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We all do it. We label persons or groups as chic, funky, chauvinist, cool, Uncle Tom, nerdy, liberated, Baby Boomers, and more. Political and religious leaders similarly make moral statements, for instance by applying Biblical characters’ names to contemporaries like Bill Clinton or Saddam Hussein – as Satanical or a Good Samaritan. Muslims analogously invoke the Koran.

This chapter seeks to analyse neighbouring in times of rapid change in the Chinese metropolis of Shanghai. Using the local neighbourhood of Tianzifang as a case study, this chapter shows how the pace of change in Shanghai since the 1950s has reshaped the social fabric of the area, including traditional neighbour relations. As Tianzifang has shifted from an unknown neighbourhood comprised of traditional lilong dwellings, where social relations played out in private communal settings, to one of Shanghai’s most famous tourist spots, the relationships between residents, as well as with ‘outsiders’ and the familiar local environment, have also changed. Traditional neighbourly ties have been broken, rebuilt and transformed again through waves of new residents coming into the area and the displacement of others who can no longer afford to live there. For those who remain, the question of who is, and thus who is not, a ‘real’ neighbour has been narrowed to include only ‘insiders’ with a deep sense of belonging and connection to the area – i.e. the urban working class who have always lived in Tianzifang and own rather than rent their homes. Yet even this is no longer sufficient. The disruption that Tianzifang’s physical and social transformation has brought to residents’ lives has also imposed new social norms about how neighbours should behave in this new, intermediary space of public and private. ‘Real’ neighbours are those who conform to changing social norms while neighbours who breach them can be ostracised and excluded by others who once saw them as an insider.

Since the arrival of mass production, commodification has been plaguing markets – none more so than that for music. By separating production and consumption in space and time, commodification challenges the very conditions underlying economic exchange. This chapter explores authenticity as the institutional response to the commodification of music, rekindling the relationship between isolated market participants in the increasingly digitized world of music. Building upon the “Production of Culture” perspective, we unpack the commodification of music across five different institutional realms – (1) production, (2) consumption, (3) selection, (4) appropriation, and (5) classification – and provide a thoroughly relational account of authenticity as an institutional practice.

This paper addresses how local retailers remain resilient in negotiating the lead up to and immediate aftermath of two major disasters (Typhoons Nesat and Nalgae) within a developing urban context (Dagupan City, Pangasinan). It highlights the specific mechanisms by which urban traders engage the Philippines’ more pervasive and highly resilient “culture of disaster” vis-à-vis conditions of chronic natural hazard.

This study relies predominately on the traditional anthropological techniques of participant observation and informal/semi-structured interviews to gather relevant project data. Supplementing these two core methods are findings derived from secondary sources like local and provincial newspapers, government records, public and university libraries, and census findings.

Findings suggest that a continual cycle of disaster impact and response does not overtly affect small retailers’ entrepreneurial initiative. It becomes clear that a persistent threat of natural hazards fosters a rather fatalistic sense of self-reliance.

Study was designed and funded as a quick-response study; therefore, the research timeframe was rather compressed and the informant pool somewhat limited.

The Philippines is widely recognized as a “culture of disaster” given its volatile position along the Pacific’s “Ring of Fire” and “Typhoon Alley.” This distinction assumes added dimension as the effects of global climate change become increasingly pervasive at the local level.

This paper adds ethnographic detail to a growing body of data on small business resilience within disaster prone areas of the Global South amid intensifying global climate change.

In this chapter, I focus on stigmatization exercised and experienced by local residents, comparing two socially-diverse areas in very different contexts: the Cabrini Green-Near North area in Chicago and the La Loma-La Florida area in Santiago de Chile.

Data for this study were drawn from 1 year of qualitative research, using interviews with residents and institutional actors, field notes from observation sessions of several inter-group spaces, and “spatial inventories” in which I located the traces of the symbolic presence of each group.

Despite contextual differences of type of social differentiation, type of social mix, type of housing tenure for the poor, and public visibility, I argue that there are important common problems: first, symbolic differences are stressed by identity changes; second, distrust against “the other” is spatially crystallized in any type and scale of social housing; third, stigmatization changes in form and scale; and fourth, there are persisting prejudiced depictions and patterns of avoidance.

Socially-mixed neighborhoods, as areas where at least two different social groups live in proximity, offer an interesting context for observing territorial stigmatization. They are strange creatures of urban development, due to the powerful symbolism of desegregation in contexts of growing inequalities.

The chapter contributes to a cross-national perspective with a comparison of global-north and global-south cities. And it also springs from a study of socially-mixed areas, in which the debate on concentrated/deconcentrated poverty is central, and in which the problem of “clearing places” appears in both material (e.g., displacement) and symbolic (e.g., stigmatization) terms.

Purpose – I argue that one can articulate a historically attuned and analytically rich model for understanding jazz in its various inflections. That is, on the one hand, such a model permits us to affirm jazz as a historically conditioned, dynamic hybridity. On the other hand, to acknowledge jazz’s open and multiple character in no way negates our ability to identify discernible features of various styles and esthetic traditions. Additionally, my model affirms the sociopolitical, legal (Jim Crow and copyright laws), and economic structures that shaped jazz. Consequently, my articulation of bebop as an inflection of Afro-modernism highlights the sociopolitical, and highly racialized context in which this music was created. Without a recognition of the sociopolitical import of bebop, one’s understanding of the music is impoverished, as one fails to grasp the strategic uses to which the music and discourses about the music were put.

Design methodology/approach – I engage in an interdisciplinary study of jazz via analyses and commentary on selected texts from several scholarly disciplines.

Findings – To acknowledge the hybridity and social construction of jazz esthetics in no way nullifies the innovations and leadership of African American jazz musicians whose artistic contributions not only significantly shaped modern jazz in the mid-twentieth century but also whose musical voices continue to sound and set esthetical standards in contemporary expressions of jazz (and beyond).

Originality and value – My chapter is highly interdisciplinary, bringing philosophical explanations of race, discourse, and the ontology of music into conversation with numerous sociological and (ethno)musicological insights about jazz.

The purpose of this chapter is to analyze ethical issues and current trends of major college athletics in relationship to Black males in society. The focus of this chapter is on identity and how higher education institutions can cultivate a more balanced student-athlete mindset through images and representations. In addition to a review of relevant literature, a content analysis of six State Farm Insurance Cliff and Chris Paul commercials was conducted so that new knowledge is applied to the constructs of academic and athletic identity. Commercial and advertisement content analysis was utilized to address student-athlete life skills issues in terms of transferable attributes from sport to life. College athletics programs need to develop systemic and culturally relevant strategies that enable Black males to transfer skill sets developed through participation in intercollegiate athletics to future occupational endeavors. The chapter concludes with a recommendation section for education research, practice, and policy.