This study discusses how motion picture spectatorship practices in Brooklyn developed separately from that of any other urban center in the United States between 1893 and 1928. Often overshadowed by Manhattan's glamorous cultural districts, Brooklyn's cultural arbiters adopted the motion picture as a means of asserting a sense of independence from the other New York boroughs. This argument is reinforced by focusing on the motion picture's ascendancy as one of the first forms of mass entertainment to be disseminated throughout New York City in congruence with the Borough of Brooklyn's rapid urbanization. In many significant areas Brooklyn's relationship with the motion picture was largely unique from anywhere else in New York. These differences are best illuminated through several key examples ranging from the manner in which Brooklyn's political and religious authorities enforced film censorship to discussing how the motion picture was exhibited and the way theaters proliferated throughout the borough Lastly this work will address the ways in which members of the Brooklyn community influenced the production practices of the films made at several Brooklyn-based film studios. Ultimately this work sets out to explain how an independent community was able to determine its own form of cultural expression through its relationship with mass entertainment.

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Most people don’t usually conjure the image of American policing methods in the Swedish police. The early-to-late 1990s would oversee a push to tackle what was then seen as rising crime and a battle over the subway a decade before in New York City. This style of policing, called Broken Windows would become mythicized in certain political circles about how it was able to reverse the trends of societal decline. It wasn’t soon after that Broken Windows had found itself in two Swedish law enforcement models over a span of fifteen years. By using the theory of Americanization, or how this transatlantic exchange of ideas had impacted important newspaper discourse–we can learn how once-American ideas, like Broken Windows, become new cultural concepts in Swedish journalistic discourse over time.

This thesis is about food practices and change among Mexican migrants living in West Queens, New York City. Public health research suggests that Mexican migration to the US has a negative impact on food practices, with diets being less nutritious over a migrant’s stay in the United States and obesity being more common among longer-term than more recently-arrived individuals. Through ethnography, I explore how migration shapes food practices and examine the nuanced process of nutritional change that is often obscured in large-scale epidemiological studies. Food practices are important not just because they shape vulnerabilities to chronic diseases but also because they serve as prisms by which to examine migrants’ lives, pressures and aspirations. The three aims of this ethnography are to explore the food practices that Mexicans engage in after migration; to examine the social, temporal and political-economic contexts shaping food practices and change; and to describe how migrants themselves makes sense of nutritional change. I explore these themes using the approach of structural vulnerability, which views health practices and outcomes as influenced by social structures, relationships and inequalities. In so doing, I provide a critique of the public health literature’s use of the concept of acculturation to explain food practices, which largely obscures the role played by structural contexts and constraints. Through participant observation, conversations and interviews with Mexican migrants in West Queens, NYC, I have identified three contexts shaping food practices and change after migration: household dynamics and labour division; time constraints and work schedules; and the ‘food environment’, referring to the availability of food items and weight loss products. Gender dynamics, documentation status and class modified the way in which these contexts were perceived and negotiated by informants, which had further consequences on food practices. In these settings, informants were often encouraged to consume high-energy foods and large portions, to replace meals with snacks, to eat prepared or convenience foods, and to experiment with weight loss products. To rationalize nutritional change and body size disparities, informants employed multiple discourses. Some discourses emphasized the role of structural contexts and constraints related to time, money and documentation status, while others emphasized the role played by cultural beliefs, habits and acculturation. An ethnographic approach informed by structural vulnerability serves to articulate how the everyday lives and social contexts in which Mexican migrants are embedded, shape experiences of nutritional change. This thesis exposes a disconnect between the way in which the public health literature conceptualizes nutritional change and how it is lived ‘on the ground’.

Since the middle of the twentieth century, American dance artists have presented complicated images of American identity to world audiences, as dance companies traveled abroad under the auspices of the US State Department. This dissertation uses oral history interviews, archival research, and performance analysis to investigate how dancers navigated their status as official American ambassadors in the Cold War and the years following the 2001 terrorist attacks in the US. Dance companies worked and performed in international sites, enacting messages of American democratic superiority, while individual dancers re-interpreted the contours of American identity through personal encounters with local artists and arts practices. The dancers’ memories of government-sponsored tours re-insert the American artist into American diplomatic history, prompting a reconsideration of dancers not just as diplomatic tools working to persuade global audiences, but as creative thinkers re-imagining what it means to be American. This dissertation begins in the late 1950s, as the State Department began discussing appropriate dance companies to send to the Soviet Union, as part of the performing arts initiatives that began in 1954 under the direction of President Dwight Eisenhower. The dissertation concludes by examining more recent dance in diplomacy programs initiated in 2003, coinciding with the US invasion of Iraq. My analysis considers New York City Ballet’s 1962 tour of the Soviet Union, where the company performed programs that included George Balanchine’s Serenade (1934), Agon (1957), and Western Symphony (1954), and Jerome Robbins’ Interplay (1945) during the heightened global anxieties of the Cuban Missile Crisis. My analysis of Ailey’s 1967 tour of nine African countries focuses primarily on Revelations (1960), which closed every program on the tour. Moving into the twenty-first century, I analyze A Slipping Glimpse (2007), a collaboration between Margaret Jenkins Dance Company and Tansuree Shankar Dance Company, which began as a US State Department-sponsored 2003 residency in Kolkata. To explore each tour, I consider government goals documented in archived minutes from artist selection panels; dancers’ memories of the tours, which I collected in personal interviews conducted between 2007 and 2009; and performance analysis of the pieces that traveled on each tour. / text

The history of transportation planning in New York City has created disparities between those who have sufficient access to the public transportation network, and those who face structural barriers to traveling from their home to education, employment, and healthcare opportunities. This thesis analyzes the legacy of discriminatory policy surrounding the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) and city and state governments that have failed to support vital infrastructure improvement projects and service changes to provide multi-modal welfare to New York’s working poor. By exploring issues of transit equity as they pertain to the New York City subway system, this thesis raises the question: which communities lack adequate access to public transit opportunity and what are the policies and historical developments that have created these inequities? Through examination of grassroots community-based movements towards social justice and transportation equity, this thesis will review the proposals, campaigns, and demands that citizen-driven organizations have fought for in New York City. These movements, I argue, are the most effective method to achieve greater transportation justice and intergenerational equity.

