Emerging work in intergroup contact has vitalized a focus on processes affecting the impact of interventions on outcomes. We theorized that intergroup learninglearning about other groups, educating others about one's own groups, intention to bridge intergroup differences, and reflecting on one's own group-mediates the effect of a combined enlightenment-encounter curricular intervention on assessments of importance and confidence in taking action to reduce prejudice and promote diversity. Results from a pretest/posttest design with a diverse group of undergraduate social welfare majors (n = 175) show (a) increased motivation for intergroup learning, and importance of taking action, and confidence in doing so, and (b) intergroup learning partially or fully mediates the impact of enlightenment and/or encounter on taking action.School changed utterly with racial integration. Gone was the messianic zeal to transform our minds and beings that had characterized teachers and their pedagogical practices in our allblack schools. Knowledge was suddenly about information only. It had no relation to how one lived, behaved. It was no longer connected to antiracist struggle. Bussed to white schools, we soon learned that obedience, and not zealous will to learn, was what was expected of us . . . . When we entered racist, desegregated white schools, we left a world where teachers believed that to educate black children rightly would require a political commitment. Now, we were mainly taught by white teachers whose lessons reinforced racist stereotypes. For
In recent years, emerging scholarship has advanced embodied approaches to urban water in/security, inequality and infrastructure. This new literature is broadly informed by political ecology studies of water, which critique depoliticized approaches to water scarcity, insecurity and inequality and give attention to the socially differentiated experiences of the urban waterscape. Recent interventions to bring feminist and embodied approaches to water's urban political ecology analyze the site and scale of the body as critical for understanding everyday urban water access and inequality. Drawing from these frameworks, I summarize three contributions of an embodied urban political ecology approach for addressing water in/security. These include analytical approaches that give attention to (1) the scale of the body within multi-scalar approaches to water, (2) intersectionality and gender/class/race/ethno-religious relations in shaping patterns of water inequality and insecurity, and (3) everyday practices and politics, in relation to both governance and citizens, which reveal under-theorized dimensions of water insecurity and inequality. Embodied approaches to urban water insecurity are poised to expand and deepen work on the everyday politics and lived experiences of insufficient, insecure, and unequal water that profoundly shape urban life for city-dwellers.
Scholarship engaging with (northern) urban theory from the south has troubled the core of urban studies. At this critical juncture, we argue that it is important to clarify core propositions and call attention to points of convergence and dissonance amongst advocates of ‘the southern urban critique’. We briefly review foundational arguments for this scholarly community, then outline three distinct iterations of the source of this critique: the south is empirically different; EuroAmerican hegemony works to displace a diversity of intellectual traditions; and the postcolonial encounter requires the critical interrogation of research practices. We then consider whether the southern urban critique is an argument for the study of a distinct southern urbanism, an ontological position about the socio-spatial contingency of all theorisation or a tactical strategy for calling attention to marginalised places and ideas to be superseded by an urban studies of a world of cities. We hope our efforts contribute to further conversation and greater analytical clarity, enabling more rigorous and robust articulations of the precise objects and objectives of the southern urban critique in particular, and urban studies more generally.
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