Chicago and Urban Studies Workshop

Winter-Spring 2002 Schedule
Winter-Spring 2001 Schedule

This multidisciplinary workshop provides a forum for graduate students and faculty to address key issues in metropolitan studies, with particular focus on Chicago. We will consider approaches that treat the city as laboratory, prism, and accelerator of social and political processes, paying careful attention to the ways in which Chicago and other cities are used as cases in empirical studies and generic social theories. We will also chart the shifting boundaries of urban studies, critically examining the nature and significance of urban/suburban divisions in an age of regionalism and sprawl. Several sessions will be dedicated to emerging challenges for city politics and policy, including issues such as housing and segregation, policing and incarceration, labor and immigration, health, and education.

The workshop will host a series of visiting speakers and thematic discussions throughout the year. This year's visitors include Janet Abu-Lughod (New School for Social Research), Sharon Zukin (CUNY), Sudhir Venkatesh (Columbia University), Archon Fung (Harvard), Susan Popkin (Urban Institute), Margaret Weir (University of California, Berkeley), Elizabeth Taylor (Chicago Tribune), Loïc Wacquant (University of California, Berkeley), Wim Wievel (University of Illinois, Chicago), and Talmadge Wright (Loyola University). We will distribute selected readings before each visit.

Graduate students at all levels are encouraged to participate regularly in workshop events, and dissertation-level students will be invited to present their own work. Students can receive course credit for their participation by making arrangements with the workshop director, Eric Klinenberg, in the Sociology Department.

The workshop will meet four times in the fall. There will be an organizational meeting on Tuesday, September 26, from 3 to 5 in the IPR conference room, 617 Library Place. In October, Sharon Zukin (October 19, joint session with the Culture Workshop) and Sudhir Venkatesh (October 24, joint session with the Ethnography Workshop), will present new work. Dalton Conley will speak on November 28. During the winter and spring quarters the workshop will meet on alternate Tuesday afternoons, from 3 to 5, in the 1808 Chicago Ave. conference room.