within, edited by Victoria Reyes and Ghassan Moussawi.

Victoria Reyes and Ghassan Moussawi

This series is rooted in Black, women of color, indigenous, and transnational feminisms that take seriously that the personal is political and that one’s embodied experiences within particular structural positions are key sources of knowledge to develop arguments, build theory, and extend existing research.

Thus, we seek authors whose book projects draw on and use their own social worlds, interactions, experiences, and knowledges to theorize broader structural processes. While topically open to substantive content, we are particularly interested in manuscripts that interrogate systems of oppression and domination, including but not limited to racial capitalism, coloniality, gendered racisms, carcerality, affect and temporality, health and disability studies, and empire. We welcome works that combine these reflexive data and methods with more traditional ones such as archives, interviews, ethnography, oral histories, and close reading of texts and material objects. In particular, we seek to highlight manuscripts that draw on and speak to multiple audiences and that truly embrace interdisciplinary thinking and theorizing.

The erasure of the personal is a political choice. Further, without careful attention to the self, research obscures how interior life is central to knowledge production. Although we are currently witnessing a Du Boisian turn in the social sciences, what remains absent from this recovery is his methodological
use of the self to theorize. As scholars, we stand witness to what we study.

Informed by James Baldwin, we see witnessing as an ethical principle that guides our work, especially when it comes to the study of power and marginalizations. However, if methodological practices are not transformed alongside theoretical insights, researchers will continue to reproduce in practice the very
kinds of knowledge production and gatekeeping they critique.

SERIES ADVISORY BOARD: Elizabeth Bernstein, Crystal Baik, Chris Barcelos, Jenny Davis, mimi khúc, Martin Manalansan, Aldon Morris, Mary Romero, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, and Assata Zerai

Submissions to the series are welcome to contact:

Victoria Reyes [email protected]

Ghassan Moussawi [email protected]

Ryan Mulligan, Editor, Temple University Press [email protected]

Filed under: african american studies, american studies, asian american studies, cultural studies, Disability Studies, Education, ethics, gender studies, Latin American studies, philosophy, race and ethnicity, racism, sexuality, sociology, women's studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Examining Past Lives and Lost Places in a Changing City

Posted on November 20, 2024 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, we showcase Building Ghosts, written by Molly Lester with photographs by Michael Bixler. This book features photography, building histories, and essays that make visual connections to hidden themes of community heritage, dislocation, demolition, and neighborhood change.

In 2013, I was wandering with a friend through the Northern Liberties neighborhood of Philadelphia. We strolled up North 2nd Street, sidling up alongside the broad Ba­roque front of St. Michael’s Church and the brick buildings that flank it. The parish is an undeniably monumental presence in the neighborhood, and yet it was a different pile of bricks that caught my eye just beyond the church. In a vacant lot at a quiet intersec­tion, an unassuming heap of blocks foregrounded—and were clearly responsible for—a building ghost at the edge of the parcel. I’d lived in Philadelphia for several years at this point, and I’m sure it wasn’t the first ghost I’d ever passed, but it was the first one I saw: a stair that snaked its way up the wall; the outline of a former foyer; a series of lines in the attic gable, clearly left over from a set of shelves.

1513 N. 2nd Street, 2013 | Photo: Molly Lester

The ghost mesmerized me, just as my first college course in architectural history had done several years before, when I first fell in love with the history of old buildings and cultural landscapes. But where my coursework and jobs to this point had mostly focused on grand structures with unquestioned significance, this building ghost of a modest rowhouse claimed a different sort of authority. When you live in an old place like Philadelphia, lavish buildings such as St. Michael’s Church may be accents in the street­scape, sparking a thrill when you encounter them, but it’s the commonplace buildings such as this erstwhile rowhouse that actually define the everyday. I wanted to know more about this utterly mundane building, to draw on all the same detective skills that I need for my higher-profile research subjects but deploy them for a building with no name or famous residents.

2323 N. 10th Street, 2020 | Photo: Michael Bixler

But in the weeks that followed, I somehow lost the ghost. I went back to Northern Liberties alone, wandering in search of the exposed wall I’d stood in front of so recently. I couldn’t orient myself, and there were no empty lots to be found as I radiated out from the starting point of the church. Belatedly, I realized that the active construction site at 2nd and Jefferson streets and “my” empty lot were one and the same. The building ghost was no longer visible as a new structure rose to take its place. It was an unfortunate lesson about the nature of building ghosts, which may vanish as quickly as they once materialized.

