COMMUNITY ACTIVISM IN OAK PARK: COMPETING AGENDAS ...
COMMUNITY ACTIVISM IN OAK PARK: COMPETING AGENDAS ...
COMMUNITY ACTIVISM IN OAK PARK: COMPETING AGENDAS ...
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Although the anthropological literature on the city published since the 1980s has<br />
incorporated a number of models and paradigms from other disciplines, the dominant<br />
research trends in urban anthropology appear to be post-structuralist studies of race, class,<br />
and gender in the urban context; political economic studies of transnational culture; and<br />
symbolic and social production studies of urban space and planning (Low 1996b:401-<br />
402). And while “cities are seen as sites of polarization, segmentation and differentiation,<br />
and also of important struggles—what is missing from these conceptions of spatial scales<br />
as continuous and nested, however, is attention to spatial scales ‘below’ the level of the<br />
urban (such as the body, home, community, and neighborhood)” (Vaiou and Lykogianni<br />
2006:731).<br />
The most important transition in the anthropological study of the city occurred in<br />
the 1980s, with the introduction of the political economy model. 4 Walton (1993:304)<br />
suggests that the political economy model has been the dominant paradigm in urban<br />
sociology for the past 25 years. Further, Amin and Graham (1997:411) suggest that<br />
“urban studies has experienced a remarkable renaissance in the past fifteen years, fueled<br />
by the replacement of tight, positivistic approaches with structuralist and more recently,<br />
post-structuralist theories.” This model allowed researchers to introduce a different<br />
framework or critique of urban anthropology to research in the United States, thus<br />
ushering in a decade of ethnographies that demonstrate how structural forces shape urban<br />
experience (Low 1996b:386). Examples of a few of these landmark ethnographies<br />
include Norman Street by Ida Susser (1982a), which focuses on a Brooklyn working-<br />
class neighborhood, a monograph by Ulf Hannerz (1980) titled, Exploring the City, and<br />
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