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Civil Rights struggles are waged locally but are always a part of, and impact, larger contexts. Eight years after the sub-prime mortgage industry’s collapse triggered the “Great Recession,” struggles for housing and neighborhood development are complex, diverse, and geographically dispersed. Small cities are increasingly becoming key Civil Rights battlegrounds as the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) implements a “deconcentration” agenda, displacing urban poor and gentrifying big-city neighborhoods. DeKalb, Illinois, an hour and a half west of Chicago and home to a large public university, was embroiled in controversy over the planned redevelopment of a HUD-subsidized housing complex. Large landlord opposition to the sale was racially charged, with public comments disparaging current residents, coalescing into a free-market critique of “big government.” A tenants’ association emerged to counter the rhetoric of landlords. These two discourses – racism and sexism on the one hand, and “local control” on the other – emerged in the process. After a yearlong struggle, the City Council passed a zoning variance to allow loans for new buyers to complete long overdue repairs. Thus, the victory for DeKalb residents sets an important precedent for other small cities. This article distills lessons learned, including the importance of community organizing, specifically being “heard” in addition to being “seen,” the confluence of racism, and “new federalism.”

A consensus of the Workgroup on Community and Socioeconomic Issues was that improving and sustaining healthy rural communities depends on integrating socioeconomic development and environmental protection. The workgroup agreed that the World Health Organization's definition of health, \"a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity,\" applies to rural communities. These principles are embodied in the following main points agreed upon by this workgroup. Healthy rural communities ensure a) the physical and mental health of individuals, b) financial security for individuals and the greater community, c) social well-being, d) social and environmental justice, and e) political equity and access. This workgroup evaluated impacts of the proliferation of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) on sustaining the health of rural communities. Recommended policy changes include a more stringent process for issuing permits for CAFOs, considering bonding for manure storage basins, limiting animal density per watershed, enhancing local control, and mandating environmental impact statements.

Essential essays on the environmental impacts of factory farms on public health. The rapid—and relatively recent—concentration of food animal production into factory farms makes meat plentiful and cheap, but this type of agriculture comes at a great cost to human health and the environment. In Industrial Farm Animal Production, the Environment, and Public Health, editors James Merchant and Robert Martin bring together public health experts to explore the most critical topics related to industrial farm animal production. The environmental impacts of these concentrated animal-feeding operations endanger the health of farm and meatpacking workers, neighbors, and surrounding communities. Factory farms create public health hazards such as antibiotic-resistant bacteria due to the overuse of antibiotics in livestock, as well as water polluted with nitrates, microbes, and other harmful chemicals. Despite the clear need for greater worker protection and oversight to mitigate the environmental harms of these practices, factory farms are notoriously difficult to regulate. Industrial animal operations are located predominantly in rural areas, often next to poor communities and communities of color. Food companies have driven independent producers nearly to extinction, sapped the economic vitality of rural communities, and amassed sweeping political influence at both the state and national levels to effectively prevent mitigation efforts. Essays in this volume cover pertinent topics such as the history, structure, and trends in the factory farming industry; water and air pollution; infectious disease health effects; community and social impacts; environmental justice and sustainable agriculture; and the impacts of COVID-19 among meatpacking workers.

The environmental justice movement has stimulated community-driven research about the living and working conditions of people of color and low-income communities. We describe an epidemiological study designed to link research with community education and organizing for social justice. In eastern North Carolina, high-density industrial swine production occurs in communities of low-income people and people of color. We investigated relationships between the resulting pollution and the health and quality of life of the hog operations’ neighbors. A repeat-measures longitudinal design, community involvement in data collection, and integration of qualitative and quantitative research methods helped promote data quality while providing opportunities for community education and organizing. Research could affect policy through its findings and its mobilization of communities.

