There are many aspects of the transportation industry that can be focused on, but the lack of res... more There are many aspects of the transportation industry that can be focused on, but the lack of resiliency is one of the most urgent. Enhancing resiliency and creative problem-solving is essential to the industry’s growth and survival. But it cannot happen without building a more diverse workforce. Women still make up a small fraction of transportation workers, and African American and Hispanic employees are even less represented. These disparities are increasingly pronounced in many senior positions, particularly in STEM fields. Meanwhile, the public transportation industry is experiencing a severe and worsening workforce shortage and many agencies have reported substantial difficulty recruiting, retaining, and developing skilled workers. Considering the transit industry’s existing diversity and inclusion toolkits and guidelines, this project emphasizes lessons from in-depth interviews with leaders from 18 transit agencies across the country. The interviews illuminate the existing ch...
Scholars have identified a range of factors that influence the ability of researchers to access h... more Scholars have identified a range of factors that influence the ability of researchers to access hard-toreach groups and the willingness of their members to participate in research. In this paper, we draw on insights from both ethnographic methods and participatory action research to demonstrate the importance of building trust in our relationships with hard-to-reach participants in research based on interviews. Such trust-building, we show, is greatly facilitated by pre-recruitment immersion that aids not only the recruitment of individual participants but also improves the quality of the data collected. These methodological concerns emerged from an interview study focusing on Muslim women’s use of urban public recreational spaces in South-East Michigan. Although the first author of this paper, as a woman and a Muslim, is a formal insider in the study population, her experiences with recruitment demonstrate that the access granted by insider status is insufficient as grounds for a r...
“Modernity in ruins. The disaster unfolds. . . .” Thus begins Dora Apel’s fascinating account of ... more “Modernity in ruins. The disaster unfolds. . . .” Thus begins Dora Apel’s fascinating account of Detroit, specifically the ways in which the city’s visual representations have captivated the cultural imagination. Characterizing Detroit as “the crucial nodal point” (p. 6) in a dense network of imagery expressing contemporary disillusion with Western progress and power, this volume intriguingly engages with aesthetic, social—and more covertly, psychoanalytic—theories to form a singular critique of the ongoing cultural enthrallment with ruin imagery as a seductive diversion from the failures of the failures of capitalism. In so doing, Apel successfully deconstructs the continuing urban crisis as one mystified by ideological cipher fashioned from alternately fetishistic and exploitative representations; by empirically problematizing the notion of “ruin porn” she further demonstrates the insurgent power of re-contextualized art to focus attention on the human and political tragedy expressed in urban decline. However, by not fully engaging with the genitive power of racial ideology and its essential role in constructing the imaginative landscape of Detroit, the book critically under-explores the deep connections between the geographic subjectivity of the city and the West’s long association of the racialized Other with anti-civilization, pollution, and decay. The book does several things well, particularly those achieved under the rubric of what Apel terms the “deindustrial sublime.” An analytic drawn from Kant’s notion of the sublime (an aesthetic category describing experience that agitates paradoxically to soothe), deindustrial sublimity is employed by Apel in order to reframe images of urban ruins as ultimately comforting stabilizations of otherwise disorderly and threatening places and events. Apel argues that within the context of real economic precarity, sublimatic depictions of urban abandonment assuage anxiety by exotifying and safely situating ruins elsewhere on the map. The aesthetic “containment” of decline, Apel contends, is evidenced well beyond the ubiquitous coffee-table photo books, and her analysis casts a wide net as it draws upon material from disparate genres like documentary and narrative film, product and ad-copy (for instance, Chrysler’s recent “Imported from Detroit” campaign), newspaper reportage, and the recently popular zombie figure to explore the city’s ability to domesticate disinvestment and inequality through its rendering as a tragic, yet beautiful object. This analysis, like Apel’s earlier work with torture and lynching imagery (2005) is embedded in a thorough review of the history and theory of Detroit and deindustrialization, in this case relying heavily on work by Thomas Sugrue and David Harvey. Beautiful Terrible Ruins: detroit and the Anxiety of decline Dora Apel. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 2015. 184 pp.; illustrations, photos, notes, bibliog., and index. $80.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-8135-7407-3), $27.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-8135-7406-6).
