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Ivy Ken

The George Washington University, Sociology, Faculty Member

Universidad Austral de Chile, Instituto de Historia y Ciencias Sociales, Visiting Fulbright Scholar

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It's all about mutual constitution . . .
Phone: 202.994.1886
Address: George Washington University
Department of Sociology
801 22 Street NW
Phillips Hall 409
Washington DC 20052

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Universidade Federal de Goiás

Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

Lancaster University

Central European University

University of Notre Dame (Australia)

Kansas State University

Syracuse University

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

Stephen Whittle

Manchester Metropolitan University

Jessica Ringrose

University College London

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Papers by Ivy Ken

Mutual Constitution in Race-Class-Gender Scholarship

Mutual Constitution in Race-Class-Gender Scholarship

The Memphis School

Routledge eBooks, Feb 8, 2023

Regulatory theater in the pork industry: how the capitalist state harms workers, farmers, and unions

Crime, Law, and Social Change, 2022

The United States pork sector generates billions of pounds of food and billions of dollars of sal... more The United States pork sector generates billions of pounds of food and billions of dollars of sales and tax revenue per year. This industry has also generated hundreds of workers’ deaths from covid infections, thousands of workers’ injuries from hazardous working conditions, economic and environmental depletion of communities near production sites, and the massive decline of small hog farming operations – not to mention over a billion tons of fecal waste per year. Although pork companies, like most firms in the food industry, portray state regulation as a burden for commercial interests, we identify how the pork industry enjoys a symbiotic relationship with the state to create favorable conditions for three interrelated processes: 1) monopoly and monopsony power; 2) hyper-efficient but injurious working conditions; 3) union busting. Using structural contradictions theory, we explain the failure to protect workers, farmers, and communities as a feature of the fundamental contradictio...

Grocery Activism: The Radical History of Food Cooperatives in Minnesota. By Craig B. Upright. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2020. Pp. 256. $100.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper)

American Journal of Sociology, 2021

Necropolitical Governance and State-Corporate Harms: COVID-19 and the U.S. Pork Packing Industry

Journal of White Collar and Corporate Crime, 2021

The coronavirus pandemic has magnified the interdependence of the state and corporations in the p... more The coronavirus pandemic has magnified the interdependence of the state and corporations in the pork packing industry. In 2020, when over 67,000 meatpacking and processing workers were infected with the virus, the state allowed and encouraged this industry to coerce a racialized workforce to risk their health and lives to slaughter pigs. While it would seem reasonable to call for more regulation to protect labor in this industry, we find by analyzing the state’s actions in 2020 that its interests are too far aligned with corporations’ interests to expect one to police the other. Our analysis underlines the state as a symbiotic partner of corporations, and places workers’ illnesses and deaths in a necropolitical framework that demands attention to the state’s tacit approval of inhumane working conditions, use of law to keep packing plants open, and attempts to limit the liability of corporations for any deaths or illnesses they have caused.

Not additive, not defined: mutual constitution in feminist intersectional studies

Feminist Theory, 2021

The term ‘mutual constitution’ appears with regularity in scholarship on intersectionality, but w... more The term ‘mutual constitution’ appears with regularity in scholarship on intersectionality, but what does it mean? We could not easily answer this question in the usual way – by reading books and articles about it – because the term has not received direct, widespread or sustained engagement in feminist theory. This led us to analyse a wide range of feminist scholarship – the entire set of 379 articles in women’s studies journals that consider both intersectionality and mutual constitution – to determine whether there are patterns and commonalities in the ways this important theoretical term is used. Our analysis reveals that while there is widespread agreement that mutual constitution does not allow for an additive or binary approach, this is the only major point of shared understanding of this term. Scholars disagree over whether mutual constitution is, in fact, the same thing as intersectionality, and in practice, clusters of disciplines use the term with different norms and leve...

