Category Archives: Recent Publications

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The Causal Effect of Gun Violence on Everyday Mobility Patterns Across US Neighborhoods

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Vachuska, K., Movahed, M. The Causal Effect of Gun Violence on Everyday Mobility Patterns Across US Neighborhoods. Spat Demogr 13, 7 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40980-025-00139-1

Gun violence takes an enormous toll on neighborhoods and their residents in important ways. While research has identified that violence makes neighborhoods less appealing and livable, few studies have fully quantified the effect of violence on neighborhoods’ vitality and dynamism. In this study, we introduce the notion of ‘neighborhood activity,’ which we measure by the unique number of everyday visitors those neighborhoods receive from residents of other neighborhoods. Drawing on a large geographically-coded dataset of 30,000 gun violence incidents across US neighborhoods in conjunction with daily mobility pattern data based on 45 million mobile devices, we apply a quasi-experimental method to estimate the impact of gun violence on the number of visitors neighborhoods receive. We find that gun violence reduces neighborhoods’ visibility significantly, but its consequences are disproportionately distributed among non-White neighborhoods that are far less popular to begin with. Our estimation results indicate that gun violence cost neighborhoods approximately 9 million visitors in the year 2019 alone.

Art as a Channel and Embodiment of Symbolic Interaction Between Migrants and Non-Migrants

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Thomas, J. (2025), Art as a Channel and Embodiment of Symbolic Interaction Between Migrants and Non-Migrants. Symbolic Interaction, 48: 410-440. https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.1219

Many non-migrant politicians, journalists, and scholars in migrant-destination societies often represent migrants with self-interested objectives and in specific instrumental ways based on stereotypes. Yet research on symbolic interaction reveals migrants are not passive victims. They actively and strategically shape their interactions with non-migrants. The artwork produced by Chinese migrant artists becomes a non-verbal channel through which the migrant can convey such challenges to non-migrants who can more empathetically appreciate these challenges. By analyzing the artwork and narratives of first-generation migrant artists, I show how art highlights various challenges that migrants confront in their process of immigration, like enduring physical pain, conforming to the institutions of the host society, navigating language barriers, confronting regular cultural clashes, accepting social estrangement, and coping with double consciousness. This paper shows how migrant art can serve as a semiotic object that reveals important features of past symbolic interactions between migrants and non-migrants and offers a channel through which non-migrants can potentially empathize more with migrants’ experiences.

Aging in Nationhood: Everyday Nationalism and Belonging Among Seniors in Old-Age Homes in Québec

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Stallone, Jessica. 2025. “ Aging in Nationhood: Everyday Nationalism and Belonging Among Seniors in Old-Age Homes in Québec,” The British Journal of Sociology: 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.70042.

Scholars of aging and nationalism rarely engage with each another. To remedy this gap, I examine how ethnonationalism becomes a resource for navigating the precarity of aging. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in two private senior residences in a region of Québec, I show how financially privileged Québécois seniors enact nationhood through everyday cultural practices. I introduce the concept of “aging in nationhood” to describe how seniors draw on ethnonationalist identities to foster comfort, community, and meaning at an age of decline—often with exclusionary effects. Seniors who do not—or cannot—assimilate into majority culture experience social isolation. By linking nationalism and aging, I show how seniors reproduce the nation, shaping their well-being and the boundaries of belonging. While grounded in Québec, this concept offers new insight for thinking about how dominant-group seniors mobilize ethnonationalism as a source of membership and exclusion in white aging societies across the Atlantic.

Toward a Predistributive Democracy: Polanyi and Piketty on Capitalism, Moral Economy, and Democracy in Crisis

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Somers, Margaret, Toward a Predistributive Democracy: Polanyi and Piketty on Capitalism, Moral Economy, and Democracy in Crisis (October 30, 2024). Journal of Law and Political Economy, Volume 5, Issue 3. Pp. 508-607., Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5160643 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5160643

As accelerating inequality careens into plutocracy, and America tilts toward autocracy, Karl Polanyi and Thomas Piketty have become key resources for understanding the link between the social exclusions of capitalism and democracy in crisis. This and its companion article (Somers 2022a) explore each of these thinkers and put them into dialogue to generate the outlines of a democratic political economy that I dub a predistributive democracy. Deconstructing capitalism’s moral economy of market justice, building on legal and economic institutionalism, and advocating a movement of countervailing power against escalating commodification and dedemocratization are central components of the project. The first article focused on Polanyi’s contribution to a predistributive democracy. This one engages Piketty’s work as it evolves from a bent toward economic naturalism to a robust institutionalism and an agenda for a participatory democratic socialism. Neither Polanyi nor Piketty is a legal theorist, yet both thinkers are indispensable to the new Law and Political Economy (LPE) project and the movement for a predistributive democracy. 

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“Until Indian Title Shall Be … Fairly Extinguished”: The Public Lands, Indigenous Erasure, and the Origins of Government Promotion of Infrastructure in the United States

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Shi, M. (2025). “Until Indian Title Shall Be … Fairly Extinguished”: The Public Lands, Indigenous Erasure, and the Origins of Government Promotion of Infrastructure in the United States. Politics & Society, 53(4), 570-602. https://doi.org/10.1177/00323292251338129 (Original work published 2025)

Prior to the authorization of the Erie Canal in 1817, it was not taken for granted that governments should directly promote infrastructure projects such as roads, canals, and railways as a means of stimulating what is now called economic development. This article investigates infrastructure promotion in this early period to examine the origins of the American developmental state. It finds that legislators repeatedly called on the nation’s public lands as a costless and freely available resource—even in the face of legally recognized Native title—for infrastructure finance. Doing so allowed legislators to rely on assumptions of Indigenous erasure to mobilize the public lands as a politically light fiscal resource that reduced the perceived costs of government action. In making this argument, this article develops political lightness as a concept for diagnosing how public budgets can institutionalize power-laden cultural contexts in public policy, makes visible the processes of Indigenous dispossession and erasure constitutive of the fiscal calculus of the modern developmental state, and contributes to the theorization of the United States as a case of settler colonial state formation.

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