(Re)enacting Settler Colonialism via White Resident Utterances

This is a qualitative study outlining the links between white resident utterances and settler colonialism. Specifically, this article provides evidence of how settler colonialism continues to operate in a progressive community, despite the narratives of community and diversity shared by research respondents. This is primarily done by the cultural master narratives that respondents uttered to make sense of “community” and “diversity” in a borough that is undergoing gentrification. Because master narratives are created and reinforced by the socialization process where whiteness is the norm, white utterances continue the settler colonial project that invests in separate white communities to maintain racial privilege. While prior studies have detailed the tensions between community and diversity, this study contributes to this debate by adding a settler colonial frame that validates the idea that in a progressive neighborhood, diversity becomes a violation of settler emplacement. These findings are particularly significant given the vast literature on communities and diversity, but few have taken a settler colonial analytical approach to the debate.

Spatial super-spreaders and super-susceptibles in human movement networks

As lockdowns and stay-at-home orders start to be lifted across the globe, governments are struggling to establish effective and practical guidelines to reopen their economies. In dense urban environments with people returning to work and public transportation resuming full capacity, enforcing strict social distancing measures will be extremely challenging, if not practically impossible. Governments are thus paying close attention to particular locations that may become the next cluster of disease spreading. Indeed, certain places, like some people, can be “super-spreaders”. Is a bustling train station in a central business district more or less susceptible and vulnerable as compared to teeming bus interchanges in the suburbs? Here, we propose a quantitative and systematic framework to identify spatial super-spreaders and the novel concept of super-susceptibles, i.e. respectively, places most likely to contribute to disease spread or to people contracting it. Our proposed data-analytic framework is based on the daily-aggregated ridership data of public transport in Singapore. By constructing the directed and weighted human movement networks and integrating human flow intensity with two neighborhood diversity metrics, we are able to pinpoint super-spreader and super-susceptible locations. Our results reveal that most super-spreaders are also super-susceptibles and that counterintuitively, busy peripheral bus interchanges are riskier places than crowded central train stations. Our analysis is based on data from Singapore, but can be readily adapted and extended for any other major urban center. It therefore serves as a useful framework for devising targeted and cost-effective preventive measures for urban planning and epidemiological preparedness.

EMH: Extended Mixing H-index centrality for identification important users in social networks based on neighborhood diversity

The rapid expansion of social network provides a suitable platform for users to deliver messages. Through the social network, we can harvest resources and share messages in a very short time. The developing of social network has brought us tremendous conveniences. However, nodes that make up the network have different spreading capability, which are constrained by many factors, and the topological structure of network is the principal element. In order to calculate the importance of nodes in network more accurately, this paper defines the improved H-index (IH) centrality according to the diversity of neighboring nodes, then uses the cumulative centrality (MC) to take all neighboring nodes into consideration, and proposes the extended mixing H-index (EMH) centrality. We evaluate the proposed method by Susceptible–Infected–Recovered (SIR) model and monotonicity which are used to assess accuracy and resolution of the method, respectively. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method is superior to the existing measures of identifying nodes in different networks.

“Because the World Consists of Everybody”: Understanding Parents’ Preferences for Neighborhood Diversity

Previous research, primarily using survey data, highlights preferences about neighborhood racial composition as a potential contributor to residential segregation. However, we know little about how individuals, especially parents, understand neighborhood racial composition. We examine this question using in–depth interview data from a racially diverse sample of 156 parents of young children in two metropolitan areas. Prior scholarship on neighborhood racial preferences has mostly been animated by expectations about in–group attraction, out–group avoidance, the influence of stereotypes, and perceived associations between race and status. However, we find that a substantial subset of parents expressed a desire for racially and ethnically mixed neighborhoods—a residential preference at odds with racial segregation. Parents across race conceptualized neighborhood diversity as beneficial for children's development. They expressed shared logics, reasoning that neighborhood diversity cultivates skills and comfort interacting with racial others; teaches tolerance; and provides cultural enrichment. However, these ideas intersected with racial segregation and stratification to shape parents’ understandings of diversity and hinder the realization of parents’ aspirations. Beliefs about the benefits of neighborhood diversity were rarely a primary motivation for residential choices. Nonetheless, parents’ perceptions of the advantages of neighborhood racial mixing reveal the reach of discourse on the value of diversity and suggest a potential opportunity to advance residential desegregation.

The Impacts of Large Natural Hazards on Neighborhood Diversity

This study analyzes the impacts of natural hazards on neighborhoods, focusing on their age and housing type diversity. It estimates how the diversity of neighborhoods having experienced large natural hazards since 2005 changed between 1995 and 2015, as compared to neighborhoods without such experiences. "Neighborhood" was defined as a census tract of the National Statistical Office, and longitudinal data analysis was used to clarify the differences in natural hazards' impacts according to the characteristics (damage intensity and financial independence) of the neighborhoods. The results of the analyses are as follows: First, age and housing type diversity decrease immediately in the aftermath of large natural hazards but tend to recover quickly. Second, the impacts differ in accordance with the neighborhood's characteristics. Age diversity in neighborhoods with severe damage tends to decrease sharply but increases rapidly during recovery. In neighborhoods with high levels of financial independence, age diversity tends to increase, while housing type diversity tends to decrease, and post-disaster growth rates tend to be reversed.

Neighborhood characteristics and individual perception of social inequity - A Stage 1 Registered Report

The neighborhoods that people live in contain a variety of features that color their everyday psychological experience. Whether they feel welcomed by their neighbors, the type of schools they can send their children to, and whether they can find a local job that pays them enough to afford a safe, comfortable home are all examples of ever-present factors that can influence people’s perception of the world and their place in it. Previous work has explored the degree to which individual characteristics, such as personal beliefs and social networks, are associated with judgments about whether society is fair and just. Here, we build upon this work by investigating if these judgments are also associated with the features of the neighborhoods that people live in. Specifically, we hypothesize that neighborhood diversity and socioeconomic indicators will relate to individual beliefs about fairness and social order. We test this hypothesis using two large, open datasets – the Attitudes, Identities, and Individual Differences study data, and the Opportunity Insights Neighborhood Characteristics by County data – and through multi-method modeling techniques. Our work can inform theories of individual perception of, and response to, societal inequity, as well as models of public opinion of social welfare policy.

Building Public Schools in the City: The Role of Neighborhood Context on Voter Support for School Bonds

This article explores individuals’ vote choice on a public good, namely, public school bonds. I argue that during a period of significant citywide demographic change the ethnic or racial context of voters’ neighborhoods affects their perception of community and, therefore, school programs. This will then shape their inferences about who are the beneficiaries. I test both racial threat and social contact theories to understand the varying impacts of neighborhood diversity on willingness to support this public good. Using a unique 1996 dataset from Houston Independent School District (HISD), I find that neighborhood context impacts vote choice and argue that this is due to perceptions about the beneficiaries of public schools. Evidence indicates that fears and insecurities in a neighborhood about the rise in a minority group at the city level can directly undermine support for the provision of public goods.

Facebooking for Good: Online Contact to Address Offline Conflict

The present study examined the benefits of meeting new people on Facebook for social capital. Results of a two-wave national web survey ( N = 387) indicate that using the site to meet and interact with new people relates to trusting more in the average person over time. Facebook sociability also moderates the negative association between neighborhood diversity and trust over time. Diversity has less of a negative impact on trust locally for users who interact with new people online. Novel interactions on sites like Facebook improve perceptions of difference, demonstrating value for reconnecting the populace.