Legitimized fraud and the state-corporate criminology of food – a Spectrum-based theory

Crime, Law and Social Change, 2018

The role that food corporations have in determining our health and nutrition is concomitant with ... more The role that food corporations have in determining our health and nutrition is concomitant with the power and influence that corporations exercise across all commercial sectors. These large, powerful, and often multinational entitiescollectively referred to as Big Foodemploy a robust array of strategies to advance the organizational interests associated with a seemingly paradoxical business model: securing the continuous and ever-growing consumption of food products increasingly associated with negative health outcomes. As this model proliferates globally, the implications of this contradiction warrant specific attention to the activities of Big Food corporations through a critical criminological framework. The pervasive and increasingly legitimized activity of Big Food relies on a legal, regulatory, and moral framework that allows for the relegation of all non-market oriented value systems to be secondary to a pro-corporatist ideological and moral superstructure. Whereas previous scholarship has contributed to an understanding of what occurs when profit-maximization values collide withand then co-optpublic health and nutrition interests, the present study offers a spectrum-based theory to explain how various degrees of food fraud are systematically incentivized by the legal privileges of corporations and the hegemonic moral economy of neoliberal governance.

Book Review: Romance with Voluptuousness: Caribbean Women and Thick Bodies in the United States by Kamille Gentles-Peart

Gender & Society, 2017

A Healthy Bottom Line

Social Currents, 2014

Corporations rarely prioritize healthy communities over healthy profit margins, but their profits... more Corporations rarely prioritize healthy communities over healthy profit margins, but their profits depend on community acceptance. This article reveals that in their quest to be perceived as legitimate citizens, some corporations co-opt the rhetorical tactics typically associated with social movement organizations to frame their profit-maximizing practices as the solution to the problem of childhood obesity. In this framing, explored here in an ethnography of the activities of two organizations called the Partnership for a Healthier America and the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, obesity is the result of communities’ failure to work together and the cumulative effect of individuals’ bad choices. By framing corporations as vital community partners poised to “work together” across sectors to solve the childhood obesity “crisis,” these organizations hope to inspire the public to participate in this imagined community in one predominant way: by buying their products. Despite the app...

Profit in the Food Desert: Walmart Stakes its Claim

Theory in Action, 2014

Big Business in the School Cafeteria

Contexts, 2014

Sociologist Ivy Ken questions the activities of two non-profit organizations that broker agreemen... more

Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throu... more

Race-Class-Gender Theory: An Image(ry) Problem

Gender Issues, 2007

For over 100 years, but particularly since the 1980s, scholars have heavily relied on images of r... more For over 100 years, but particularly since the 1980s, scholars have heavily relied on images of race, class, and gender as ''intersecting'' and ''interlocking'' forms of oppression and disempowerment. This imagery has helped feminists develop the empirically grounded theoretical premises that (1) race, class, and gender are social structural locations, (2) structural locations shape perspectives, (3) no individual is all-oppressed or all-oppressing, (4) the meanings of race, class, and gender are localized, and (5) race, class, and gender depend on and (6) mutually constitute each other. In this article I synthesize these premises to reveal some opportunities for theoretical development that may inspire a new generation of race-class-gender scholarship. I argue that while intersection is fairly limited as a conceptual image, the interlocking imagery can help us identify how the relationships among these structures of oppression have become institutionalized.

