Law and Community in Three American Towns

Greenhouse, Carol J.; Yngvesson, Barbara; Engel, David M.

doi:10.7591/9781501725012

Cited by 140 publications

(41 citation statements)

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“…6 Much of the data for this research site was collected in 1998 and 1999 by the author (Brown-Saracino, 1999). 7 Examples of other comparative research designs include Law and Community in Three American Towns (Greenhouse et al, 1994), Cultures of Solidarity (Fantasia, 1988), and Money, Morals and Manners (Lamont, 1992). 8 The units of analysis for this study vary across the research sites.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Preservationists and the Quest for Authentic Community

Brown–Saracino¹

2004

City & Community

102

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In contemporary urban and rural America there is a social process separate and distinct from gentrification: social preservation. Social preservation is the culturally motivated choice of certain people, who tend to be highly educated and residentially mobile, to live in the central city or small town in order to live in authentic social space, embodied by the sustained presence of old‐timers. Social preservationists view old‐timers as indispensable to preserving a pristine “social wilderness” and as arbiters of authentic community. For this reason, they engage in efforts to limit the displacement of those original residents they deem to be truly authentic. Ethnographic data from two Chicago neighborhoods and two small Massachusetts towns describes and analyzes the ethic and practice of social preservation.

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Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Preservationists and the Quest for Authentic Community

Brown–Saracino¹

2004

City & Community

102

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“…My analysis draws from literature on law and community (Engel 1984;Greenhouse, Yngvesson, and Engel 1994) and the conservative mobilization of rights (Goldberg-Hiller and Milner 2003;Dudas 2005Dudas , 2008. These studies document how members of majority groups in various contexts tend to dismiss efforts by minority groups to evoke rights and law, treating them as demands for special, as opposed to equal, rights (Goldberg-Hiller and Milner 2003).…”

Section: Innocence and Abstraction In The Mobilization Of Lawmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rhetorical Barriers to Mobilizing for Immigrant Rights: White Innocence and Latina/o Abstraction

Longazel¹

2014

Law soc. inq.

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In the summer of 2006, Hazleton, Pennsylvania passed the Illegal Immigration Relief Act (IIRA). In this article, the politics that emerged in that law's wake are used as a case study to identify the rhetorical tools that justify and help achieve White dominance in local struggles over immigration in the United States. In tracing three successive waves of post‐IIRA activism, what legal scholar Thomas Ross has termed White innocence/Black abstraction—a racial narrative that absolves Whites of wrongdoing and obfuscates minority suffering—is shown to be a central theme in the discourse of Hazleton's White majority. This colorblind rhetoric is used to make exclusionary legislation appear justifiable and to curtail the efforts of immigrant rights activists. By bringing Ross's insights into a new substantive context (i.e., immigration) and outside the confines of formal law (i.e., legal mobilizations rather than judicial opinions), this article demonstrates the centrality of innocence/abstraction in on‐the‐ground efforts to defend existing social arrangements.

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“…Law's indeterminacy, which is often emphasized by critical legal scholars in particular, has been attributed to the contradictory nature of law (i.e., statutes conflict with each other) and to the fact that laws "on the books" must be applied in situations that lawmakers could not have fully anticipated (Kairys 1998; see also Hagan, Ferrales, and Jasso 2008). This indeterminacy is crucial to law's role within political struggles, as meanings are contested by actors and as authorities, according to legal realists, can usually find a precedent to justify a desired outcome (Llewellyn 1962;Collier 1973;Comaroff and Roberts 1981;Greenhouse, Yngvesson, and Engel 1994;Matoesian 1997). At the same time, scholars have noted that, when rights are used as a vehicle for social change, associated notions of property, subjectivity, and agency are simultaneously reproduced.…”

Section: Law's Archeologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Falling Outside: Excavating the History of Central American Asylum Seekers

Coutin¹

2011

Law soc. inq.

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This article takes a retrospective look at legal advocacy on behalf of Central American asylum seekers, which has been influential in the development of US asylum law and in the creation of an infrastructure to address immigrants' needs. The article considers three time periods when Central Americans have been deemed to fall outside of the category of refugee: (1) the 1980s, when US administrations argued that Central Americans were economic immigrants; (2) the 1990s, when civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala came to an end; and (3) the 2000s, when some Salvadoran youths in removal proceedings have argued that they faced persecution as perceived or actual gang members. This retrospective analysis highlights the ways in which law can be creatively reinterpreted by legal actors, as well as how legal innovations carry forward traces of prior historical moments.

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Law and Community in Three American Towns

Cited by 140 publications

References 0 publications

Social Preservationists and the Quest for Authentic Community

Social Preservationists and the Quest for Authentic Community

Rhetorical Barriers to Mobilizing for Immigrant Rights: White Innocence and Latina/o Abstraction

Falling Outside: Excavating the History of Central American Asylum Seekers

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