George Galster is the Clarence Hilberry Professor of Urban Affairs at Wayne State University. Dr. Galster has held positions at the Universities of: Harvard, Berkeley, North Carolina, Amsterdam, Delft, Glasgow, Mannheim, Oslo, and Western Sydney, among others. He served as Director of Housing Research at the Urban Institute before coming to Wayne State University in 1996. His research has focused on urban neighborhoods and housing markets, exploring how they change and how they change the people who live within them. This has resulted in over 130 peer-reviewed articles, 30 book chapters and seven books. His latest book is Driving Detroit: The Quest for Respect in the Motor City (2012). He has provided housing policy consultations to public officials in Australia, Canada, China, Scotland, and the U.S. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from M.I.T.
book available for purchase at seminar
Detroit is the international icon for a once-thriving industrial powerhouse transformed within half a century into a dysfunctional metropolis. George Galster’s Driving Detroit paints a stunning portrait of Metropolitan Detroit through an eclectic application of urban planning, economics, sociology, political science, geography, history, and psychology. But Driving Detroit is also partly a self portrait, wherein Detroiters paint their own stories through songs, poems, and oral histories. This remarkable mix of scholarly disciplines and media of communication make the book distinctively insightful, accessible, and memorable. Driving Detroit is uniquely powerful because its portrait not only helps the reader clearly see the subject but, more importantly, understand why Metropolitan Detroit’s social, cultural, political, institutional, commercial, and built landscape has been transformed. Though appropriate for graduate and undergraduate courses in urban studies, geography, planning, social sciences and history, the book should be of interest to the general public, both in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Here the related post from the SSN website:
Associate Professor of Public Policy, Rutgers University-Camden
Minnite is a policy-focused political scientist with expertise in American and urban politics and policy. She specializes in the study of inequality and how it is dealt with by the American political system, teaching courses on political participation, poverty, community development, urban politics, and policy analysis. Her earlier work on immigrant communities in New York City engaged a community collaborative research process that produced new insights into questions about immigrant political incorporation. She is a Senior Fellow at the policy think tank and advocacy organization, Demos, and serves on the research board of the Urban Justice Center’s Participatory Budgeting in New York City project. With her expertise on voter fraud, she has testified before Congress, advised government agencies such as the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission and the U.S. Government Accountability Office, been invited to speak to state elections officials about her research, and participated as an expert witness in high profile legal challenges to new voter identification rules adopted in a number of states.
The recent Pennsylvania trial court ruling striking down the state’s voter ID law is only the most recent instance where a court relied heavily on evidence produced by social scientists and statisticians.
Dr. Lorraine Minnite is an associate professor at Rutgers-Camden and a well-known expert on vote fraud. Minnite was brought in by the plaintiffs to examine the content of the legislative debates regarding the need for voter ID and the prevalence (or not) of voter fraud in Pennsylvania. Her report starts at page 20 here and is an entertaining read for anyone interested in legislative intent. The court determined, for instance, that there appeared to be a “legislative disconnect from reality” (pg. 41 of the decision), and Minnite shows that, whatever the merits of voter ID, the speculations of legislators often outstripped reality.
To read more about this case, see this recent NYT article.
Eric Schneider is the Associate Director for Academic Affairs and an Adjunct Professor of History in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of In the Web of Class: Delinquents and Reformers in Boston, 1810s-1930s (1992), Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings: Youth Gangs in Postwar New York (1999), and Smack: Heroin and the American City (2008), which won the Kenneth B. Jackson Prize for the best book in North American urban history. Schneider is currently working on a history of homicide in Philadelphia from the 1940s to the 1990s, American Necropolis: Homicide in the Modern City.
What explains the concentration of homicide among African Americans? In Philadelphia over the past twenty-five years, 70 percent of nearly 9,500 homicide victims were African American, and over half were African American males between the ages of 18 and 40. Most commentators see this as a uniquely contemporary problem, but it is not. This paper explores the historical development of the contemporary homicide crisis, reviews existing explanations for homicide, and then uses excerpts from a sample of homicide trial transcripts to argue for the emergence and perpetuation of “homicidal environments.”
Please visit: https://www.berfrois.com/2014/01/eric-schneider-the-streets-of-killadelphia/ to read more about Dr. Schneider’s work.