Book Review: On Intellectual Activism by Patricia Hill Collins

Gender & Society, 2013

Race, Gender, and the Labor Market: Inequalities at Work

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2011

The Professional Guinea Pig belongs to a social science growth area investigating the pharmaceuti... more The Professional Guinea Pig belongs to a social science growth area investigating the pharmaceutical industry in contemporary health care. This literature is united by a prevailing consensus that views the drug industry as the villain du jour in health policy. After focusing on unbridled professional power and the for-profit insurance industry, the critical social gaze is turned to Big Pharma. Consequently, most social scientists see it as their job to expose the scientific manipulation, the chase of profit margins, the dehumanization, the ethical transgressions, and the inequities that flow from drug industry involvement. In engaging prose, Roberto Abadie delivers the expected social science message. Abadie conducted an eighteen-month ethnography of a group of healthy people who made a living as research subjects in Phase One clinical trials in Philadelphia. Most trial participants are African-American and Latino, but Abadie spent time with a group of young, non-Hispanic white anarchists who enrolled in clinical trials. He compares these trial participants with people enrolling in HIV trials. The book examines the motivations, reflections, and practices of professionalized clinical trial participation. What does Abadie make from this data? He highlights the ‘‘commodification’’ (p. 15) of the trial subjects’ bodies in a ‘‘slow torture economy’’ (p. 46). He pays attention to the ‘‘revolt’’ (p. 54) of the professional research subjects when they felt underpaid and threatened to walk out. Instead they received an $800 bonus. He notes the ‘‘resistance of the weak’’ (p. 60), when ‘‘guinea pigs’’ (p. 21) smuggle in forbidden foods or engage in other acts of ‘‘sabotage’’ (p. 61). Abadie also examines the risk-management strategies of the trial subjects: they weigh money against potential long-term effects but tend to believe that drugs wash out of their bodies in a couple of days. He then compares the professional trial participants to those involved in HIV trials and argues that the latter are motivated by deeper existential concerns but, of course, they also have a disease and participate in different kinds of trials. In a final empirical chapter, Abadie examines the professional trial subject’s limited understanding of informed consent procedures, and argues that the drug industry deliberately uses the consent form to obfuscate the commodified relationship with research subjects. Abadie’s book has two glaring weaknesses. First, he brings much rhetorical bluster to his study but the interview quotes and observations do not bear out the core themes of ‘‘alienation’’ (p. 6) and ‘‘exploitation’’ (p. 154). The fascinating empirical puzzle of his study is that anarchists are willing to swallow their principles and vegan diet to take money from this most controversial industry. In the conclusion, Abadie pays attention to the paradox between anarchist politics and pragmatics, but throughout most of the book he tries to rationalize the anarchists’ justifications for the blood money that sustains their lifestyle of leisure. Some of his friends even minimize the trial risk because they assume that strong government oversight protects them from harm! Abadie writes: ‘‘[these] views of governmental regulation are not totally at odds with their radical [anarchist] beliefs’’ (p. 143). Really? Rather than reconcile the dissonance between what anarchists do and belief in theoretical constructs of exploitation, the explanation seems more mundane. People end up in trial after trial by choice or circumstances because it is easy money. Compared to flipping burgers, cleaning toilets, or being homeless, testing pills is extremely attractive. The job stinks, but the money is good. Abadie also wrote the wrong book. While he lived in the anarchist community, he never participated along with his research subjects in the trials. Abadie’s information comes largely from casual conversations

Digesting Race, Class, and Gender: Sugar as a Metaphor

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2011

PART I: RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER AS ORGANIZING PRINCIPLES Introduction Race, Class, and Gender: Wh... more PART I: RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER AS ORGANIZING PRINCIPLES Introduction Race, Class, and Gender: What They Are, What They Do PART II: USING FOOD TO IDENTIFY RELATIONSHIPS AMONG RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER Digesting Race, Class, and Gender Producing Race, Class, and Gender Baking Race, Class, and Gender Tasting Race, Class, and Gender PART III: SEARCHING FOR EVIDENCE OF RELATIONSHIPS AT SPECIFIC SITES The Multi-Relational Character of Race, Class, and Gender

The New Entrepreneurs: How Race, Class, and Gender Shape American Enterprise

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2013

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2011 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stan... more

Between Good And Ghetto: African American Girls And Inner-City Violence by Nikki Jones