1025 Buttonwood Street, 2020 | Photo: Michael Bixler

In the years that followed, I researched the former ghost anyway and wrote a piece about its idiosyncratic history for Hidden City Philadelphia. Various work projects took me to every corner of the city, and I documented other building ghosts as I found them (having learned my lesson about trying to return later to a building ghost). I started no­ticing patterns: what kinds of buildings become ghosts; how long the ghosts last; where ghosts do and do not occur in the broad reaches of the city. I started an Instagram ac­count (@buildingghosts) to chronicle my ghostly wanderings and found that plenty of friends and strangers were enamored by them, too.

1801-03 Fairmount Avenue | Photo: Michael Bixler

Among them was my friend Michael Bixler, photographer and managing editor of Hidden City Philadelphia, the publication in which I’d first reflected on this phenome­non. He would send me photos of ghosts from his own travels, hooked with the same curiosity I shared. Eventually, I decided to explore this passion project with more rigor, and I enlisted him and his photographic expertise. I applied for funding from the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, an interdisciplinary arts initiative at the University of Penn­sylvania, and received a seed grant in early 2020.

1935 Diamond Street, 2020 | Photo: Michael Bixler

When the world shut down in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, I took solace in dreaming about the project that would take shape when we could venture out again. Confined to my house and immediate vicinity, I missed my city. I went months without seeing neighborhoods (and people!) I loved. As many of us hunkered down, building ghosts became emblematic for me of the moment in which we found ourselves: suspend­ed in time, they symbolized some inherent measure of loss and absence.

2240 Master Street, 2020 | Photo: Michael Bixler

Finally, in fall 2020 Michael and I launched the project that would become this book. (For more on that process, see the Introduction.) Hungry for exploration, we trekked all over Philadelphia in our spare time, in search of ghosts. For all the pain of that period of 2020, there was something appropriate about embarking on this venture, in that moment. The pandemic reframed so many aspects of our lives, and building ghosts wield a similar power, forcing a reexamination of their context. They have a way of making even familiar places look strange, exposing a rift between what we think we remember of a building and what we see after it’s gone. This book exists in that uncer­tain interlude, dwelling on these lost buildings and found ghosts as an invitation to see the city around us in a new way.

—Molly Lester

Filed under: american studies, art, cultural studies, environment, History, Mass Media and Communications, Philadelphia, photography, sociology, Urban Studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Expanding solidarity across boundaries of identity

Posted on November 13, 2024 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Felipe Amin Filomeno, author of Christian Cosmopolitanism, writes about deliberative dialogues on immigration in congregations.

Growing up in Brazil, Sunday lunches at my grandparents’ were a cherished ritual around a big family table. We were a typical Brazilian family with Italian roots: my grandfather at one end of the table with his wine, adults filling in the middle, and us grandchildren clustered at the far end (not drinking wine, of course). Over bowls of minestrone and the sound of overlapping voices, conversations flowed until someone brought up the age-old taboos – politics or religion. That was when one of my grandaunts would inevitably remind us that neither topic belonged at the table. Ironically, I must have missed the memo, because years later, I wrote a book exploring one of today’s most divisive political questions – immigration – and the role that Christianity might play in fostering a deeper, more empathetic conversation around it.

My work on Christian Cosmopolitanism: Faith Communities Talk Immigration started in 2017, when I attended a meeting of the Latino Racial Justice Circle (LRJC), a faith-based nonprofit group supporting Baltimore’s Latino immigrant community. Drawn initially by a desire to serve, I also saw this as an opportunity to align service with research. In that gathering and the ones that followed, we prayed for God’s protection of immigrants, LGBTQ people, and multicultural families. I was moved, thinking, “This is Christian cosmopolitanism!” A term that may seem unfamiliar to many, Christian cosmopolitanism stands in stark contrast to Christian nationalism, the idea that the U.S. is a Christian nation and that a certain variety of Christianity must inform our laws, making us the “city on a hill.”

LRJC leaders were hopeful that faith-based conversations could shift hearts and minds about immigration. Their hope was grounded in traditional Christian teachings. From the Old Testament, we learn that “[t]he alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God” (Leviticus 19:34). In the New Testament, Jesus says, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me” (Matthew 25:35). What for LRJC leaders was hope for me became a research question: Could prayerful conversation within Christian congregations nurture understanding and collaboration across divides of nationality, race, and ethnicity? From 2018 to 2022, I designed, implemented, recorded, and analyzed a pilot dialogue and seven three-week dialogues on immigration in Christian congregations in Baltimore. The seven dialogues included fourteen congregations and 97 participants. Each involved diverse groups coming together to talk through one of the nation’s most divisive topics. From crafting the dialogue script to refining my findings, I relied heavily on the collaboration of LRJC volunteers, clergy, and lay leaders of the participating congregations.

