Thursday, September 28
Talk: 3:30 – 5:00 PM
Reception: 5:00 – 6:00 PM

Hybrid Event: 1155 E. 60th St., Room 142, or via Zoom

Global heating appears to be accelerating and to prevent it from disrupting organized existence we must quickly and substantially reduce the burning of fossil fuels, reduce consumption and demand, and achieve a just transition to renewable energy. Local decision makers, including university chancellors and city and state officials generally have not, and will not, implement policy in a timely way to leave fossil fuels in the ground without being impelled by a large-scale social mobilization. I will speak about social mobilization from my perspective as an academic who quit a career in cognitive neuroscience to focus on the climate crisis. I will provide some examples of successful social mobilization from our organizing efforts within the University of California and the overlap with psychology research. I will argue that insofar as the fields of environmental and social psychology have concerned themselves with the climate crisis, they have mostly done so through studies of individual rather than collective action. Even when these fields focus on collective action, they have almost entirely been limited to cross-sectional survey studies (often online), and self-reported actions or hypothetical intentions. Instead I will discuss how we are trying to pioneer a new kind of field study: we teach research participants to organize for climate action and study the psychological factors that predispose them and make them successful.

Wednesday, May 31, 12:30 PM

Hybrid Event: 1155 E. 60th St., Room 101 (Mansueto Lounge), or via Zoom

Visions and strategies for the city as a key place for just and sustainable transformation are gaining rapid ground in a time of ever-more pressing environmental and social challenges. In this presentation, I explore the potential of the city as a place for such transformation, by drawing on the findings of my ongoing PhD project. In the project, I study the case of Amsterdam, whose city council recently initiated a circular economy strategy that foregrounds the role of citizens and community organisations in its implementation. Through a qualitative approach, I aim to understand how citizen-driven initiatives promoting alternative forms of economic, social, and political organising get to play a role in shaping the future of Amsterdam. I consider the relevant actors and their practices, and I situate these developments within a wider political-economic context, to understand the mechanisms through which sustainable and inclusive urban futures might be enacted.

Wednesday, May 17, 12:30 PM

Hybrid Event: 1155 E. 60th St., Room 101 (Mansueto Lounge), or via Zoom

Due to previous housing segregation practices like “redlining,” many underprivileged urban communities continue to face systematic economic violence. This has contributed to a prolonged national scarcity of affordable housing and displacement as a result of limited land resources, market speculation, and other factors. In this framework, modern zoning is a crucial policy that also directs the majority of development practices. However, the findings suggest that zoning and the policies that support it protect and constrain the establishment of important spatial morphologies, resulting in an even more unequal distribution of spatial resources. These representational methods and procedures create a kind of artificial spatial scarcity in addition to being discriminatory practices that uphold systemic geographic imbalances. Concerns about spatial justice and reparative justice continue to be crucial in identifying alternatives to current policies that may provide more equitable outcomes. This presentation will explore how policy reform coupled with emergent spatial morphologies of housing development might help shape and materially negotiate new scalable concepts of spatial and reparative justice through an analysis and case studies of Harlem, New York’s housing challenges, and assigned zoning policies. The talk will suggest an expanded role for these spatial justice issues using investigative policy review and reform, planning, and design—a role geared toward encouraging meaningful policy debate and the regeneration and redistribution of spatial resources with the goal of offsetting or slowing forms of gentrification and building mutualist markets.​

Wednesday, May 3, 12:30 PM

Hybrid Event: 1155 E. 60th St., Room 101 (Mansueto Lounge), or via Zoom

The behaviour of people living in socially deprived urban areas is often different from that of their affluent neighbours. They eat different food, trust one another less, have different priorities, and different valuations of the future. These behaviours are often stigmatized as irrational or invoked as the causes of their poverty. But there is another possible perspective: people make generally reasonable adaptations to the actual environments they live in and the material constraints they face. I will illustrate this general thesis with theoretical models and data from my research in the UK. I will argue that understanding people’s psychological adaptation to their context requires much more detailed data on people’s experienced environments than we typically gather, and a shift away from seeing human cognition as flawed or deficient, and towards seeing it as flexible and ‘rational under the circumstances’.

