Fusing the aesthetics of futurity with the lush beauty of the natural world, planned eco-city developments like Forest City and Penang South Islands, both in Malaysia, promise luxury enclaves against climate change and the environmental stressors of existing cities. This article analyzes CGI architectural renderings used to promote and sell eco-city projects in Southeast Asia. Eco-city renderings, we argue, produce semio-capitalistic value by translating the familiar concepts of “green,” “eco-friendly,” and “sustainable” into something far more inchoate: feelings. They do so through their supersaturation with signs of greenness in a design strategy we label “semiotic overdetermination.” Selling “green” as a feeling, eco-city renderings capitalize on present-day anxieties over urban decay and commodify “the ecological” as a rich resource of pleasurable qualitative experiences. The result, we contend, is to reinforce a neoliberal mode of subjectivity that equates consumption with somatics and reduces climate responsibility to individual consumer decisions.

Understanding and tracking societal discourse around essential governance challenges of our times is crucial. One possible heuristic is to conceptualize discourse as a network of actors and policy beliefs.

Here, we present an exemplary and widely applicable automated approach to extract discourse networks from large volumes of media data, as a bipartite graph of organizations and beliefs connected by stance edges. Our approach leverages various natural language processing techniques, alongside qualitative content analysis. We combine named entity recognition, named entity linking, supervised text classification informed by close reading, and a novel stance detection procedure based on large language models.

We demonstrate our approach in an empirical application tracing urban sustainable transport discourse networks in the Swiss urban area of Zürich over 12 years, based on more than one million paragraphs extracted from slightly less than two million newspaper articles.

We test the internal validity of our approach. Based on evaluations against manually automated data, we find support for what we call the window validity hypothesis of automated discourse network data gathering. The internal validity of automated discourse network data gathering increases if inferences are combined over sliding time windows.

Our results show that when leveraging data redundancy and stance inertia through windowed aggregation, automated methods can recover basic structure and higher-level structurally descriptive metrics of discourse networks well. Our results also demonstrate the necessity of creating high-quality test sets and close reading and that efforts invested in automation should be carefully considered.

Although family factors are considered important for children’s language acquisition, the evidence comes primarily from affluent societies. Thus, this study aimed to examine the relations between family factors (family’s socioeconomic status [SES], home literacy activities, access to print resources, and parental beliefs) and children’s vocabulary knowledge in both urban and rural settings in China. Data from 366 children (urban group: 109, 4.85 years; rural group: 257, 4.89 years) were collected. Results showed that whereas family’s SES significantly predicted access to print resources and children’s vocabulary knowledge in the rural group, parental beliefs directly predicted children’s vocabulary knowledge in the urban group. Multigroup analysis showed that the associations of family’s SES and access to print resources with children’s vocabulary knowledge were stronger in the rural group than in the urban group. Our findings highlight the importance of considering contextual settings when conceptualising the role of family factors in children’s language acquisition.

Although 12 soft tick species (Argasidae) are native to Australia, the ecology of most is poorly known. Argas dewae parasitizes several insectivorous bat species and has been recorded on humans. Therefore, understanding its ecology is crucial for wildlife health management and public health preparedness. To address this knowledge gap, A. dewae populations were monitored from 2 bat hosts (Chalinolobus gouldii and Austronomus australis) using bat boxes at 3 sites in Victoria, Australia, for 28 months (July 2005–December 2007). A phenological profile undertaken for A. dewae revealed that tick load on bat hosts increased throughout winter and peaked in the first month of spring, before collapsing and remaining low throughout the drier late spring and summer periods. There was also further investigation of the relationship between 2 response variables (tick infestation risk and tick load) and a range of explanatory variables (body condition index, sex, age class, bioseason, site, bat density per nest box). In C. gouldii, site was the only significant predictor of A. dewae infestation risk, while load was correlated with several variables including age class, sex, bioseason, roost density and body condition index. This paper also reports the first records of A. dewae from 6 bat species in 3 bat families (Miniopteridae: Miniopterus australis; Molossidae: A. australis; Vespertilionidae: Chalinolobus morio, Myotis Macropus, Vespadelus darlingtonia, Vespadelus regulus) and a second record of A. dewae from a human. The first distribution records are presented for A. dewae in South Australia, the Australian Capital Territory and Queensland.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, fans assembled at stadiums and arenas across the country to witness a recurring spectacular event. They headed toward the local ballpark or arena, not to watch their favorite teams and entertainers perform inside, but rather to witness the implosion of the facilities themselves. As the United States was in the midst of its latest stadium construction boom, a new community ritual took shape: the ceremonial demolition of stadiums that were built in the 1960s and 1970s. Facilities that were once celebrated for their modern designs and conveniences were deemed ugly and obsolete seemingly overnight. Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh, Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati, Market Square Arena in Indianapolis, among dozens of other professional stadiums, were demolished in this spectacular fashion (Figure 1). Explosives were strategically placed throughout the abandoned facilities, and fans gathered yards away to watch the buildings burst into gigantic clouds of dust and smoke, the environmental consequences of sending pollutants into the air notwithstanding. Television networks covered the detonations while fans donned team colors, cheered, and shed tears as their beloved community gathering places were blown into oblivion.