There were moments of tension. In one session, a White American man claimed to be Native American because he was born in the U.S., and in another, an African American woman, shared her discomfort with Latino shopkeepers speaking Spanish with U.S.-born customers. But there were also deeply moving moments. I watched a White American woman cry as a young Latina recounted the hardships of crossing the border. At the end of one of the collaborative projects that participants undertook after each dialogue, a Latina faith leader told me the experience had been healing “like therapy” to her congregants.

Overall, I found that deliberative dialogues on immigration in congregations can unleash the cosmopolitan potential of Christianity, but there were also limitations. I hope my readers will be moved to organize these courageous conversations in their communities. With prayer and the insights shared in this book, I believe Christian congregations can address legitimate concerns about immigration control and border security while leaving behind harmful myths about immigrants draining welfare, stealing jobs, or eating pets.

Filed under: american studies, civil rights, Education, ethics, gender studies, health, immigration, Latin American studies, latinos, LGBT studies, philosophy, political science, race and ethnicity, racism, Religion, sociology, transnational politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

How my community-based research turned into community service

Posted on November 6, 2024 by gkramer

It’s University Press Week! This year’s theme is #STEPUP. In today’s entry, Rebecca Glazier, author of Faith and Community, writes about how her research prompted her to step up and participate in community action.

By Rebecca Glazier

It wasn’t inevitable that I would find myself working in a church food pantry on a random Thursday afternoon, but it was definitely foreseeable. At some point, my research into religion and community engagement had become more than just research—I was building relationships with the congregations I was studying, getting to know their leaders and members, and volunteering alongside them in their community engagement efforts. And I was having a great time doing it!

This research project began in 2012, in an election year, with a bunch of political science students that I wanted to get out of the classroom and engaged in experiential learning. We surveyed and interviewed congregants at five different places of worship that year and we learned something really valuable: they were happy to talk about the issues that mattered to them, the problems in their community, and the concerns they had for their children. But they didn’t want to talk partisan politics. They didn’t want to talk about who they were voting for or what party they belonged to.

So, we embraced the community-based nature of the research and asked about what mattered to our research subjects. We doubled-down on community engagement, we talked about local issues, and we learned about the projects underway at different congregations. We assembled a Clergy Advisory Board to help us ask better survey questions and recruit more diverse congregations. We focused on building trust and relationships to improve our response rates.

And, before you knew it, I was working in a church food pantry on a random Thursday. I was also elbow deep in an elementary school’s flower bed on a Saturday and sore for days after cleaning up tornado debris. My research project had begun to look a lot like doing service with the congregations I was researching.

This was a welcome, and even purposeful, development for two reasons. First, it added rich, qualitative data to the research. By 2020, we had collected surveys from dozens of congregations, nearly 4,000 congregants, and hundreds of clergy. We understood a lot about the benefits of community engagement for members, places of worship, and democracy. But participating on the ground with congregations gave a new perspective on the diverse ways that they were actually engaging. It made it possible to include seven case studies, along with many other stories, in my book Faith and Community (Temple University Press, 2024), illustrating what community engagement really looks like in practice.

Second, it allowed me to live out one of the key findings of the book: people who are engaged in their communities have happier, healthier lives. Our data even show that they experience more frequent moments of deep spiritual fulfillment and closer relationships with God. By participating in community engagement with the congregations I study, I also receive those benefits. And for many of these service projects, I bring my family along with me. My son has been in water-balloon fights at community picnics, helped pull weeds to clear the view of painted memorials, and assembled “period kits” of free menstrual products to distribute to the unhoused. These experiences connect us to others in our community, help us find joy in serving, and make our lives richer. I am happier knowing that I am teaching my son about service and community early in his life.

Although the case studies have concluded and Faith and Community is now published, my community engagement will continue. The data tell a clear story of its benefits! At a book signing last month, we collected four boxes of donations for our local food bank. Last week, I was planting trees with Little Rock Tree Streets. Next month, we will be packing night lights to send to foster kids. What started as a research project has turned into a way of life.

Wilk Glazier (age 10), author Rebecca Glazier’s son, cleaning up debris after a tornado hit their city of Little Rock in March 2023.

Author Rebecca Glazier at a book signing event in October 2024, with boxes for donations to the Arkansas Food Bank.