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La catastrophe qui a frappé les États-Unis au matin du 11 septembre 2001 est considérée comme l’une des plus spectaculaires du 21ème siècle. Dès lors, se pose la question de son écriture. Si le monde entier en a été témoin, que peut donc nous apporter la littérature ? Pour répondre à cette question, il conviendra de s’intéresser à l’écriture de la ville après la catastrophe, afin de comprendre comment la béance laissée par la destruction des tours du World Trade Center à New York pourrait être narrée et justifiée. Parce que la catastrophe est tout d’abord physique, géographique, et intervient au cœur même de la ville, elle impose une réappropriation, une relecture et une réécriture de l’espace public. S’étendant au-delà de la question de l’espace urbain, la catastrophe se pense aussi en termes de temps, entre autres à cause de l’expérience traumatique qui en découle : impossible en effet de dissocier temps et trauma. La catastrophe contamine présent, passé et futur, opérant alors un dérèglement temporel. Ce questionnement sur la temporalité mène à une remise en question de l’immédiateté de certaines réponses, notamment politiques, et pousse à s’interroger sur les contre-récits fictionnels qui participent d’une réflexion sur cette temporalité altérée. La littérature post-11 septembre s’apparente donc à une écriture de la survivance, mais aussi à une écriture du questionnement et de la remise en cause de certaines positions, trop immédiates, face à la catastrophe. / The catastrophe that hit the United States of America on the morning of September 11, 2001 is regarded as one of the most spectacular events of the 21st century. Consequently, the possibility of writing about this event has to be questioned. Indeed, if the whole world got to witness this event, what more can literature tell us about it? To answer this question, the way the city of New York has been written about following the catastrophe needs to be considered, so as to understand how the hole left by the destruction of the World Trade Center could be narrated and justified. Insofar as the catastrophe is first and foremost physical and geographical and affects the core of the city, it makes it necessary for writers to reappropriate, re-read and re-write the public space. Beyond the issue of urban space, the catastrophe also needs to be tackled in terms of time, because of – among other factors – the traumatic experience that stems from it, as time and trauma cannot be separated. The catastrophe contaminates the present, the past and the future, inducing temporal disorder. Post-9/11 literature pertains to a writing of survival, but is also a literary form that questions certain positions for being too immediate following the catastrophe.

Dans les années 1970, alors que la Ville de New York faisait face à une grave crise économique et sociale, des citadins ont entrepris d'investir le tissu urbain en transformant des terrains vagues en jardins collectifs. Après avoir accueilli favorablement ces initiatives grassroot qui palliaient des carences en espaces verts et articipaient à la vie des quartiers, la municipalité a cherché à les éliminer dans les années 1990, lorsque la relance économique les a fait apparaître comme un usage peu rentable du territoire. Usant de tactiques fortement médiatiques et théâtrales, les jardiniers ont réussi à protéger provisoirement une grande partie des community gardens, mais leur sort demeure aujourd'hui incertain. L'étude de l'histoire de ces jardins inscrits dans une tradition politique d'intervention par la base, ainsi que l'analyse ethnographique de quatre de ces espaces, permettent de développer un point de vue à plusieurs échelles sur un mouvement né d'initiatives ultra-locales, mais dont seule la mise en réseau à l'échelle de la métropole permet de justifier l'existence à long terme. La question se pose aujourd'hui de la manière dont ces pratiques citoyennes peuvent être intégrées à l'aménagement urbain dans la perspective des politiques de ville durable, tout en ne perdant rien de leur richesse et de leur diversité.

In recent years, industrial preservation policies, which aim to preserve urban industrial activity and industrial employment often through the preservation of industrial land, have emerged as a flashpoint in cities across the country that have implemented these policies. While critics contend that industrial preservation policies amount to smokestack chasing in “post-industrial” cities like New York City, industrial preservationists argue that such policies help to preserve well-paying, middle-class jobs and thus represent a tool to mitigate rising income inequalities in cities. Despite considerable attention to these policies, minimal research has evaluated the effectiveness of industrial preservation policies as land use and economic development planning tools. This paper inserts itself into the debate surrounding the utility of industrial preservation policies by evaluating the effectiveness of New York City’s 2006 Industrial Business Zone (IBZ) program. Specifically, this paper uses propensity scoring to evaluate various measures of urban industrial activity in designated IBZs compared to a control group of similar areas. This paper finds that IBZs outperformed the control group in terms of better stemming industrial employment losses and industrial land decline. The control group, however, provided a more favorable climate to industrial business starts and performed about the same as IBZs in encouraging capital investments in industrial infrastructure. These findings suggest that the IBZ program yielded mixed results in its efforts to both attract and retain urban industry.