Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: I use non-participant observation, as well as analysis of photographic images to investigate whether the dynamics of interaction between mall patrons and the shopping mall Santa identified by Thompson and Hickey (1989) are still relevant more than a decade later. In the process of doing so, I highlight the importance of unlimited access (via photographs) to contextual details for linking micro to macro levels of analysis, and the value of setting for discerning the relationship between time, space, and social relations. It was only upon reviewing the images and expanding the focus of inquiry that the wider-ranging implications of this project became apparent. The untapped potential for researchers, as well as our students in undergraduate sociology courses, to benefit from the use of images is immense.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This study concerns social control strategies in planned spaces, but as an ethnomethodological investigation addresses issues beyond the deliberate agendas of security policy and architectural planning. This study's focus is
on how persons orient to design elements of shopping malls- corridors, furniture, colours, and the like- and how these design features are
construable as "players" in those contexts. To that end I examine how design can militate techniques of social-interactional "management" produced by interactants themselves and unforeseen in architects' or designers' plans.
This research suggests a broadening of the notion of "social control" beyond formal and informal human sources to include the physical features of
spaces like shopping malls, and not only of prisons or similar total institutions. This study advises moreover how inanimate objects and the
spaces that comprise them are informative for and relevant to the behaviours of human interactants.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The ‘Bazaar’ and the ‘Mall’ not only provides a stark visual contrasts between that of an informal versus formal market space, it increasingly typifies the larger shift in the choices that an average urban Indian makes in their daily rituals. Be it preferences they have for a more cosmopolitan (western) cuisine, dress styles and social etiquettes, or the ways in which they accept the changing patterns of cultural (values and ethics) emotional (multiple identities) and ideological (new consumerism)facets of a fast paced ‘globalised’ style of living.

Are these new physical spaces and cultural virtues being created by the ‘local’ norms accommodating the global or is there a tension between the two? Some consider the resistance to global forces a result of a sudden rise in nationalist sentiments, be it the case of issuing fatwa on the dress code of young college girls, or a move towards changing names of cities, such as the recent proposal to rename Bangalore as Bangaluru, (the name by which it was referred to in pre-colonial times). Is this resistance symptomatic of the traditional conflict between the ‘have’s’ and ‘have not’s’, or has it moved to a non-economic sphere which is being influenced by global rather than local forces of change in our culture, identity, politics and legal system within a specific spatial context?
This paper will explore the issue of space not only from a philosophical (drawing from urban sociology) perspective, but also from a more pragmatic and utilitarian (urban planning and governance) approach as well. As an academic researcher with training in urban Sociology and urban Planning, I have the advantage of exploring and weaving together various facets of culture, politics and laws governing urban space in India, with special focus on the city of Delhi.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Six miles outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania lies the town of Homestead. Once the home of Andrew Carnegie’s immense Homestead Steel Works, and the location of some of the greatest battles in American labor history, Homestead is now the site of a vast retail complex called the Waterfront. Although alternatives were proposed for the use of this land, the Waterfront complex was the only one seriously considered and as a result, Homestead has gone from a steel town to ‘any-town’ USA, making the journey from modern place to postmodern space. This study examines both the social and economic implications of Homestead’s transition and its alternatives, as well as the role of this transition in larger societal trends.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper analyzes the presence of the shopping mall and consumer cultures in post-war El Salvador as a significant site of imaginaries of citizenship in the context of global flows. I base my analysis on ethnographic observations in three shopping malls in San Salvador, in addition to observations of street vendors in the downtown area of this city. Although “public” in character, the shopping mall is a private space that reproduces ideas of economic inequality and disparate access to goods. The mall can supply a lifestyle—everything from secure parking lots and identification with fashionable global brands, to “culture” in its multiple forms—for those who can afford to be its citizens. Even as the mall intends to eliminate the consumer’s need to confront the reality of the street, the street continues to be an important site where the economic and political importance of consumption is realized for many Salvadorans who are excluded from the formal sector. As shopping malls have grown in number and size, the informal sector in San Salvador, and the average Salvadoran family’s dependence on remittances from abroad, have also expanded. These spaces are involved in a dialogue about the processes and consequences of consumption in contemporary Salvadoran society—the mall and the street communicate and link even as they differentiate.