The mural on 12th street in Little Rock, which the author and her son helped the Saint Mark Baptist Church clean in summer 2022.

Author Rebecca Glazier with her husband, Andy Manchester, and her son, Wilk Glazier (age 11), assembling “period packs” of free menstrual products with Little Rock Women for Good in February 2024. 

Filed under: american studies, Anthropology, cultural studies, Education, environment, ethics, gender studies, health, political science, Religion, sociology, Urban Studies, women's studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Super(natural) titles for Halloween

Posted on October 30, 2024 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, in the spirit of Halloween, we showcase two of our supernatural titles.

The Supernatural in Society, Culture, and History, edited by Dennis Waskul and Marc Eaton, demonstrates the value of serious academic inquiry into supernatural beliefs and practices—from ghosts, vampirism, cryptozoology, and dark tourism to tarot cards, fortunetelling, voodoo, and alien abduction.

The Supernatural in Society, Culture, and History have made a concerted effort to understand encounters with ghosts and the supernatural that have persisted and flourished. Featuring folkloric researchers examining the cultural value of such beliefs and practices, sociologists who acknowledge the social and historical value of the supernatural, and enthusiasts of the mystical and uncanny, this volume includes a variety of experts and interested observers using first-hand ethnographic experiences and historical records.

The Supernatural in Society, Culture, and History seeks to understand the socio-cultural and socio-historical contexts of the supernatural. This volume takes the supernatural as real because belief in it has fundamentally shaped human history. It continues to inform people’s interpretations, actions, and identities on a daily basis. The supernatural is an indelible part of our social world that deserves sincere scholarly attention.

Ghostly Encounters: The Hauntings of Everyday Life by Dennis Waskul with Michele Waskul, considers how people experience ghosts and hauntings, the ways they make sense of uncanny experiences, and the consequences thereof

Dennis Waskul writes these lines—about his first-hand experience with the supernatural—in the introduction to his beguiling book Ghostly Encounters. Based on two years of fieldwork and interviews with 71 midwestern Americans, the Waskuls’ book is a reflexive ethnography that examines how people experience ghosts and hauntings in everyday life. The authors explore how uncanny happenings become ghosts, and the reasons people struggle with or against a will to believe. They present the variety and character of hauntings and ghostly encounters, outcomes of people telling haunted legends, and the nested consequences of ghostly experiences.

Through these stories, Ghostly Encounters seeks to understand the persistence of uncanny experiences and beliefs in ghosts in an age of reason, science, education, and technology—as well as how those beliefs and experiences both reflect and serve important social and cultural functions.

Filed under: american studies, Anthropology, cultural studies, Education, History, Mass Media and Communications, sociology | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Atoms for Peace, Clean Coal, and the Search for Pollution-Free Power

Posted on October 23, 2024 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Allen Dieterich-Ward, author of Cradle of Conservation, revisits the Three Mile Island meltdown and the rise of Clean Coal.

As he picked up the telephone just before 8:00 on the morning of March 28, 1979, Pennsylvania Governor Dick Thornburgh had no idea the call would help define his legacy and change the course of history. There had been an accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, located on the Susquehanna River just ten miles downstream from Harrisburg. Soon the initials “TMI” would become a stand-in for nuclear energy’s dangers, as a simple stuck cooling-system valve eventually resulted in one of the site’s two reactors overheating, causing the worst commercial nuclear power accident in U.S. history. Amid the confusion that ensued over the following five days, pregnant women and children were advised to evacuate the area and nearby schools were closed, even as the plant’s operator, Metropolitan Edison and state and federal officials emphasized the relatively small amount of radiation escaping from the facility. 

While the impact on the environment and public health were ultimately modest compared to other disasters, the accident at TMI had enormous economic and political consequences as activists emphasized the dangers of nuclear power just as trust in scientists, industrial corporations, and government officials was waning. Advocates of “atoms for peace” had depicted nuclear energy as a safe and air-pollution-free improvement on the nineteenth-century technology of burning coal to power steam turbines. As the danger of potential meltdown and questions about storing radioactive waste haunted the nuclear industry after TMI, mining companies and their allies instead cast coal as the responsible solution to the nation’s energy needs. Thornburg “made coal development a major priority” and the state spent $23.6 million to enlarge and modernize coal export facilities in Philadelphia as well as millions more on upgrades to transportation infrastructure. “I believe that Pennsylvania can and should become the energy capital of the northeast,” he declared in 1980.  