There are many aspects of the transportation industry that can be focused on, but the lack of res... more There are many aspects of the transportation industry that can be focused on, but the lack of resiliency is one of the most urgent. Enhancing resiliency and creative problem-solving is essential to the industry’s growth and survival. But it cannot happen without building a more diverse workforce. Women still make up a small fraction of transportation workers, and African American and Hispanic employees are even less represented. These disparities are increasingly pronounced in many senior positions, particularly in STEM fields. Meanwhile, the public transportation industry is experiencing a severe and worsening workforce shortage and many agencies have reported substantial difficulty recruiting, retaining, and developing skilled workers. Considering the transit industry’s existing diversity and inclusion toolkits and guidelines, this project emphasizes lessons from in-depth interviews with leaders from 18 transit agencies across the country. The interviews illuminate the existing ch...
Scholars have identified a range of factors that influence the ability of researchers to access h... more Scholars have identified a range of factors that influence the ability of researchers to access hard-toreach groups and the willingness of their members to participate in research. In this paper, we draw on insights from both ethnographic methods and participatory action research to demonstrate the importance of building trust in our relationships with hard-to-reach participants in research based on interviews. Such trust-building, we show, is greatly facilitated by pre-recruitment immersion that aids not only the recruitment of individual participants but also improves the quality of the data collected. These methodological concerns emerged from an interview study focusing on Muslim women’s use of urban public recreational spaces in South-East Michigan. Although the first author of this paper, as a woman and a Muslim, is a formal insider in the study population, her experiences with recruitment demonstrate that the access granted by insider status is insufficient as grounds for a r...
“Modernity in ruins. The disaster unfolds. . . .” Thus begins Dora Apel’s fascinating account of ... more “Modernity in ruins. The disaster unfolds. . . .” Thus begins Dora Apel’s fascinating account of Detroit, specifically the ways in which the city’s visual representations have captivated the cultural imagination. Characterizing Detroit as “the crucial nodal point” (p. 6) in a dense network of imagery expressing contemporary disillusion with Western progress and power, this volume intriguingly engages with aesthetic, social—and more covertly, psychoanalytic—theories to form a singular critique of the ongoing cultural enthrallment with ruin imagery as a seductive diversion from the failures of the failures of capitalism. In so doing, Apel successfully deconstructs the continuing urban crisis as one mystified by ideological cipher fashioned from alternately fetishistic and exploitative representations; by empirically problematizing the notion of “ruin porn” she further demonstrates the insurgent power of re-contextualized art to focus attention on the human and political tragedy expressed in urban decline. However, by not fully engaging with the genitive power of racial ideology and its essential role in constructing the imaginative landscape of Detroit, the book critically under-explores the deep connections between the geographic subjectivity of the city and the West’s long association of the racialized Other with anti-civilization, pollution, and decay. The book does several things well, particularly those achieved under the rubric of what Apel terms the “deindustrial sublime.” An analytic drawn from Kant’s notion of the sublime (an aesthetic category describing experience that agitates paradoxically to soothe), deindustrial sublimity is employed by Apel in order to reframe images of urban ruins as ultimately comforting stabilizations of otherwise disorderly and threatening places and events. Apel argues that within the context of real economic precarity, sublimatic depictions of urban abandonment assuage anxiety by exotifying and safely situating ruins elsewhere on the map. The aesthetic “containment” of decline, Apel contends, is evidenced well beyond the ubiquitous coffee-table photo books, and her analysis casts a wide net as it draws upon material from disparate genres like documentary and narrative film, product and ad-copy (for instance, Chrysler’s recent “Imported from Detroit” campaign), newspaper reportage, and the recently popular zombie figure to explore the city’s ability to domesticate disinvestment and inequality through its rendering as a tragic, yet beautiful object. This analysis, like Apel’s earlier work with torture and lynching imagery (2005) is embedded in a thorough review of the history and theory of Detroit and deindustrialization, in this case relying heavily on work by Thomas Sugrue and David Harvey. Beautiful Terrible Ruins: detroit and the Anxiety of decline Dora Apel. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 2015. 184 pp.; illustrations, photos, notes, bibliog., and index. $80.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-8135-7407-3), $27.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-8135-7406-6).
Uploads
Papers by Mehri Mohebbi