Habitats Archives - Page 6 of 16

Capitalism

How Mary Mattingly’s Floating Barge Tackled Food Deserts in New York City

What foraging can teach Americans about solving national food insecurity

September 27, 2023 • by Emma Slack-Jørgensen

Mattingly’s Swale came before the foraging boom, but it suggests that foraging may hold a permanent place in New York. Foraging is not just another fashionable affectation, but a path to addressing the deep-rooted issues embedded in our current food systems. Swale represents how our understanding of food access is ...

How Mary Mattingly’s Floating Barge Tackled Food Deserts in New York City

Our Next Guantánamo

Immigrants might become the next target for state-sponsored terrors

May 2, 2023 • by Joseph Margulies

We create Guantánamos in those fevered moments when imagined needs enflame ancient hatreds and modern fears, telling ourselves they will keep us safe and forgetting that they never have before. ...

New York City

Where Is New York?

Like so many newcomers, I was looking for my city. Then I reached for E. B. White’s 1948 classic, Here Is New York

April 26, 2023 • by Naman Vakharia

Naman Vakharia ponders on his personal yet collective experience of moving to the dirty, dreamy, and historical city: New York....

Migration

Held Hostage to One’s Values

On the responsibility to refugees at the Belarusian-Polish border

April 25, 2023 • by Lidia Zessin-Jurek

The Polish-Belarusian border crossing has been, since mid-2021, one of the world’s many border zones where people get sick and die under the watchful eye of the state....

Migration

The Violence of American Border Policies Continues

Both political parties say they care about families—so why would the Biden administration return to a family separation regime?

April 19, 2023 • by Rachel Ida Buff

And yet, in the absence of new legislation that makes it easier to cross the border legally for work, the Biden administration has defaulted to a hard line on immigration that continues to separate families and promote border security. ...

The Violence of American Border Policies Continues

Climate & Ecology

A Botany of Decolonization

An excerpt from Maria Thereza Alves: Seeds of Change

February 13, 2023 • by J. Kēhaulani Kauanui

Colonization is built into the very soil of New York....

New York City

In Search of a Room of My Own

In New York City’s cutthroat housing market, a student finds refuge in an all-women building

February 8, 2023 • by Yasmin Arquiza

As more and more women enter higher education, however, the need for female-friendly spaces shows that places like Webster are more relevant than ever....

Migration

Why the U.S. Needs Migrants

Migrant workers have an important role in the economy

November 9, 2022 • by Steve Max

Contrary to what the Republicans would have us believe, foreign-born workers, nearly half of whom are Spanish speaking, participate in the workforce at a higher rate than their native-born counterparts: 65 percent compared to 61 percent of the native-born. ...

Migration

The Dilemma of a Fragmented Self

Mass migrations, language, and the future of identity

November 9, 2022 • by Ken Hu

How can language create such a convoluted way of experiencing the everyday world? We can explore this phenomenon with two linked concepts: the speech act and the discourse community. ...

Climate & Ecology

A Globe, Clothing Itself with Ears

Stories of speaking with animals are as old as human history

November 3, 2022 • by Karen Bakker

Human ambivalence about animal language persists and is linked with our uncertainty about human status: Are we one animal among others, or does something truly set us apart? Debates over animal language are a touchstone for human uncertainties about our role in the cosmos....

Interviews

Documenting the City of Refugees

An interview with Susan Hartman on her new book about Utica’s transformation by refugees

October 4, 2022 • by Susan Hartman and Marisa Budlong

I wanted to put in perspective what these refugees had gone through, what the countries they left had gone through, what the refugee camp experience was like. So, there is this part where I talk about when they were each on the run: it is very traumatic material and this ...

Migration

A City on Fire

Arson and neglect in 1970s Utica, New York

October 4, 2022 • by Susan Hartman

Some residents still remember the bumper sticker: “Last one out of Utica, please turn out the lights.” Absentee landlords bought houses at auction—then hired people to burn them so they could collect the insurance money. And some owners torched their own homes. “Arson rates just skyrocketed,” Chief Ingersoll said. In ...