Wednesday, April 19, 12:30 PM

Hybrid Event: 1155 E. 60th St., Room 101 (Mansueto Lounge), or via Zoom

Now proven to be essential agents of change globally, cities occupy a central role in societal responses to climate change. In its 5th and 6th reports, the IPCC has endorsed the need for a transformative research agenda on cities and climate. Although growing momentum exists to unleash the transformative potential of urban action, the extent to which current practice can address root causes and connections between unequal urban development and climate change is limited. I draw lessons from social and policy approaches to LA100 Equity Strategies in this presentation. This high social impact project, which involves a community-informed analysis of strategies for Los Angeles, can shed light on how to ensure cities around the world transition to 100% clean energy while also centering on justice and the needs of underrepresented populations.

Wednesday, April 5, 12:30 PM

Hybrid Event: 1155 E. 60th St., Room 101 (Mansueto Lounge), or via Zoom – Speaker will be remote

Some psychologists ask whether a given behavior results from evolution or development. However, all phenotypes result from development. And all development, in turn, results from evolved mechanisms interacting with previous and current contexts. Therefore, all phenotypes have both an evolutionary history and a developmental history. In this talk, I will first conceptualize evolution and development as nested processes operating on different timescales: across generations, some developmental mechanisms are passed on more than others; within generations, these mechanisms tailor individuals to local environments based on their experiences. Using this framework, I will argue that humans have evolved mechanisms for developmental adjustments to several forms of childhood adversity (e.g., exposure to violence, resource insecurity, low parental investment). Such adaptations may include hidden talents, social and cognitive abilities that are enhanced by adversity, and reasonable responses, strategies that respond to the affordances and constraints of adverse conditions. However, to study adaptations, we need clear definitions and measures of the environment. I next discuss environmental statistics, a framework for describing environmental stability and change over space and time. This framework affords building theory and testing ideas about specific dimensions of the environment and developmental adaptations. Taken together, this work contributes to a well-rounded scientific understanding of human development in adverse conditions, which includes not only possible impairments or deficits, but also strengths and strategies. Such a well-rounded view has the potential to inform education, jobs, policy, and interventions that leverage the strengths of people living in adverse conditions.

Wednesday, March 29, 12:30 PM

Hybrid Event: 1155 E. 60th St., Room 101 (Mansueto Lounge), or via Zoom

In his seminal work on neighborhood identity, Suttles (1972) argued that neighborhoods are “embedded in a contrastive structure in which each neighborhood is known primarily as a counterpart to some others.” Despite this recognition of the relational nature of neighborhood knowledge, few studies examine how people sort and group neighborhoods or how collective conceptions of neighborhood identity are formed and maintained. One reason for this oversight is a lack of data that simultaneously capture residents’ views of their own neighborhood and other neighborhoods across their city. In this talk, I describe findings and future directions of research that draw on a survey tool developed to capture the relational quality of residents’ knowledge of and experience with neighborhoods in three US cities – Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington D.C. First, I highlight the utility of this data to explore systematic differences in neighborhood familiarity and the implications of these “blind spots” for urban research. Second, I illustrate how this relational data can be used to develop ecometric measures of communities by examining the collective nature of neighborhood reputation and reputations’ demographic and physical underpinnings. Throughout, I argue that research that embraces the contrastive structure of urban spaces is critical for developing more realistic models of urban behavior and decision-making.

Wednesday, March 22, 12:30 PM

Hybrid Event: 1155 E. 60th St., Room 101 (Mansueto Lounge), or via Zoom – Speaker will be remote

Behavioural interventions targeting low-income communities tend to focus on eliciting the kind of health, financial, and educational decisions that enhance people’s long-term life outcomes, thereby helping them move away from financial precarity. What has been less considered, until recently, is the influence of the surrounding context of material and social adversity in shaping decision-making in the first place. This talk will outline research taking a socioecological perspective on decision-making in low income contexts, with consideration for interventions that are relevant in contemporary urban settings.

Wednesday, February 22, 12 PM

Hybrid Event: 1155 E. 60th St., Room 101 (Mansueto Lounge), or via Zoom

Neighborhoods are a paramount aspect of sociological study and the social experience more generally; the inequality between them is evident in many realms, especially the concentration of crime. Despite a great deal of research on crime diffusion across urban areas, comparatively little is known about the influence of networks on this pattern. To better understand the distribution of crime across a city, I conduct a spatial examination of a large network of individuals involved in arrests. Neighborhood connections can be defined by linking the neighborhood in which an arrested person resides to the neighborhood in which the respective crime occurred. This connection creates a social tie between two neighborhoods that theoretically allows for the flow of ideas, information, or resources across a city. I use crime incident reports and arrest data from Boston, US to create and examine the network of neighborhoods connected by crime. I examine how the characteristics of the ties between neighborhoods, including crime types, inform the understanding of urban crime. Identifying networked patterns of crime provides more information for the formulation of appropriate social policies aimed at crime prevention and improving inequalities across communities.