Group-based identities are an important basis of political competition. Politicians consciously appeal to specific social groups, and these group-based appeals often improve the evaluation of parties and candidates. Studying place-based appeals, we advance the understanding of this strategy by distinguishing between dominant and subordinate social groups. Using two survey experiments in Germany and England, we show that group appeals improve candidate evaluation among subordinate (rural) voters. By contrast, appeals to the dominant (urban) group trigger a negative reaction. While urban citizens’ weaker local identities and lower place-based resentment partly explain this asymmetry, they mainly dislike group-based appeals because of their antagonistic nature. If the same policies are framed as benefiting urban and rural dwellers alike, candidate evaluation improves. Thus, people on the dominant side of a group divide reject a framing of politics as antagonistically structured by this divide, even if they identify with the dominant group.

Andrew Kahrl's The Black Tax is a sweeping and insightful history of the local property tax in the United States from Reconstruction onward that speaks eloquently to urban history, tax history, and histories of capitalism and race in the United States. Kahrl exposes the relentless process of dispossession and exploitation, captive taxpayers and fiscal apartheid within the local property tax that has overtaxed Black Americans by over $275 billion, cost $326 billion in land loss, and created a generational wealth difference compounded into trillions. But Kahrl is not focused only on individual loss or even community dispossession, but on entrenched systems of legalized theft built into the local property tax that have reinforced themselves over time through the most localized bureaucratic subjectivity and bias, such that poor cities are now left with few fiscally sustaining options other than preying on their poorest citizens.

When African-American history is done well, it allows us to see the places where inequality hides. Scholars in the areas of the history of capitalism, African-American history, and urban studies have popularized the language of historical phenomena such as white flight, redlining, and privatization, in the process of explaining the origins of contemporary challenges. A reasonably educated person understands that deindustrialization at mid-century led to job losses. Every May, pundits write essays about the failure to equalize schools as the nation memorializes the anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Popular journalists Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nicole Hannah-Jones owe their careers to their study of historical work in order to leverage public-facing conversations from reparations for slavery to the politicization of the teaching of civil rights. Essentially, good history helps us search for the state practices and policies that soften the blow of inequality, assault human dignity, and normalize poverty. In his deeply researched and thoughtfully written book The Black Tax, Andrew Kahrl addresses another obscure mechanism that has historically worked to dispossess and disadvantage African Americans across regions and generations, and has ensnarled both landowners and tenants. Kahrl's book forces readers and scholars to think about the ways that a lack of federal authority and will to protect Black citizens allowed states and municipalities to assess, tax, and place liens on Black property—from vacant plots to farm land to family homes.

First, I want to thank Modern American History co-editors Sarah Snyder and Darren Dochuk for selecting my book for this roundtable and assembling such an incredible group of scholars to read and comment on it. I drew heavily on these readers’ previous works when writing The Black Tax and held up their books as models of the kind of engaging and impactful historical scholarship that I aspired to achieve. Which makes their positive reactions to my book all the more gratifying, even as it makes my job here a bit harder. I have no complaints to respond to, no arguments to defend, no decisions or only a few omissions to justify or explain.