Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: A growing body of literature examines whether the poor, working class, and people of color are disproportionately likely to live in environmentally hazardous neighborhoods, with mixed results. Some researchers suggest that methodological weaknesses are to blame for inconsistent findings. In order to address these concerns, we use individual-level data from the 1995 Community, Crime, and Health Survey (Ross and Britt, co-PIs) linked with 1990 U.S. Census data and 1995 Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) data. Using these data we are able to test whether individual characteristics are related to hazard exposure, as population characteristics have been in many previous studies. We also examine whether patterns of environmental inequality that exist in urban areas hold up in suburban and rural areas, using multiple measures of environmental hazards. Being Hispanic and family income are more consistent predictors of waste exposure than race, although race also matters. While the impacts of individual’s race and family income are explained by neighborhoods characteristics, the association between being Hispanic and waste exposure is not. We find less inequality in the distribution of waste in metropolitan Chicago than in the rest of Illinois. Income does not explain racial or ethnic inequality.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper argues that fiction and literary non-fiction should play an important role in the environmental politics classroom, and explores how such works might best be employed. The paper draws on experience with past, present, and future-oriented liter

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Previous research has shown that people appear to use television fiction memories when asked to make a judgment about social reality. It has been argued that such memory based judgment occurs because people mislabel fictitious memories or because they do not take information about source validity into account. This study argues that fiction contains cues which tell some viewers that some of what they see resembles reality. In that case a viewer makes an on line, stimulus based judgment and learns a fact while watching fiction. This “sudden insight” was called the data setting effect.
In a sample of 501 Flemish students 29 1f thirteen year olds had knowledge about police procedures in the USA which they could only have obtained by watching TV fiction. Knowledge levels increased with age. 74.4 1003410535f eighteen year olds possessed the same knowledge.
The paper argues fist, that that the data setting effect is strong and persistent. Second, that it may occur at an early age, which may explain why little or no association between measures of viewing volume and knowledge of the TV world is found in adult age groups. Third, the implication of the first two conclusions is that in TV effects research age should not be treated as a demographic background variable, but rather as a measure of overall lifetime TV viewing.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The theme of the frontier as a geographic demarcation where different cultures conflictively co-exist has drawn a multidisciplinary attention since the earliest days of the European arrival to the New World. The initial clash between the Old World and America has been translated into various polarizations: the war between civilization and barbarism, the politics of oppression vs. the policy of liberation, the economic exploitation vs. the recognition of human rights, etc. These are some of the binaries that describe the vision of the frontier as a challenge to the reconciliation of conflicting values in the cultural encounters of America.
My attempt in this work is to read some of the author’s fictions that pivot around the interaction between the men of the city and the men of the frontier, with the premise that his stories reflect a cultural amalgam in which the values of the frontier eventually mould the life of the city. I am aware that the processes and features of such movement are highly debatible; for some authors Borges had contradictory loyalties to both sides of the division between civilization and barbarism [Strong, 1997 in Lois Parkinson, 2002]; others tend to see this contradiction resolved in a nihilistic fashion [Rodriguez Monegal, 1978; Franco 1981; Bloom, 1994]; indeed some may highlight the ironical tone of his social portraits as a proof of his apparent apartisanism.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The paper assesses the dynamics of party system development in Ukraine after the 2006 and 2007 elections to the Rada and raises a question about the significance of a tendency toward greater political institutionalization demonstrated in this nation