February 15, 12 PM

Hybrid Event: 1155 E. 60th Street., Room 101 (Mansueto Lounge), or via Zoom

Video

Cutting edge research on street gangs often leverages official data from government agencies to measure the social networks of gangs to capture the interactions and relationships among gang-involved individuals. However, as gang activity has shifted to the “digital streets” of social media, a burgeoning literature has begun to investigate how gang-involved people interact online. In addition to scholars, gang activity displayed on social media has captured the attention of non-gang involved members of the public who have created their own spaces to discuss gang activity. As such, this project analyzes posts from a discussion board about Chicago “Drill” rap and gangs to evaluate whether online-based, crowd-sourced knowledge about gang networks can inform academic research. This talk will describe an NLP-based strategy for extracting individual identities and gang affiliations from social media posts and demonstrate the utility of these data by testing whether features of the crowd-sourced network are correlated with mortality among gang-involved individuals. This talk will further outline how this network can be used to explore the role that geography, social media posting, and rap music play in shaping and creating gang dynamics that drive risk across urban places.

Wednesday, February 8, 12 PM

Hybrid Event: 1155 E. 60th Street., Room 101 (Mansueto Lounge), or via Zoom

Video

Is technological change cumulative or disruptive? The extent to which new technologies build on existing technologies or replace them has deep and direct implications for how actors, organizations, and cities generate, maintain, and lose technology-based competitive advantages. Cumulative models of technological change predict the technological advantages of inventors, firms, and cities grow over time, while models of disruptive technological change predict that new individuals, firms, and cities can displace incumbents by developing new technological capabilities that obsolesce the knowledge bases of the incumbents. In this presentation, I present evidence in support of the theory of disruptive technological change at the scale of individual inventors. Using detailed information on the careers and collaborative networks of the inventors of patents, I show that novel ideas that bolster patenting output are generated by young inventors who work in highly interdependent relationships with their fellow junior collaborators. I generate this insight by identifying the importance of inventors in two age groups (young and mid-career) for enhancing the patenting productivity of their collaborators. Using the premature deaths of 78,000 inventors as an exogenous shock to their 78,000 collaborators’ collaborative networks, I find that inventors who lose a junior collaborator to a premature death produce one fewer patent over the following 10 years relative to inventors who lose mid-career collaborators, an 8.7% difference. This effect is strongest when the surviving is also young, indicating that innovation emerges from dense networks of highly-interdependent junior inventors. By locating the nucleus of invention in the networks that connect junior inventors, these results de-emphasize the importance of inter-generational knowledge spillovers for sustaining innovation over time, suggest that the costs of education burdens for continued innovation are not as high as is commonly believed, and propose that knowledge obsolescence is a powerful headwind faced by the economy.

Wednesday, January 11, 12 PM

Hybrid Event: 1155 E. 60th Street., Room 101 (Mansueto Lounge) or via Zoom

While cities exist as layered social spaces constructed through aggregated human interactions, the archaeological record usually only preserves physical infrastructure. Past actions and lifeways have to be inferred from the indirect evidence provided by mapping, excavation, and analysis of that built environment. While daily routines limited the activity of people in the past (as they do today), daily commutes to obtain goods and services or – especially in garden cities – to tend agricultural fields can be reconstructed through walking times. More than 100,000 residents of Classic Period Caracol experienced a city that facilitated residential access to neighbors, agricultural terraces, residential reservoirs, and urban services. The widespread distribution of public plazas across the city facilitated all social, political, religious, or economic events that required formalized, open spaces. Ballcourts remained similarly accessible to provide venues for playing and watching the Mesoamerican ballgame. E Groups, though built earlier, maintained their use as community centers over time with the downtown E Group gaining ritual preeminence. Finally, the city’s causeway system linked together these distributed nodes of public services across the residential landscape through a dendritic, citywide road network. Using spatial analysis, it can be demonstrated that the city of Caracol remained easily walkable for its inhabitants, providing both access to agricultural fields and allowing residents to engage in all the mundane, daily aspects of urban life in their garden city.