City & Community, 2011

Sharon Zukin’s Naked City takes us on an intriguing tour of several New York City neighborhoods, ... more Sharon Zukin’s Naked City takes us on an intriguing tour of several New York City neighborhoods, parks, and gardens to illustrate the ways in which culture patterns neighborhood development and urban life. The book is an insightful analysis of gentrification, and the role that culture and authenticity play in sparking the redevelopment of Williamsburg, Harlem, the Lower East Side, and Red Hook. In addition to these neighborhoods, there is an examination of how consumer-driven change has altered and influenced the developmental trajectory of Union Square Park, the World Trade Center redevelopment site, and community gardens scattered throughout the city. The theme that Zukin uses to unite these diverse landscapes is the quest for and competition among gentrifiers, city planners, political officials, long-term residents, real estate developers, and bloggers to define the authenticity of space, and thus who has the rights to certain places. For Zukin, urban transformation is driven largely by cultural consumption patterns. She argues that, “Our tastes as consumers – tastes for lattes and organic food, as well as for green spaces, boutiques, and farmers’ markets – now define the city” (27). In a postindustrial New York, the new tastes and preferences of the new middle class direct and guide development patterns. For the new middle class, it’s not lofts that attract the urban professionals to the central city, it’s Ann Taylor Loft. The consequence of these preferences and consumption patterns is the death of the authenticity of the past—the crime, the edge, and the spontaneous interactions that come from the unpredictability of events when people of different races and classes mix in places, such as the “old” Lower East Side. Middle class preferences for particular amenities, such as Starbucks, lead to a metropolis that is sanitized, predictable, and consumer oriented. The authentic city has become the authentic suburb, with Home Depot in the Bronx, IKEA in Red Hook, and Barnes & Noble abutting Union Square Park. The book duly acknowledges that cultural consumption patterns alone are not the sole driver of urban transformation. For instance, Zukin details how the city government’s failure to provide basic city services led to a reliance on corporate action, through Business Improvement Districts, to manage urban space when local budget shortfalls prevented adequate public services. Zukin tactfully incorporates New York’s political and economic forces within her cultural paradigm.

Food Fraud and the Partnership for a ‘Healthier’ America: A Case Study in State-Corporate Crime

Critical Criminology, 2017

This is the author's manuscript for a work that has been accepted for publication. Changes result... more This is the author's manuscript for a work that has been accepted for publication. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as copyediting, final layout, and pagination, may not be reflected in this document. The publisher takes permanent responsibility for the work. Content and layout follow publisher's submission requirements.

Mutual Constitution in Race-Class-Gender Scholarship

Mutual Constitution in Race-Class-Gender Scholarship

The Memphis School

Routledge eBooks, Feb 8, 2023

Regulatory theater in the pork industry: how the capitalist state harms workers, farmers, and unions

Crime, Law, and Social Change, 2022

The United States pork sector generates billions of pounds of food and billions of dollars of sal... more The United States pork sector generates billions of pounds of food and billions of dollars of sales and tax revenue per year. This industry has also generated hundreds of workers’ deaths from covid infections, thousands of workers’ injuries from hazardous working conditions, economic and environmental depletion of communities near production sites, and the massive decline of small hog farming operations – not to mention over a billion tons of fecal waste per year. Although pork companies, like most firms in the food industry, portray state regulation as a burden for commercial interests, we identify how the pork industry enjoys a symbiotic relationship with the state to create favorable conditions for three interrelated processes: 1) monopoly and monopsony power; 2) hyper-efficient but injurious working conditions; 3) union busting. Using structural contradictions theory, we explain the failure to protect workers, farmers, and communities as a feature of the fundamental contradictio...

Grocery Activism: The Radical History of Food Cooperatives in Minnesota. By Craig B. Upright. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2020. Pp. 256. $100.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper)

American Journal of Sociology, 2021

Necropolitical Governance and State-Corporate Harms: COVID-19 and the U.S. Pork Packing Industry

Journal of White Collar and Corporate Crime, 2021

The coronavirus pandemic has magnified the interdependence of the state and corporations in the p... more The coronavirus pandemic has magnified the interdependence of the state and corporations in the pork packing industry. In 2020, when over 67,000 meatpacking and processing workers were infected with the virus, the state allowed and encouraged this industry to coerce a racialized workforce to risk their health and lives to slaughter pigs. While it would seem reasonable to call for more regulation to protect labor in this industry, we find by analyzing the state’s actions in 2020 that its interests are too far aligned with corporations’ interests to expect one to police the other. Our analysis underlines the state as a symbiotic partner of corporations, and places workers’ illnesses and deaths in a necropolitical framework that demands attention to the state’s tacit approval of inhumane working conditions, use of law to keep packing plants open, and attempts to limit the liability of corporations for any deaths or illnesses they have caused.

