Bottom-Up Efforts to Improve New York City's Schooling: The New Localism as Neighborhood-based Education Organizing

2009 ◽  
Vol 111 (13) ◽  
pp. 86-111
Author(s):  
Norm Fruchter
Last Subway ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 124-156
Author(s):  
Philip Mark Plotch

This chapter recounts how New York City Transit Authority rail service planners Peter Cafiero, Chuck Kirchner, Glenn Lunden, and Jon Melnick resurrected the Second Avenue subway in 1988. Even though the Transit Authority was in the early stages of its 1987–91 capital program, the planners' bosses wanted to start getting ready for the next program, which would run from 1992 to 1996. The first step would be to create a document that assessed the authority's long-term needs and identified projects that would rehabilitate the subway system, increase ridership, improve productivity, and expand system capacity. One proposal the planners wrote to address the Lexington Avenue's problems was an idea that the MTA planner Bob Olmsted had first championed in 1975—a Second Avenue subway north of 63rd Street. As the Second Avenue subway proposal moved up the Transit Authority hierarchy, the authority's president, David Gunn, agreed that the time was right to begin thinking about expanding the subway system. Before he could devote significant resources to advancing the Second Avenue subway, however, it would have to compete with other potential megaprojects under discussion at the MTA's agencies.


Author(s):  
Jonathan B. Shurin

The dichotomy between top-down and bottom-up forces acting on populations and communities has informed and motivated research in ecology over its entire history. Early practitioners emphasized the importance of bottom-up control because of the apparent association between many species and the supply of resources from the environment. Consumers and predators, the sources of top-down control, were often assumed to exert little influence over the composition of communities or the dynamics of ecosystems. Thomas Huxley’s famous assertion in 1883 that “all the great sea fisheries, are inexhaustible; that is to say, that nothing we do seriously affects the number of the fish” reflects the general impression about the effects of many consumers, including humans, on populations of their prey (“The abundance of the seas,” New York Times, 17 November 1895). Predators were considered to be agents of natural selection, removing unfit individuals but having little impact on the numbers of their prey, which were often thought to be capable of mounting effective defensive strategies and prodigious reproduction. Top-down regulation became a strong contender as an alternative to bottom-up control in the 1960s, when theoretical and empirical evidence began to accumulate that consumers exert considerable influence over the ecosystems they inhabit. Since then a much-richer picture has emerged of how, where, and when top-down and bottom-up forces come into play and of the interaction between the two. This article deals with approaches to disentangling the effects of predators and resources on communities and ecosystems and what they have revealed about the structure and dynamics of nature.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 499-518 ◽  
Author(s):  
Travis R. Bell ◽  
Jimmy Sanderson

In December 2015, the movie Concussion was released. The film portrayed the story of Dr Bennet Omalu, who is credited with discovering chromic traumatic encephalopathy in the brains of deceased National Football League players. Before the release, on December 7, 2015, Omalu penned an op-ed in The New York Times in which he opined that children should not play tackle football. This research explores 114 reader comments on Omalu’s op-ed through the lens of Nisbet’s bottom-up framing. Using a mixed-methods approach, the results indicated that participants framed the issue through health and safety, American cultural values, parenting liability, and skepticism. Linguistic analysis revealed that comments contained a negative tone, with women’s comments being more negative than men’s. The analysis suggests that online news forums function as spaces where public deliberation around the viability of children playing tackle football occurs and illustrates the tensions around risk, sport participation, and health and safety that confront parents as they grapple with the decision to let their children play tackle football


2019 ◽  
Vol 82 (4) ◽  
pp. 386-406
Author(s):  
Alexandre Frenette

The sociological literature on creativity would suggest that collaboration between newcomers and more experienced members of an art world results in the fruitful combination of novelty and usefulness, though not without some conflict. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with workers from the popular recording industry (rock/pop) in New York City, this article extends the literature on creativity as collective action by showing how three types of intergenerational tensions (aesthetic, technological, and career) are embedded in the ways newcomers and experienced workers see themselves and each other as agents of change and stasis. I propose a new variable—leveraging age—a mechanism intergenerational collaborators use to resolve or override these tensions to ultimately maximize creativity in group contexts. Leveraging age, as a form of knowledge extraction, occurs in creative bureaucratic organizations and describes how newcomers and experienced workers dualistically draw on each other’s respective strengths (novelty and tradition). I primarily examine the bottom-up part of this process—how experienced workers draw on the insights of newcomers—by analyzing five leveraging-youth practices, which vary by level of formality and intentionality, but mostly limit the interactional challenges between the two groups.


MODOS ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-141
Author(s):  
Nora Sternfeld

“Towards the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century”, as Anthony Gardner and Charles Green propose, “biennials became self-conscious.” Increasingly they are reflecting on themselves as "hegemonic machines" (Oliver Marchart), and for this very reason also understand themselves as places of intervention. We have to come to terms with the fact that biennials today are both: "Brands and Sites of Resistance", "Spaces of Capital and Hope" (Panos Kompatsiaris).The article follows withdrawals and protests as well as interventions and strategies of appropriation of biennials in the second decade of the 21st century. Protests in St. Petersburg, Sydney and New York shape the biennials they boycott. In Kochi, Athens, Dhaka, and Kassel we encounter curatorial projects that challenge the apparatus of value coding. The relationship between bottom up and top down often becomes blurred. In Prague, Warsaw, Kiev, and Budapest it is even reversed. Here biennials are used as a means of counter-hegemony and institutional survival.


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