A burgeoning literature on white-collar unemployment and job searching has sought over the past two decades to explain why white-collar workers embrace neoliberal labor market restructuring, and why they often blame themselves for the failure of labor markets to provide stable, secure employment. Recent work, especially Sharone, has shown how neoliberal ideology is rooted in the details of American labor market institutions. More recently, however, U.S. employment relations have undergone a reconfiguration, punctuated by the Great Recession, raising new questions about self-blame and system-blame among white-collar job seekers. In this article, the authors draw on a unique data set of 43 white-collar job seekers interviewed in 2012 and 2013 and argue that, in the post-Great Recession period, what Sharone calls the chemistry game is now experienced as unwinnable, unplayable, and rigged. As a result, the authors find white-collar job seekers questioning neoliberalism in important ways and largely blaming structural factors-especially what they perceive as employers' betrayal of the social contract-for negative labor market outcomes. The anger,

The sociological literature, although rich on the topic of racial/ethnic hierarchy, often overlooks its spatially varying nature relative to group tensions and inequality. In this article, we address this gap by drawing on and analyzing four historically important U.S. urban cases (i.e., Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City) that reflect both compositional diversity and significant variation in racial/ethnic group sizes. Our analyses, which draw on U.S. Census microdata and content‐coded newspaper reports (1910–1930), demonstrate considerable consistency in racial/ethnic labor market hierarchies, yet divergences in levels of labor market inequality. Specifically, our aggregate analyses and cross‐city comparisons of sectoral representations and occupational returns reveal the importance of place‐specific processes—processes consistent with what spatially sensitive queuing perspectives suggest about the bolstering of minority prospects in contexts where subordinated groups come to numerically dominate. As suggested by competition/threat perspectives, however, such gains from queuing are undermined at least to some extent by city‐specific racial/ethnic antagonisms, industry‐level segregation, and group closure. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for various streams of research on group inequality, labor market hierarchies, and spatial understandings of how they unfold across urban spaces.

Efforts to understand the complex, multidimensional nature of environmental vulnerability can generate new knowledge by deploying a convergence research framework within a community-engaged approach. We explore the benefits and shortcomings of what we call engaged convergence research (ECR) by narrating a case study that uncovered a pattern of indoor heat-related deaths that was previously unexplained: Although only 5 percent of Maricopa County, Arizona, residents live in mobile homes, residents of mobile homes account for 29 percent of indoor heat-related deaths. Exploring the multiplicative threats of economic precarity, population sensitivity to environmental exposure, site, and shelter type, we recharacterize the reality faced by mobile home dwellers to find them falling between the cracks of available heat resilience options. Beyond contributing to scholarship on indoor heat-related deaths, we demonstrate the potential for novel and actionable insights emerging from ECR. We also elucidate some of the challenges faced when enlisting community actors as coproducers of knowledge in geographic research.

Purpose: Food insecurity is an urgent crisis in the United States, with one in nine people lacking a consistent source of the food necessary for an active and healthy lifestyle. This crisis is particularly dire in Maricopa County, Arizona, where 1 in 5 children experience food insecurity, and >1 in 10 residents experience poverty. Mobile food pantries offer an additional resource to address food insecurity; however, there is minimal knowledge about how communities utilize these food distributors. Background: Research on the elderly (people >60 years) and immigrant populations shows that these populations are especially vulnerable to food insecurity. The risk these groups face is compounded in Maricopa County, the 15th largest county in the country with minimal public transit to extant resources. Mobile food pantries offer one solution to this issue, bringing groceries and other important items directly to communities. Methods: This study utilizes data from a food pantry called “Phoenix Rescue Mission” (PRM) on food insecure people's use of PRM's mobile and brick-and-mortar pantries, as well as census data. Using GIS mapping and a multinomial logistic regression model, this research identifies how different demographic groups engage with PRM's brick-and-mortar or mobile pantries. Results: Findings indicate that people aged 60–80 years and immigrant people of color are more likely to use both mobile and brick-and-mortar pantries. Conclusions: This research suggests that mobile pantries can reach the most food insecure populations and local nonprofits and governments can consider implementing mobile pantries to reach food insecure communities.

In the U.S. state of Arizona, nearly one-third of households experienced food insecurity during the COVID-19 pandemic, an increase from one-fourth of households before the pandemic. Previous research on food insecurity in the wake of natural and human-instigated disasters demonstrates that groups vulnerable to food insecurity before a disaster are more susceptible to food insecurity during and after that disaster; however, less is known about whether this relationship also holds true during health-related disasters, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. We explore how the COVID-19 pandemic influenced urban food insecurity patterns by analyzing the socio-demographic characteristics of food pantry clients in Maricopa County, Arizona. Using data from Phoenix Rescue Mission (PRM), a local non-profit food service provider, two binomial logistic regression models compare the socio-demographic composition of total and first-time food pantry users before and during the pandemic. In addition to an overall increase in food pantry usage during the pandemic, we find that, while certain socio-demographic groups historically vulnerable to food insecurity experienced the predicted uptick in insecurity during the pandemic, other socio-demographic disparities were attenuated. These somewhat disparate findings illustrate the complex relationship between disasters and food insecurity in an urban context, offering several avenues for future research.