Background: Odors can affect health and quality of life. Industrialized animal agriculture creates odorant compounds that are components of a mixture of agents that could trigger symptoms reported by neighbors of livestock operations. Objective: We quantified swine odor episodes reported by neighbors and the relationships of these episodes with environmental measurements. Methods: Between September 2003 and September 2005, 101 nonsmoking volunteers living within 1.5 mi of industrial swine operations in 16 neighborhoods in eastern North Carolina completed twice-daily odor diaries for approximately 2 weeks. Meteorological conditions, hydrogen sulfide, and particulate matter ≤ 10 μm in aerodynamic diameter (${\\rm PM}_{10}$) were monitored in each neighborhood. We used mixed models to partition odor variance within and between people and between neighborhoods, and to quantify relationships between environmental factors and odor. Results: Participants reported 1,655 episodes of swine odor. In nine neighborhoods, odor was reported on more than half of study-days. Odor ratings were related to temperature, ${\\rm PM}_{10}$, and semivolatile ${\\rm PM}_{10}$ in standard but not mixed models. In mixed models, odor increased 0.15 ± 0.05 units (mean ± SE) for a 1-ppb increase in ${\\rm H}_{2}{\\rm S}$, and 0.45 ± 0.14 units for a $10\\text{-}\\mu {\\rm g}/{\\rm m}^{3}$ increase in ${\\rm PM}_{10}$ at wind speeds > 6.75 miles per hour. The odds of reporting a change in daily activities due to odor increased 62% for each unit increase in average odor during the prior 12 hr (t-value = 7.17). Conclusions: This study indicates that malodor from swine operations is commonly present in these communities and that the odors reported by neighbors are related to objective environmental measurements and interruption of activities of daily life.

This article provides an overview of the inordinately high rates of health and injury problems among farmers, farm workers, and their families in the U.S. It offers a critical review of farmer health and safety research and intervention efforts which primarily focus on engineering and education. An understanding of farmer health problems rooted in social and economic conditions of industrialized agriculture is offered based on data from a series of group interviews with farmers in Iowa and Nebraska, recent survey data, and relevant social science research.

Using county level socioeconomic and agricultural data from all counties in Iowa, we assess Goldschmidt's findings that measures of economic well-being are better with the presence of more smaller farms rather than fewer larger ones. We ethnographically situate our examination in terms of statewide discussions concerning the desirability of large scale swine production. Contrary to state economic development rhetoric, our analysis indicates that the organization of hog production and not market share or numbers is a key to rural welfare. We conclude that it is more advantageous for Iowa to have more hog farmers rather than more hogs.

As a cross-cultural universal, sports are frequently examined by anthropologists in terms of how sporting behavior embodies and expresses the cultural logic of societal norms and expectations. In contemporary Western society, sports are often premised on cultural precepts of \"fair play\" expressed through gaming rules that ostensibly control factors that allow for the expression and comparison of competing skills. We examine the behavior of men's college basketball referees as choreographers of staged fair play and suspense versus objective enforcers of rules. To this end, we test the hypothesis that when games are televised on national television, referees in men's Division I college basketball call a disproportionate number of fouls against teams that are ahead in the score of their respective games, resulting in more competitive games which maintain an edge of suspense for viewers. We suspect this to be true even though trailing teams typically exhibit more aggressive play to remain competitive or get back in the game. We observed the behavior of referees involved in a total of 2,441 foul call events in 67 randomly selected Division I college basketball games during the 2000 basketball season. Results demonstrate that college basketball referees call a significantly higher number of fouls against a team that is leading a game when the game is televised on national television. This pattern does not hold when games are televised regionally. We suspect that \"fair play\" behavior on the part of referees helps promote dramatic suspense to attract and maintain television viewers.

[...] the yeoman efforts of Jim McDonald as editor from 1998 through 2007 sustained the journal into its present form. Today, C&A is a national peer-reviewed journal that has an interdisciplinary readership among anthropologists and archaeologists as well as researchers and practitioners in related fields including sociology, agricultural economics, food studies, policy sciences, and diverse branches of farming and natural resource management.

[...] this volume included the positive challenge to both students entering the discipline of practicing and applied anthropology and current practitioners engaged in the field: \"Applied anthropologists must hone their skills in diplomacy, collaboration, and oral and written communication to raise the stakes for disciplinary and scholarly recognition of applied work and, particularly, their community engagement\" (Kedia 2008:23).