Suchergebnisse

Increasing the use of merit-based competition has become a popular policy idea for federal transportation funding. Focusing on a competitive program—the 2009 Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) program—this article asserts thatsuch competition does not guarantee transparency or that awards will actually maximize benefits. In addition, competitive award programs can widen gaps across places and among people. Rather than rush towards competition, careful program design is needed, and more debate on the federal role in transportation is warranted.

Local funds for transportation infrastructure are increasingly necessary, even though the U.S. federal government provides billions for urban rail projects. Through analysis of a competitive federal rail program (New Starts), this research tests the hypothesis that local financing decisions—as a demand-side factor in funding allocations—can drive federal rail spending. The analysis also considers alternative explanations for funding outcomes: transportation benefits and political clout. Based on a statistical analysis of 60 projects and 2 brief project profiles, findings indicate that local financial commitment—more than other factors—explains federal awards. Rail expansions that most advance federal transportation goals, as captured by program evaluation criteria, are not more likely to receive New Starts awards, but funded projects all met a minimum threshold for benefits. As a result, local decisions on transit funding both rely on and affect the allocation of federal monies.

Transportation systems shape the built environment of cities and the lived experiences of their residents, but equitable public participation in municipal transportation decision-making is limited. Furthermore, municipal transportation decision-making—and thus public participation within it—exists in a complicated field of transportation provision, while intersecting with a myriad of policy issues. This research article draws on Chicago as a case study and existing research in transportation and planning to argue for equity-oriented capacity building by transportation agencies. Such capacity building should more explicitly clarify official and informal decision-making processes and their politicized nature to enhance equitable, meaningful impact on transportation decisions.

Self-examinations of researcher positionality are central to understanding how scholars engage with research populations and vice versa. Discussions of how researchers are positioned are considered particularly important when studying groups whose vulnerability is well-accepted. Less is known, however, about the role of researcher positionality when interviewing participants deemed privileged, such as expatriates. Researchers who study expatriates overwhelmingly omit to discuss their positionality and how this shaped their research processes and outcomes. In response, our article calls for a turn in expatriate scholarship towards greater, and more public, examinations of researchers' social locations and their effects. Drawing upon our research experiences in Hong Kong, we explore the complexities of conducting reflective practice when investigating expatriate life and highlight an over-reliance on the field to trigger considerations of positionality. In response, we suggest that expatriate researchers should be more proactive in their reflexivity and offer some prompts for these self-assessments. Beyond this, we advocate for more conducive research environments, including systems of peer support, to enable expatriate researchers to deepen understandings of their own positionalities while also holding each other reflexively accountable. These suggestions also hold potential benefit for other sociologists such as those studying elite populations and/or the globally mobile.

The rich history of encounters prior to World War I between people from German-speaking parts of Europe and people of African descent has gone largely unnoticed in the historical literature—not least because Germany became a nation and engaged in colonization much later than other European nations. This volume presents intersections of Black and German history over eight centuries while mapping continuities and ruptures in Germans' perceptions of Blacks. Juxtaposing these intersections demonstrates that negative German perceptions of Blackness proceeded from nineteenth-century racial theories, and that earlier constructions of "race" were far more differentiated. The contributors present a wide range of Black–German encounters, from representations of Black saints in religious medieval art to Black Hessians fighting in the American Revolutionary War, from Cameroonian children being educated in Germany to African American agriculturalists in Germany's protectorate, Togoland. Each chapter probes individual and collective responses to these intercultural points of contact