Faculty/staff notes

Prof. Marcelo Cruz, Urban and Regional Studies, participated in a seminar at the University of Castilla La Mancha Albacete with Spanish and Polish researchers on “contemporary urban morphologies and tendencies within the European and U.S. contexts.” Their work is part of a larger, three-year project between the Universities of UCM Albacete, Warsaw and UW-Green Bay, funded by a grant from the European Union. Cruz and students will study development in the Green Bay metropolitan area this year in comparison to Albacete and Lomza, Poland.

Ray Hutchison, professor of Urban and Regional Studies, recently returned from the American Sociological Association meeting in Boston, where he organized a roundtable session on The Ghetto, with participants from MIT (Xavier de Souza Briggs), University of Chicago (Mario Small), City University of New York (Lily Hoffman), University of Amsterdam (Talja Blokland), and University of California-Davis (Bruce Haynes). He also presented a paper on The Ghetto: Origins, Discourse, and Rhetoric that traced the use of the term from Venice (in the 1500s) to the publication of The Ghetto by Louis Wirth in 1928. But it would be another twenty years before ghetto was again used in the social sciences, and not until the 1960s that the term found widespread use and eventual adaptation as pop culture slang (“that’s so ghetto”), a corruption of the term described in the recent book Ghetto Nation.

Prof. Dean VonDras, Human Development and psychology, is a member of the Advisory Board for the publication “Annual Editions: Aging 2008-2009”.