Coal-fired electrical generation faced headwinds from federal environmental regulations, however, beginning with the passage of the Clean Air Act  in 1970. Seeking to meet ambient air quality standards in the cheapest way possible, many power plant operators simply built taller exhaust chimneys to disperse pollutants over a broader area. Pennsylvania thus found itself in the awkward position of being both a source and a recipient of environmental and public health problems from power plant emissions, including acid rain. The solution to this riddle was “Clean Coal” – a catch-all term that gained renewed currency as federal and state governments invested enormous sums in the grail-like search for a pollution-free way to generate electricity from the dirtiest of fossil fuels. The vision of Clean Coal provided political cover for Democrats and environmentally moderate Republicans such as Thornburgh by maintaining at least a rhetorical commitment to environmental protection while avoiding alienating miners and their allies in other industrial sectors. 

Technology initially concentrated primarily on decreasing sulfur emissions, the main cause of acid rain and the focus of a cap-and-trade system imposed by amendments to the Clean Air Act in 1990.  However, as the effects of climate change became increasingly apparent, carbon capture was added to the growing list of Clean Coal’s goals and, by the early 2000s, proponents could point to “integrated coal gasification combined cycle” power plants that promised a new generation of efficient coal energy production even as nuclear energy remained under a cloud of suspicion and no new reactors came online between 1996 and 2016. In his first campaign for president, Barack Obama embraced clean coal technology that could make America energy independent. “This is America,” he declared in a September 2008 rally. “We figured out how to put a man on the moon in 10 years. You can’t tell me we can’t figure out how to burn coal that we mine right here in the United States of America and make it work.”    

Of course, this did not happen. Pennsylvania’s natural gas boom, enabled by horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing in the state’s subterranean shale formations, undercut the very need for clean coal.  Soon the Obama administration realized it could meet short-term goals for reducing carbon dioxide emissions by simply encouraging the ongoing to shift to natural gas (a set of policy decisions branded a “war on coal” by his political opponents). By 2015, there were more than 70,000 active gas wells in the state, placing it second only to Texas, and energy executives were referring to Pennsylvania as “the Saudi Arabia of natural gas.” Between 2015 and 2022, nearly 4,700 megawatts of the state’s coal-fired electrical generating capacity retired, dropping coal to less than ten percent of total production as natural gas rose to account for more than fifty percent. 

The burning of natural gas produced far less climate-warming carbon dioxide than coal but advocates for wind, solar, and nuclear energy pointed out that these methods caused no emissions at all.  However, with state and federal attempts to meaningfully regulate carbon dioxide emissions thwarted by a series of Republican-backed lawsuits, in 2019 the same market dynamics that undermined coal caused the shuttering of TMI’s second, functioning reactor. The more recent announcement that TMI may be restarted thanks to a deal with Microsoft to power its energy data centers, and technology-neutral tax subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act, can thus be seen within the long trajectory of the search for power without pollution. It further points to the ebb and flow of how our society calculates environmental and public health risks – at least for now, the existential threat of climate change seems to be overshadowing the equally existential threat of nuclear meltdown just as thirty years ago, the TMI disaster tipped the scales in favor of coal. Whether and for how long this is the case remains to be seen, as the history of energy production, including the return of natural gas, certainly suggests new technologies as well as new threats can remake the marketplace in unanticipated ways.

Filed under: american studies, environment, health, History, political science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Listen up! Two new Temple University Press podcasts

Posted on October 16, 2024 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, we debut two new podcasts that are part of a series of interviews with authors of books in the series Political Lessons from American Cities, edited by Richardson Dilworth. Each book in the series is intended to provide a specific lesson about politics, drawn from a single American city.

Advancing Immigrant Rights in Houston, by Els de Graauw and Shannon Gleeson

Listen to this podcast HERE

In this episode, Els de Graauw and Shannon Gleeson discuss their book Advancing Immigrant Rights in Houston, which shows how Houston governmental and non-governmental actors have collaborated and combated to realize local advances in immigrant rights.

Democracy Vouchers and the Promise of Fairer Elections in Seattle, by Jennifer A. Heerwig and Brian J. McCabe.

Listen to this podcast HERE

In this episode, Jennifer A. Heerwig and Brian J. McCabe discuss their book, Democracy Vouchers and the Promise of Fairer Elections in Seattle, which recounts how Seattle’s first-in-the-nation Democracy Voucher program came to be and its impact on local democracy and participation.

Filed under: american studies, civil rights, immigration, latinos, law & criminology, Mass Media and Communications, political science, race and ethnicity, racism, sociology, Urban Studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

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