An Example to Us All: Child Development and Identity Construction in Early 20th-Century Playgrounds

10.1068/a3237 ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 599-616 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A Gagen
Keyword(s):  
Child Development ◽  
Public Space ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Development Theory ◽  
Gender Identities ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
A Site ◽  
Us Cities

At the turn of the 20th century, children's play came under new and heightened scrutiny by urban reformers. As conditions in US cities threatened traditional notions of order, reformers sought new ways to direct urban-social development. In this paper I explore playground reform as an institutional response that aimed to produce and promote ideal gender identities in children. Supervised summer playgrounds were established across the United States as a means of drawing children off the street and into a corrective environment. Drawing from literature published by the Playground Association of America and a case study of playground management in Cambridge, MA, I explore playground training as a means of constructing gender identities in and through public space. Playground reformers asserted, drawing from child development theory, that the child's body was a conduit through which ‘inner’ identity surfaced. The child's body became a site through which gender identities could be both monitored and produced, compelling reformers to locate playgrounds in public, visible settings. Reformers' conviction that exposing girls to public vision threatened their development motivated a series of spatial restrictions. Whereas boys were unambiguously displayed to public audiences, girls' playgrounds were organised to accommodate this fear. Playground reformers' shrewd spatial tactics exemplify the ways in which institutional authorities conceive of and deploy space toward the construction of identity.

The Snapshots of A. Thomas Nelson: A Case Study in the Preservation of Early 20th-century Vernacular Albums

Collections ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-193
Author(s):  
Stephanie Becker
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Single Object ◽  
Critical Questions ◽  
Selection Of

Throughout the early 20th century, A. Thomas Nelson took snapshots while traveling the United States and Canada. His wife, Catherine Nelson, made a selection of these and placed them within eight photographic albums, later acquired by the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. Using one of these, “Snapshots from Travels in the United States and Canada (1904–1940),” as a case study, this article explores preservation practices for early 20th-century vernacular albums. While such albums are a valuable part of any collection, they present many complex preservation challenges due to the variety of materials contained within a single object. Critical questions about cataloging, digitizing, and rehousing methods guide decisions on how to stabilize the album's fragile condition and allow for access. This case study offers insight for collection managers and archivists who find themselves caring for similar snapshot albums.

Globalization and the American City

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Alex Beasley
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Food Service ◽  
White Collar ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global Cities ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
American Cities ◽  
Us Cities

American cities have been transnational in nature since the first urban spaces emerged during the colonial period. Yet the specific shape of the relationship between American cities and the rest of the world has changed dramatically in the intervening years. In the mid-20th century, the increasing integration of the global economy within the American economy began to reshape US cities. In the Northeast and Midwest, the once robust manufacturing centers and factories that had sustained their residents—and their tax bases—left, first for the South and West, and then for cities and towns outside the United States, as capital grew more mobile and businesses sought lower wages and tax incentives elsewhere. That same global capital, combined with federal subsidies, created boomtowns in the once-rural South and West. Nationwide, city boosters began to pursue alternatives to heavy industry, once understood to be the undisputed guarantor of a healthy urban economy. Increasingly, US cities organized themselves around the service economy, both in high-end, white-collar sectors like finance, consulting, and education, and in low-end pink-collar and no-collar sectors like food service, hospitality, and health care. A new legal infrastructure related to immigration made US cities more racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse than ever before. At the same time, some US cities were agents of economic globalization themselves. Dubbed “global cities” by celebrants and critics of the new economy alike, these cities achieved power and prestige in the late 20th century not only because they had survived the ruptures of globalization but because they helped to determine its shape. By the end of the 20th century, cities that are not routinely listed among the “global city” elite jockeyed to claim “world-class” status, investing in high-end art, entertainment, technology, education, and health care amenities to attract and retain the high-income white-collar workers understood to be the last hope for cities hollowed out by deindustrialization and global competition. Today, the extreme differences between “global cities” and the rest of US cities, and the extreme socioeconomic stratification seen in cities of all stripes, is a key concern of urbanists.

