Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Hello and welcome to the February GCI Monthly. This month the Institute is pleased to welcome City of Chicago Commissioner of Housing, Jack Markowski who will be giving a presentation at noon, Friday, February 20 in the GCI main conference room. Commissioner Markowski's talk is co-sponsored by the CUPPA Urban Planning and Policy Program Friday Forum Series and brings together graduate students, community partners and faculty in a lively discussion on the conditions and challenges of planning cities and their regions. We also invite you to attend GCI Faculty Scholar Irma Olmedo's presentation on "Crossing Borders: Children's Bilingual Development in a Chicago Public School" on Tuesday, February 10 at 3:00 pm and GCI Fellow Louise Cainkar's presentation on "The Racialization and Criminalization of Arabs and Muslims" on Tuesday, February 24 at 3:00 pm, both to be held in the GCI main conference room.

We are committed to engaged research and these events are clear examples of the way's in which university research benefits from community partnerships and, equally, how we at the university learn from experts in the city of Chicago and other great cities around the world.

Speaking of the world, the Great Cities Institute is the site, again this year, of the path-breaking course "Contested Cities," a product of the scholarship of GCI Fellow Professor John Hagedorn and GCI Director David Perry and their collaboration with faculty and graduate students from Queens University in Belfast, Humbolt University in Berlin and Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The course uses advances in video-conferencing and internet technologies to bring graduate students and faculty from UIC together with similar students and faculty from around the world in an advanced project of scholarship on the contested nature of urban space.

Please join us for the events we've described here and others at GCI this month. If you have any questions about "Contested Cities" or any of the projects at the Institute, please contact us.

Finally, watch for the upcoming talk "Rethinking How We Prepare Minority Youth for Success in College and Careers" at 3:00 pm on Tuesday, March 16 by GCI Fellow Davis Jenkins.

David Perry Professor and Director	Lauri Alpern Associate Director

News

Two courses for the UIC Online Certificate in Nonprofit Management will be offered this March. They are: Financial Management for Nonprofit Organizations and Strategic Management for Nonprofit Organizations. Both courses will begin on March 18th and have a registration deadline of March 8.
For more information on the program, please contact John Mudd, jmudd1@uic.edu, 312.996.9257.

GCI Faculty Fellow, Wim Wiewel, has been appointed to the post of Provost and Senior Vice President of the University of Baltimore. Although he will be missed after twenty-five years of service at UIC, GCI would like to wish him all the best in this new position.

CUED and the National Immigration Law Center released a study entitled, "Social Security Administration's No-Match Letter Program: Implications for Immigration Enforcement and Workers' Rights." Under current policy, the Social Security Administration (SSA) mails letters to employers whose employees' records do not match those in SSA databases. Rather than leading to the correction of records, however, the policy has led to the discharge of thousands of workers, as well as the undermining of workers' rights. The study analyzes the survey responses of 921 workers in 18 states who were listed in no match letters mailed to their employer. The authors conclude that the policy has failed to achieve its stated aims while disrupting the operation of local labor markets.

This research was funded by grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Rosenberg Foundation. The study was covered by the Wall Street Journal and the Chicago Tribune.
For more information, please contact: Chirag Mehta, cmehta3@uic.edu or Nik Theodore, theodore@uic.edu.

CUED and the National Employment Law Project released a short report entitled, "Persistent Unemployment in Illinois: The Case for Reauthorizing Federal Temporary Extended Unemployment Compensation Benefits." The study documents continuing job losses in Illinois as the jobless recovery limps along. Responses of focus group participants in Rockford and Chicago indicate that the supply of workers greatly outpaces demand, suggesting that Congress and the President should again extend unemployment insurance benefits.
Contact: Nik Theodore, theodore@uic.edu, Chirag Mehta, cmehta3@uic.edu, or Sharon Mastracci, mastracc@uic.edu.

CUED also turned its eye to the restructuring of the data processing industry in the report, "Uncertain Futures: The Real Impact of the High-Tech Boom and Bust on Seattle's IT Workers." Produced for the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers (Wash Tech) and funded by the Ford Foundation, the report found that employment in the data processing industry is not likely to return to the peak levels of 2001 until 2012 or later. CUED researchers also found preliminary evidence that the workers remaining in the industry are younger, less likely to hold college degrees, and more likely to be women than they were during the height of the IT boom. The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer both covered the report.
Contact: Sharon Mastracci, mastracc@uic.edu, or Marc Doussard, mdouss1@uic.edu.

Calendar

Great Cities Institute Faculty Scholar Seminar Series
Tuesday, February 10, 2004, 3pm
Young Children's Bilingual, Metalinguistic and Communicative Development in a Chicago School
Irma Olmedo, Associate Professor
Department of Curriculum and Instruction, College of Education, University of Illinois at Chicago

People

Irma M. Olmedo, GCI Faculty Scholar, gave a presentation at the State of Illinois Bilingual Conference in December on bilingual teachers' conceptions of effective instruction for English language learners. The research was based on an Effective Bilingual Instruction Institute that she has offered for five years at UIC and which received funding under a federal Department of Education grant. Two papers of hers were published in December, including "Language mediation among emergent bilingual children" in Linguistics and Education, vol. 14, no. 2, and "Accommodation and resistance: Latinas struggle for their children's education" in Anthropology and Education Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 4.

Laurie Schaffner, GCI Faculty Scholar, sent her forthcoming anthology off to Routledge Press. The volume, Regulating Sex: The Politics of Intimacy and Identity, was co-edited with Elizabeth Bernstein (Sociology Department, Barnard-Columbia) and derived from a workshop they held at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law in Spain in the summer of 2000. The edited volume of essays focuses on ways that states serve to construct and control erotic behaviors in three substantive arenas: the regulation of queer identities and intimacies, state interventions in the sexual marketplace, and the regulation of childhood and gendered "innocence" via a series of spirited dialogues between socio-legal scholars from diverse disciplinary, national, and political perspectives. This book is set to be released this summer.

Faculty Scholar Spotlight

Irma M. Olmedo is an Associate Professor in the College of Education. Her research focuses on childhood bilingualism, bilingual education and preparation of teachers for urban schools. She has also conducted research on Latinos in Chicago, focusing on oral histories of elderly members of the community. She has published in journals such as Anthropology and Education, Teaching and Teacher Education and Urban Education.