Abstract
Alisha Kirchoff
Cape May is a small town in Southern New Jersey where the Contexts editor, Fabio Rojas, grew up. Harriet Tubman once worked in Cape May and Abraham Lincoln slept in one the town’s stately hotels. During the winter, Cape May is a sleepy fishing place. Light snow decorates the area and farmers and fishermen dominate the scene. Fishing is so central to Cape May that the largest employer is the local Coast Guard base, which is one of that service’s most important training centers. In summer, Cape May is transformed into a different place. Hundreds of thousands of tourists descend on the town. The sudden influx of people also includes immigrant workers who come from Latin America and Eastern Europe.
Towns like Cape May teach us that place is a dynamic and social thing. A town can be the home for a local working class community, a stop over for immigrant workers looking for summer employment, and a playground for vacationers. A quaint town can be a summer sojourn for political leaders, but also a place for resistance and transformation.
The Spring 2022 issue of Contexts is dedicated to the theme of place and meaning making. We have a fascinating collection of articles that delve into the idea that people actively create and recreate place. Catherine Simpson Bueker and Teal Rothschild examine how a small New England community transforms from a quiet fishing village to a summer tourist destination with a globalized workforce each summer. Matthew DelSesto grapples with the legacy of Christopher Columbus, memorialization, and cultural identity. This article directly grapples with the social conflict around memorials that mark the conquest of the Americas. The dispute over Columbus also touches on American history because for many Americans, the remembrance of Columbus is as much about Italian heritage as it is about colonization.
Other articles explore neighborhoods specifically. Sara Duvi-sac, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, and Avigail Vantu take us to Crown Heights, one of Brooklyn’s most rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods, where poor housing conditions are rampant in spite of the recent infusion of wealth there. Evelyn Perry discusses the upsides of neighborhood conflict and how it can help build strong, diverse communities. Kimberly Creasap argues that the decline of the urban gay bar scene has given way to increased small-town acceptance and the presence of LGBTQ communities that do not need the urban centers as refuge as much as the past. Regine Jackson describes how members of the Caribbean diaspora use the Atlanta Carnival as an assertion of belonging.
Focusing on movement, Pilar Morales-Giner and Cristina Ramos discuss the importance of recognizing the underlying dimensions of climate migration and how doing so could inform future approaches to immigration policy. Juan Pedroza uses Department of Homeland Security and Center for Migration Studies data to reveal how deportation of unauthorized immigrants in the United States disproportionately affects those from Haiti and Central America compared with other immigrant groups in the U.S. These articles forcefully remind us that disputes over place are not always limited to symbolic issues. When people move between places, there is often resistance and contestation. Unfortunately, damaging policies are put into place to prevent movement across places. Our policy brief focuses on homelessness. Garrett Grainger challenges new policy trends in urban homelessness management of providing housing before all other resources and instead argues that the U.S. Federal Government must make preventative investments in homelessness prevention.
Our photo essays are outstanding and they too address place. Stephanie Hartwell and her team reveal the persistent social problems in Detroit’s peripheral neighborhoods despite a commitment to downtown revitalization efforts. Aaron Yoder and Zach Schrank examine human impacts on the environment and climate change through aerial photos of human-made spaces of production, extraction, and waste.
Our section editors have provided us with a rich selection of articles that complement our focus on place and meaning. Georgetown Professor and former Department of Justice investigator Christy Lopez talks with Contexts’ Genesis Fuentes about her work on the Ferguson Report and the challenges of police reform. Sarah E. Patterson reviews Deborah J. Cohan’s book, Welcome to Wherever We Are, which is a sociologically informed memoir about the complexities of caregiving for elderly family members with a history of abusive behavior. In our “One Thing I Know” section, Scott Chazdon recounts his experiences at a racial equity summit for his work with the University of Minnesota Extension. Danielle Bessett explains how a lack of access to abortion is harmful to everyone. If nothing else, this issue tells us that sociology is definitely the place to be for first-class social science and policy work. Thank you for reading.