Not additive, not defined: mutual constitution in feminist intersectional studies

Feminist Theory, 2021

The term ‘mutual constitution’ appears with regularity in scholarship on intersectionality, but w... more The term ‘mutual constitution’ appears with regularity in scholarship on intersectionality, but what does it mean? We could not easily answer this question in the usual way – by reading books and articles about it – because the term has not received direct, widespread or sustained engagement in feminist theory. This led us to analyse a wide range of feminist scholarship – the entire set of 379 articles in women’s studies journals that consider both intersectionality and mutual constitution – to determine whether there are patterns and commonalities in the ways this important theoretical term is used. Our analysis reveals that while there is widespread agreement that mutual constitution does not allow for an additive or binary approach, this is the only major point of shared understanding of this term. Scholars disagree over whether mutual constitution is, in fact, the same thing as intersectionality, and in practice, clusters of disciplines use the term with different norms and leve...

Legitimized fraud and the state-corporate criminology of food – a Spectrum-based theory

Crime, Law and Social Change, 2018

The role that food corporations have in determining our health and nutrition is concomitant with ... more The role that food corporations have in determining our health and nutrition is concomitant with the power and influence that corporations exercise across all commercial sectors. These large, powerful, and often multinational entitiescollectively referred to as Big Foodemploy a robust array of strategies to advance the organizational interests associated with a seemingly paradoxical business model: securing the continuous and ever-growing consumption of food products increasingly associated with negative health outcomes. As this model proliferates globally, the implications of this contradiction warrant specific attention to the activities of Big Food corporations through a critical criminological framework. The pervasive and increasingly legitimized activity of Big Food relies on a legal, regulatory, and moral framework that allows for the relegation of all non-market oriented value systems to be secondary to a pro-corporatist ideological and moral superstructure. Whereas previous scholarship has contributed to an understanding of what occurs when profit-maximization values collide withand then co-optpublic health and nutrition interests, the present study offers a spectrum-based theory to explain how various degrees of food fraud are systematically incentivized by the legal privileges of corporations and the hegemonic moral economy of neoliberal governance.

Book Review: Romance with Voluptuousness: Caribbean Women and Thick Bodies in the United States by Kamille Gentles-Peart

Gender & Society, 2017

A Healthy Bottom Line

Social Currents, 2014

Corporations rarely prioritize healthy communities over healthy profit margins, but their profits... more Corporations rarely prioritize healthy communities over healthy profit margins, but their profits depend on community acceptance. This article reveals that in their quest to be perceived as legitimate citizens, some corporations co-opt the rhetorical tactics typically associated with social movement organizations to frame their profit-maximizing practices as the solution to the problem of childhood obesity. In this framing, explored here in an ethnography of the activities of two organizations called the Partnership for a Healthier America and the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, obesity is the result of communities’ failure to work together and the cumulative effect of individuals’ bad choices. By framing corporations as vital community partners poised to “work together” across sectors to solve the childhood obesity “crisis,” these organizations hope to inspire the public to participate in this imagined community in one predominant way: by buying their products. Despite the app...

Profit in the Food Desert: Walmart Stakes its Claim

Theory in Action, 2014

Big Business in the School Cafeteria

Contexts, 2014

Sociologist Ivy Ken questions the activities of two non-profit organizations that broker agreemen... more

Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throu... more

Race-Class-Gender Theory: An Image(ry) Problem

Gender Issues, 2007

For over 100 years, but particularly since the 1980s, scholars have heavily relied on images of r... more For over 100 years, but particularly since the 1980s, scholars have heavily relied on images of race, class, and gender as ''intersecting'' and ''interlocking'' forms of oppression and disempowerment. This imagery has helped feminists develop the empirically grounded theoretical premises that (1) race, class, and gender are social structural locations, (2) structural locations shape perspectives, (3) no individual is all-oppressed or all-oppressing, (4) the meanings of race, class, and gender are localized, and (5) race, class, and gender depend on and (6) mutually constitute each other. In this article I synthesize these premises to reveal some opportunities for theoretical development that may inspire a new generation of race-class-gender scholarship. I argue that while intersection is fairly limited as a conceptual image, the interlocking imagery can help us identify how the relationships among these structures of oppression have become institutionalized.

