Immigration and the making of place in Paris

Since the late nineteenth century, France has been a destination for people outside its borders. In recent decades, most immigrants have come from outside of Europe, often from ex-colonies in Northern Africa, West Africa, and Indochina. The Parisian area has welcomed a disproportionate share of these immigrants and neighborhoods have been shaped and reshaped to reflect their presence. This paper examines three neighborhoods in Paris—Belleville, the Triangle de Choisy, and the Goutte d'Or—which are each composed of and shaped by separate ethnic populations. To a great extent, these neighborhoods are imprinted by commercial activity, often involving customers who come from well outside the neighborhood and networks that extend beyond the nation. They also show patterns of multiethnicity which allows for difference between groups to be maintained, even as the space shared between them is effectively negotiated.     

Solomon Carter Fuller, M.D. (1872-1953): American pioneer in Alzheimer's disease research

The appointment of Alois Alzheimer to Emil Kraepelin's clinic and laboratory at the Royal Psychiatric Hospital, University of Munich in 1903 offered new opportunities for clinical and pathological studies of the brain. At the opening of the facility in 1904, Alzheimer selected five foreign visiting students as his graduate research assistants, among whom was an American, Dr. Solomon Carter Fuller. A glimpse of Fuller's background as an African-American (born in Liberia) at the turn of the century, his continuing research after leaving Germany in 1906, and his critical view of the Alzheimer dementia entity are recounted. He was held in high esteem as a practicing neuropsychiatrist and teacher in the Boston area.     

Freemasonry as a playground for civic nationalism

This article explores correspondences between the ideals of ‘civic nationalism’ (hereafter CN) and the practices of Freemasonry, a worldwide male fraternity. Freemasons practice an elitist stance of civilizing the self, translated into a collective mission of society‐building. Though not a national movement, Freemasonry shares conceptual similarities with CN and was implicated in civic‐national revolutions in the Americas and the Middle East. Drawing on ethnographic research on Israeli Freemasonry, the study explores Masonic sociability as a playgound for practicing civic friendship and negotiating the inherent tensions of CN. Freemasons straddle between particularist and universalist understandings of fraternity, virtue and charity, which carry over to questions of citizenship, patriotism and nationalism. This boundary work over collective attachments represents a pragmatic attempt, not to resolve universalist and particularist preferences, but to contain and incorporate both within exclusivist Masonic practices. Far from marking the failure of CN, Masonic sociability illustrates its political significance, envisioning the nation as a social club of chosen friends.     

Political Accommodation and Functional Interaction along the Northern Italian Borderlands

Borderlands are places where large–scale and small–scale politics interact. Relationships between national states at the largescale affect local relations at the smallscale. Likewise, activities at the small–scale redound to the larger scale. While the politics of boundaries and borderland regions is often viewed at the scale of the national states, we argue that politics at the borderland needs to be examined in two other ways: in terms of relations between regions across national boundaries (small–scale) and in the relations between the borderland region itself and the national state (cross–scale). This article examines the nature of 'cross–scale' and "small–scale" political relations in the northern Italian borderlands. This is explored through (1) the degree of autonomy granted by the Italian government towards regions and cultural minorities on the border, and (2) the nature and extent of contacts and shared projects with neighboring regions across the boundary. Two conclusions are drawn. First, that the nature of cross–scale concessions to regional autonomy depends on the strength of the minority groups involved. Second, that the extent of small–scale contact and collaboration across the boundary depends on pre–existing economic interrelationships and cultural ties.     

Trans objects: materializing queer time in US transmasculine homes

Emerging from a participatory research project, this article draws on in-depth, semi-structured interviews, and home tours with trans masculine individuals and couples in the US Northeast to examine how homes come to function as spaces of both grounding and disidentification for transmasculine participants. In this article we argue that photographs and items of décor–particular, meaningful objects in trans homes–function to materialize the queerness of transition, and thus constitute a material expression of queer time. They provide a means for trans folks to acknowledge the queerness of the multiple life course temporalities co-present in the intimacy of private space, and we suggest that through these objects trans bodies engage in a process of becoming through moments of ‘co-substancing’ with the objects that are cherished, displayed, or hidden, in trans homespaces. In this article we suggest that objects on display in the home allow not just for a stretching of normative temporalities of the self, but also for the performance of home space as trans. We argue that more scholarly attention needs to be paid to the everyday, mundane geographies of transgender lives.     

Evaluating Crash Risk in Urban Areas Based on Vehicle and Pedestrian Modeling

This article presents a method for investigating the spatial distribution of vehicle and pedestrian traffic crashes relative to the volume of vehicle and pedestrian movement in urban areas. This method consists of two phases. First, vehicle and pedestrian traffic volumes on the street network are modeled using a space syntax configurational analysis of the network, land use data, and observed traffic data. Second, crash prediction models are fitted to the traffic crash data, using negative binomial regression models and based on traffic volume estimates and street segment lengths. The method was applied in two areas in Tel Aviv, Israel, which differ in their morphological and traffic characteristics. The case‐studies illustrated the method's capability in identifying hazardous locations on the network and examining relative crash risks. The analysis shows that an increase in vehicle or pedestrian traffic volume tends to be associated with a decrease in relative crash risk. Moreover, the spatial patterns of relative crash risks are associated with the design characteristics of urban space: areas characterized by dense street networks encourage more walking, and are generally safer for pedestrians, while those with longer street segments encourage more driving, are less safe for pedestrians, but safer for vehicles.     

The “Greenberg Controversy” and the Interdisciplinary Study of Global Linguistic Relationships**

This paper examines the controversy that followed the 1987 publication of Joseph Greenberg's book, Language in the Americas, attending to the role of language and linguistic research within overlapping disciplinary traditions. With this text, Greenberg presented a macro-level tripartite classification that opposed then dominant fine-grained analyses recognizing anywhere from 150 to 200 distinct language families. His proposal was the subject of a landmark conference, examining strengths and weaknesses, the unpublished proceedings of which are presented here for the first time. For specialists in the anthropological and comparative-historical study of Indigenous American languages, Greenberg's intervention highlighted the tension between language, conceived as an abstract object of study, and languages, understood to be carriers of specific cultural knowledge. For physical anthropologists and archaeologists, his theory was initially fortuitous on programmatic, substantive, and methodological grounds. The essay will show how interdisciplinary appeals were figured by supporters as a virtue, and by critics as a vice. The essay further highlights ethical reasons for integrating historical narratives of science and the humanities.