Growing Up Queer

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
First Generation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Gender Identities ◽  
Intersecting Identities ◽  
And Gender ◽  
A Site ◽  
Teenage Sexuality ◽  
Natural Characteristics

Growing Up Queer explores what it is like being young and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer (LGBTQ) in the United States today. Using interviews and ethnographic research conducted at an LGBTQ youth drop-in center, it shows how young people understand their sexual and gender identities, their interest in queer media, and the role that family plays in their lives. The young people who participated in this research are among the first generation to embrace queer identities as kids and teens, and Growing Up Queer shows how both sexual and gender identities are formed through complicated, ambivalent processes, as opposed to the natural characteristics one is born with. In addition to showing how youth understand their identities, Growing Up Queer describes how young people navigate queerness within a culture in which being gay is the “new normal.” Using Sara Ahmed’s concept of queer orientation, it argues that being queer is not just about one’s sexual and/or gender identity but is also understood through intersecting identities including race, class, ability, and more. By showing how society accepts some kinds of LGBTQ-identified people while rejecting others, Growing Up Queer provides evidence of queerness as a site of social inequality. The book moves beyond an oversimplified examination of teenage sexuality and shows, through the voices of young people themselves, the exciting yet complicated terrain of queer adolescence.

scholarly journals Artificial Landscape: in search of publicness through urban spectacle in Hong Kong

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Isaac Leung ◽  
Andy Buchanan
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Constitutive Relationship ◽  
Urban Context ◽  
Dynamic Information ◽  
The Public ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
A Site

Screen technologies increasingly permeate the experience of public space in Hong Kong. Large media walls have occupied the façades of many buildings, rendering a cityscape with dynamic information visible as a new urban skin. This article is a case study on Artificial Landscape, a site-specific media art project located on Asia Pacific’s largest LED outdoor screen. The case sets an example of how a public screen can serve as a mediating agent. It provides an opportunity for artists to provoke absent ideas in the public space and explore subversive potential, including critical reflection on issues surrounding surveillance, consumerism and rapid urban growth. The case also exemplifies how a public screen can mediate the public to experience an alternative context through artistic intervention, where negotiations of perceptions and subjectivities are made possible. This article provides insights into a public screen’s mode of spectatorship, quality of public space and curatorial strategies in an urban context. This is achieved by illustrating how various artworks extend the notion of publicness and remediate the mutually constitutive relationship among the built environment, media technologies, artists, public and everyday encounters.

scholarly journals “And Slowly, the Integration and the Growing and the Learning”: Nuanced Notions of Integration of Bhutanese Refugees in US Cities

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (6) ◽  
pp. 181
Author(s):  
Annie Taccolini Pannagio ◽  
Odessa Gonzalez Benson
Keyword(s):  
Local Level ◽  
National Level ◽  
Ground Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Study Approach ◽  
Wide Scale ◽  
Us Cities ◽  
Bhutanese Refugee

Policy related to refugee integration focuses on economic factors, while integration is not clearly operationalized nor is it being systematically measured and tracked in policy implementation. This study poses the question, how can local-level integration be conceptualized based on the perspectives of resettled refugees, to add nuance to policy. Using a case study approach with a nation-wide scale, data include 40 interviews and five focus groups with leaders of Bhutanese refugee-run organizations in 35 cities across the United States. Findings illustrate the importance of bonds, bridges and links in non-linear, relational integration. Findings also suggest that better access to services and resources is the responsibility of policy-makers and would lead to stronger bridges over time. This complicates existing policy and implies that resettlement programming should remain individualized and contextual from the ground level to the national level.

scholarly journals Age at Immigration and the Adult Attainments of Child Migrants to the United States

2012 ◽  
Vol 643 (1) ◽  
pp. 134-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Audrey Beck ◽  
Miles Corak ◽  
Marta Tienda
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Child Development ◽  
Language Proficiency ◽  
English Language ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Development Theory ◽  
Fully Integrated ◽  
Education Outcomes ◽  
Timing Of Migration

Immigrants’ age at arrival matters for schooling outcomes in a way that is predicted by child development theory: the chances of being a high school dropout increase significantly each year for children who arrive in a host country after the age of eight. The authors document this process for immigrants in the United States from a number of regions relative to appropriate comparison regions. Using instrumental variables, the authors find that the variation in education outcomes associated with variation in age at arrival influences adult outcomes that are important in the American mainstream, notably English-language proficiency and intermarriage. The authors conclude that children experience migration differently from adults depending on the timing of migration and show that migration during the early years of child development influences educational outcomes. The authors also find that variation in education outcomes induced by the interaction of migration and age at arrival changes the capacity of children to become fully integrated into the American mainstream as adults.