Book Review: On Intellectual Activism by Patricia Hill Collins

Gender & Society, 2013

Race, Gender, and the Labor Market: Inequalities at Work

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2011

The Professional Guinea Pig belongs to a social science growth area investigating the pharmaceuti... more The Professional Guinea Pig belongs to a social science growth area investigating the pharmaceutical industry in contemporary health care. This literature is united by a prevailing consensus that views the drug industry as the villain du jour in health policy. After focusing on unbridled professional power and the for-profit insurance industry, the critical social gaze is turned to Big Pharma. Consequently, most social scientists see it as their job to expose the scientific manipulation, the chase of profit margins, the dehumanization, the ethical transgressions, and the inequities that flow from drug industry involvement. In engaging prose, Roberto Abadie delivers the expected social science message. Abadie conducted an eighteen-month ethnography of a group of healthy people who made a living as research subjects in Phase One clinical trials in Philadelphia. Most trial participants are African-American and Latino, but Abadie spent time with a group of young, non-Hispanic white anarchists who enrolled in clinical trials. He compares these trial participants with people enrolling in HIV trials. The book examines the motivations, reflections, and practices of professionalized clinical trial participation. What does Abadie make from this data? He highlights the ‘‘commodification’’ (p. 15) of the trial subjects’ bodies in a ‘‘slow torture economy’’ (p. 46). He pays attention to the ‘‘revolt’’ (p. 54) of the professional research subjects when they felt underpaid and threatened to walk out. Instead they received an $800 bonus. He notes the ‘‘resistance of the weak’’ (p. 60), when ‘‘guinea pigs’’ (p. 21) smuggle in forbidden foods or engage in other acts of ‘‘sabotage’’ (p. 61). Abadie also examines the risk-management strategies of the trial subjects: they weigh money against potential long-term effects but tend to believe that drugs wash out of their bodies in a couple of days. He then compares the professional trial participants to those involved in HIV trials and argues that the latter are motivated by deeper existential concerns but, of course, they also have a disease and participate in different kinds of trials. In a final empirical chapter, Abadie examines the professional trial subject’s limited understanding of informed consent procedures, and argues that the drug industry deliberately uses the consent form to obfuscate the commodified relationship with research subjects. Abadie’s book has two glaring weaknesses. First, he brings much rhetorical bluster to his study but the interview quotes and observations do not bear out the core themes of ‘‘alienation’’ (p. 6) and ‘‘exploitation’’ (p. 154). The fascinating empirical puzzle of his study is that anarchists are willing to swallow their principles and vegan diet to take money from this most controversial industry. In the conclusion, Abadie pays attention to the paradox between anarchist politics and pragmatics, but throughout most of the book he tries to rationalize the anarchists’ justifications for the blood money that sustains their lifestyle of leisure. Some of his friends even minimize the trial risk because they assume that strong government oversight protects them from harm! Abadie writes: ‘‘[these] views of governmental regulation are not totally at odds with their radical [anarchist] beliefs’’ (p. 143). Really? Rather than reconcile the dissonance between what anarchists do and belief in theoretical constructs of exploitation, the explanation seems more mundane. People end up in trial after trial by choice or circumstances because it is easy money. Compared to flipping burgers, cleaning toilets, or being homeless, testing pills is extremely attractive. The job stinks, but the money is good. Abadie also wrote the wrong book. While he lived in the anarchist community, he never participated along with his research subjects in the trials. Abadie’s information comes largely from casual conversations

Digesting Race, Class, and Gender: Sugar as a Metaphor

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2011

PART I: RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER AS ORGANIZING PRINCIPLES Introduction Race, Class, and Gender: Wh... more PART I: RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER AS ORGANIZING PRINCIPLES Introduction Race, Class, and Gender: What They Are, What They Do PART II: USING FOOD TO IDENTIFY RELATIONSHIPS AMONG RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER Digesting Race, Class, and Gender Producing Race, Class, and Gender Baking Race, Class, and Gender Tasting Race, Class, and Gender PART III: SEARCHING FOR EVIDENCE OF RELATIONSHIPS AT SPECIFIC SITES The Multi-Relational Character of Race, Class, and Gender

