Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The widespread implementation of geographic information systems has played an enormous role in the way that modern metropolitan police departments concentrate their efforts. This current focus on crime science provides administrators with up to date details of crime and crime patterns within municipalities as well as the ability to focus on smaller geographic areas. Particular emphasis has been placed on 'hot spots' analyses wherein police efforts are concentrated in these smaller geographic areas, characterized by disproportionately greater crime counts or an increased count of calls for service. Unfortunately, this emphasis on hot spots analyses leads us to a circular reasoning where crime is the only, or best, predictor of crime.

This research offers an alternative through the construction of theoretically driven hot spots. Examining over two years worth of crime data from Philadelphia, Pa. this research compares the effectiveness of traditional hot spots against the effectiveness of theory driven hot spots, employing social disorganization theory, in consistently identifying areas in which concentrations of crime occur.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Under Suharto, the state demobilized labor and only permitted one state-backed union, the All-Indonesia Workers Unions (SPSI, Serikat Pekerja Seluruh Indonesia) to exist. Since SPSI was an ineffective advocate for workers, organized only a small percentage of the labor force, showed few signs of reforming, lost much of its financial support from the government, and was shunned by international funders, most labor activists wrote off SPSI following the transition to democracy, surmising that members would abandon SPSI and join new unions in droves. Yet seven years later, SPSI, while not flourishing, remains the largest confederation in Indonesia. I explore the resilience of SPSI as a way to both understand their continued dominance in Indonesia to reflect on the broader theoretical issue of legacy unions. I argue that SPSI has maintained its ascendancy primarily through preventing exit rather than as a result of fundamental reforms. It has been able to prevent exit through collaboration with management, intimidation of opponents, continued government favoritism, and through conceding autonomy to lower levels of the organization. In addition, since few unions have offered dynamic alternatives to SPSI and labor legislation has facilitated the fragmentation of these unions, many SPSI affiliates are not tempted to exit and the new independent unions are divided into dozens of federations and thousands of unaffiliated plant-level unions.

Publication Type: Proceeding

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: “Gender Identity Disorder of Childhood” (GID-C), a psychiatric diagnostic category described as a “strong and persistent cross-gender identification” accompanied by “persistent discomfort about one’s assigned sex or a sense of inappropriateness in the gender role of that sex” (APA 1994: 532-533), has been criticized both by mental health professionals and by nonprofessional commentators since its inclusion in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1980. The most often levied critique is that GID-C pathologizes pre-homosexual children. Further, critics of GID-C draw on the APA’s own decision to declassify homosexuality (1973) to bolster their assessment of GID-C. In this paper, I examine the often-ignored early psychiatric and psychological literatures on gender variant children to show that professionals were interested in a variety of possible adult outcomes (notably, homosexuality, transvestism, and transsexuality). I then review both the intraprofessional and extraprofessional critiques of GID-C, and discuss some of the ways that they are limited in their ability to effect diagnostic revision. Finally, I propose suggestions about how to better conceptualize the “problems” with GID-C.

Publication Type: Session Paper
Abstract: This paper investigates the social and cultural dimensions of video surveillance--the continuous and systematic monitoring of people and spaces for the purpose of ensuring personal/public safety, protecting property, and minimizing risks. Here I develop a comprehensive theoretical framework to understand video surveillance and investigate the impetus behind the development and deployment of this technology as well as its social, cultural implications. In this sense, I offer a media ecological examination by focusing on the social, cultural environment in which video surveillance takes root. The questions that I address concern how and why video surveillance technologies and practices are becoming incorporated into our institutional and cultural practices, their social and political implications; and how they shape and are shaped by the larger media universe. One of my key objectives is to understand the cultural fascination with video surveillance, its articulation as commonsensical, and its unproblematic acceptance by the public. To this end, I examine prominent representations of video surveillance in film, television, news broadcasts and press coverage, and tackle the social relations and cultural practices video surveillance is embedded in. In doing so, I identify the political and ideological implications of these representations, and their role in developing ways of understanding video surveillance in public consciousness. Central to my project is the interplay between the society of spectacle and society of surveillance, both of which rely exclusively on images; are preoccupied with visual communication (albeit for seemingly different purposes); and evidently intersect through the same technology. Through a discussion of the cultural fascination with surveillance as in the example of infinite replays of surveillance camera footage on TV and on the Internet, and the appropriation of emergent communication technologies such as “camera phones” for voyeuristic pleasures, I argue that the social, cultural practices of spectacle and surveillance inevitably shape each other.