On Thursday, Feb. 27, 2025 from 12 – 2 pm, the Earl & Edna Stice Memorial Lectureship and Department of Sociology will host a talk by Sarah Mayorga (Brandeis University) in Savery 409. In this talk, Dr. Mayorga discusses findings from her forthcoming book, Urban Specters: The Everyday Harms of Racial Capitalism. Based on interviews with 117 residents of two working-class neighborhoods in Cincinnati, Ohio, she describes and analyzes how residents make sense of their lives and neighborhoods.
Residents talked about neglect, trash, and security to interpret their neighborhood circumstances. They used these narratives, or urban specters, to explain the negative things happening in their neighborhoods, often obscuring the relations of racial capitalism that produced these conditions.
Mayorga overlays residents’ interpretations with an analysis of exploitation, dispossession, and dehumanization to identify how racial capitalist relations, such as underdevelopment, produce the everyday harm that residents reported.
Sarah is Professor and Chair of Sociology at Brandeis University. Her research focuses on the sociology of race and racism, urban neighborhoods, and Latinx migration. She earned her PhD from Duke University and previously held positions at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the University of Cincinnati.
Mayorga’s first book, “Behind the White Picket Fence: Power and Privilege in a Multiethnic Neighborhood” (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), won the 2015 American Sociological Association Latino/a Sociology Section’s Distinguished Contribution to Research Book Award.
On February 27th, Professor Lawrence Katz (Harvard University) will present a virtual lecture hosted by the Social Science Research Council entitled “Neighborhood Effects, Housing Mobility, and Place-Based Policies: Evidence from Experiments and Quasi-Experiments.” This lecture will cover his work on three landmark projects: Moving to Opportunity, enabling residents of public housing to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods; Creating Moves to Opportunity, providing additional support to families considering leaving high-poverty neighborhoods; and HOPE VI revitalization grants, investing in mixed-income developments in neighborhoods with distressed public housing. Learn more and register here.
CSDE Affiliates Jen Otten (Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences) and Marie Spiker (Epidemiology) along with Trainee Jane Dai (Health Services) and the WAFOOD team released the 5th wave of the Washington State Food Security Surveys (WAFOOD) series. A research brief, published on February 13 and focused on survey results, found that food assistance usage was high statewide and that food insecurity was higher in households with respondents identifying as Black or Hispanic, households with children, households with incomes under $15,000, and renters. Read the full brief here.
Occupational inequality is an important driver of racial, gender, and class inequalities in the American workforce. CSDE External Affiliate Elizabeth Korver-Glenn (University of North Carolina) recently published an article in Social Forces that focuses on residential property managers to understand how structural marginalization plays out in a segregated profession. Drawing on 80 in-depth interviews, the study demonstrates the burdens that fall on marginalized workers in property management and how those burdens result in financial and health-related consequences for renters. Read the full study here.