The New Entrepreneurs: How Race, Class, and Gender Shape American Enterprise

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2013

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2011 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stan... more

Between Good And Ghetto: African American Girls And Inner-City Violence by Nikki Jones

City & Community, 2011

Sharon Zukin’s Naked City takes us on an intriguing tour of several New York City neighborhoods, ... more Sharon Zukin’s Naked City takes us on an intriguing tour of several New York City neighborhoods, parks, and gardens to illustrate the ways in which culture patterns neighborhood development and urban life. The book is an insightful analysis of gentrification, and the role that culture and authenticity play in sparking the redevelopment of Williamsburg, Harlem, the Lower East Side, and Red Hook. In addition to these neighborhoods, there is an examination of how consumer-driven change has altered and influenced the developmental trajectory of Union Square Park, the World Trade Center redevelopment site, and community gardens scattered throughout the city. The theme that Zukin uses to unite these diverse landscapes is the quest for and competition among gentrifiers, city planners, political officials, long-term residents, real estate developers, and bloggers to define the authenticity of space, and thus who has the rights to certain places. For Zukin, urban transformation is driven largely by cultural consumption patterns. She argues that, “Our tastes as consumers – tastes for lattes and organic food, as well as for green spaces, boutiques, and farmers’ markets – now define the city” (27). In a postindustrial New York, the new tastes and preferences of the new middle class direct and guide development patterns. For the new middle class, it’s not lofts that attract the urban professionals to the central city, it’s Ann Taylor Loft. The consequence of these preferences and consumption patterns is the death of the authenticity of the past—the crime, the edge, and the spontaneous interactions that come from the unpredictability of events when people of different races and classes mix in places, such as the “old” Lower East Side. Middle class preferences for particular amenities, such as Starbucks, lead to a metropolis that is sanitized, predictable, and consumer oriented. The authentic city has become the authentic suburb, with Home Depot in the Bronx, IKEA in Red Hook, and Barnes & Noble abutting Union Square Park. The book duly acknowledges that cultural consumption patterns alone are not the sole driver of urban transformation. For instance, Zukin details how the city government’s failure to provide basic city services led to a reliance on corporate action, through Business Improvement Districts, to manage urban space when local budget shortfalls prevented adequate public services. Zukin tactfully incorporates New York’s political and economic forces within her cultural paradigm.

Food Fraud and the Partnership for a ‘Healthier’ America: A Case Study in State-Corporate Crime

Critical Criminology, 2017

This is the author's manuscript for a work that has been accepted for publication. Changes result... more This is the author's manuscript for a work that has been accepted for publication. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as copyediting, final layout, and pagination, may not be reflected in this document. The publisher takes permanent responsibility for the work. Content and layout follow publisher's submission requirements.

KEN testimony at DC Food Services Roundtable July 2016

Good morning, Councilmembers. Chairperson Grosso, thank you for responding to the will of the peo... more

KEN testimony at DC Food Services Hearing 2015

To the Council of the District of Columbia: Committee on Education, David Grosso, Chair Regardin... more

KEN testimony at DC Food Services Hearing 2012

Digesting Race, Class, and Gender: Sugar as a Metaphor

How are the ways that race organizes our lives related to the ways gender and class organize our ... more How are the ways that race organizes our lives related to the ways gender and class organize our lives? How might these organizing mechanisms conflict or work together? In Digesting Race, Class, and Gender, Ivy Ken likens race, class, and gender to foods – foods that are produced in fields, mixed together in bowls, and digested in our social and institutional bodies. In the field, one food may contaminate another through cross-pollination. In the mixing bowl, each food’s original molecular structure changes in the presence of others. And within a meal, the presence of one food may impede or facilitate the digestion of another. At each of these sites, the “foods” of race, class, and gender are involved in dynamic relationships with each other that have implications for the shape – or the taste – of our social order.

Healthy Bottom Line PODCAST