Why are missionaries in America? A case study of a Korean mission movement in the United States

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 426-440
Author(s):  
Rebecca Y. Kim
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Korea ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Commission ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Majority World ◽  
Mission Movement ◽  
Christian Nation

Why are missionaries coming to the United States? Why is the country that is a top missionary-sending nation also a top missionary destination? Based on an in-depth case study of one of the largest missionary-sending agencies in South Korea that sends many of its missionaries to the United States, this article explores five reasons for the phenomena of missionaries in America. These factors include the perennial importance of the Great Commission among impassioned majority-world evangelicals as well as their framing of the United States as a “great nation,” the “modern Rome,” and a dominant “Christian nation in crisis” in the late 20th century.

scholarly journals On the move in the (post)colonial metropolis: The Paris Metro in Francophone African and Afrodiasporic fiction

Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802110539
Author(s):  
Anna-Leena Toivanen
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Public ◽  
A Site

Literary texts convey the complexities of the urban experience in a tangible way. While there is a wide body of work on literary representations of Paris, the role of public transport as part of the (postcolonial) urban experience has not received much attention. This article sets out to analyse the meanings of the mobile public space comprising the Paris Metro in Francophone African and Afrodiasporic literary texts from the mid-20th century to the 2010s. The reading demonstrates how the texts represent the public space of the Metro as a symbol of modernity, a space of disappointment and alienation, an embodiment of social inequalities and as a site of convivial encounters and claims of agency. Through this analysis, the article highlights the role of literature in elucidating the intertwinement of mobility, public space and postcolonial urbanity.

Women, Gender, and the Revocation of Citizenship in the United States

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Herzog ◽  
Julia Adams
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Citizenship Status ◽  
Extreme Measure ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Site ◽  
Citizenship Laws ◽  
The Military ◽  
Citizenship Regime

Taking away citizenship, as an extreme measure, defines its boundaries by specifying acts that are deemed nationally desirable and undesirable. The history of expatriation in the United States serves as a case study for the interaction between gender and the limits of modern citizenship status. Citizenship laws and mechanisms of revocation in the United States were explicitly patriarchal until 1922; until then, women lost their citizenship on marriage to a foreign citizen. The laws regarding revocation of citizenship have continued to target prototypically masculine behaviors, particularly those bearing on the military defense of the state. Since the 1920s moment, women in the United States exist in a contradictory citizenship regime: paradoxically endowed with relative immunity from certain forms of regulation and punishment as their status as active political individuals remains a site of struggle.

scholarly journals Urban Noise Pollution Prevention — Tokyo Case Study

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-109
Author(s):  
Joanna Jabłońska
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Pollution Prevention ◽  
Noise Pollution ◽  
The United States ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Outcome Analysis ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Commercial Activities ◽  
Noise Limitation

AbstractNowadays most of the world’s metropolises, cities, and conglomerations are substantially contaminated by noise. Development of civilization based on the intensification of car, rail, and air traffic, an increase of building density and, consequently, green areas reduction has led to major problems. Highlighting this negative phenomenon was one of the main objectives of this article. The process of noise pollution reduction is hindered not only by the needs of population growth, but also in a number of selected cities of the United States, Europe or Asia — aggressive sounds together with light and visual communications — emitted into public space, become an important element of commercial activities and remain a permanent, and even desirable, element of community culture and entertainment. The outlined problems are referred to in the introduction and discussion parts of this manuscript. At the same time, there are a number of solutions, both those currently applied and those possible to be introduced into the space of cities, which allow reduction of noise in selected zones of public and private sectors. One of the examples in the discussed field of science and practice is Tokyo — a multi-million metropolis, in which residents can experience silence both in workplaces, on streets and at home, despite the extraordinary civilization development of this metropolitan structure. Outcome analysis of solutions, used in the example city, forms the second part of the discussion in the article. Nowadays, when cities of the world are polluted with unwanted sounds, this case study is valuable, allowing the formulation of a set of clear recommendations for noise limitation in urban spaces — which are presented in the conclusions of the article. It is also worth mentioning that the spread of smart and humanized solutions aimed at noise reduction is crucial in order to build user- and environment-friendly urban environments in the near future.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document