ASA is excited to present the Regional Spotlight Sessions for the 2026 Annual Meeting, showcasing the vibrant sociological landscape of our host city: New York. These sessions will examine a wide range of themes offering attendees a unique opportunity to consider how local contexts shape research, practice, and community.
Arts and Culture in New York City
New York City has long occupied a central place in the global imagination as a hub of artistic and cultural production—home to iconic institutions, vibrant creative communities, and major annual events from Fashion Week to The Armory Show. Its centrality reflects not only cultural prestige but also distinctive spatial and social dynamics: philanthropic legacies that shaped museums, loft conversions and MFA programs that drew artists, and immigrant and working-class labor that continue to sustain the city’s cultural infrastructure. This panel examines both the historical foundations and the contemporary forces that define New York’s cultural life. We explore the institutions, practices, and work that keep the city’s art worlds alive, while also considering the exclusions and inequalities that persist. At the same time, we ask how New York’s status as a cultural center is being reshaped by global art markets, the growing recognition of historically marginalized artists, and the rise of digital platforms that are transforming how culture circulates and gains value. Together, the panel interrogates how New York’s art worlds and cultural fields are at once enduring, contested, and continually reinvented in the twenty-first century.
Session Participants:
Session Organizer: Hannah Wohl, University of California, Santa Barbara
Presider: Hannah Wohl, University of California, Santa Barbara
Panelists: Shamus Rahman Khan, Princeton University; Claudio Ezequiel Benzecry, Northwestern University; Tania R. Aparicio, Teachers College-Columbia University; Ashley E. Mears, University of Amsterdam
Gentrification in Brooklyn
Larger than most American cities, the storied and diverse borough of Brooklyn has been shaped and reshaped by people, culture, politics, and capital. For over five decades, Brooklyn has experienced many forms of gentrification from marginal gentrification to brownstoning to luxury development. Creatives and hipsters, urban professionals and aspirational families, real estate developers supported by municipal agencies, and culture, food, retail, tech, and leisure industry entrepreneurs have transformed working class, ethnic, majority-minority, waterfront, and industrial areas into increasingly exclusive and unaffordable neighborhoods. With a distinct aesthetic and vibe, Brooklyn’s style of gentrification has spread far beyond its geographic boundaries. Returning to the site that spawned “Brooklynization,” this session puts a spotlight on the forms and impact of gentrification and responses by local residents, city planners, businesses, and community organizations in Brooklyn. Reflecting on bohemianism and the creative class, placemaking and racial capital, green and resilience gentrification, luxury development and super-gentrification, and anti-gentrification, panelists analyze current developments to shed light on a variety of neighborhoods across the borough that has become synonymous with gentrification. Research-based and community-engaged insights will provide a nuanced understanding of these phenomena and their lasting effects on Brooklyn’s diverse communities.
Session Participants:
Session Organizers: Judith R. Halasz, SUNY-New Paltz; Mario R. Hernandez, Mills College at Northeastern University;
Presider: Judith R. Halasz, SUNY-New Paltz
- Anti-Gentrification Community Organizing in Flatbush – Imani Henry, Equality for Flatbush
- Artist-Driven Gentrification, Creative Class Industry Growth, and Neo-liberal Planning in Bushwick – Mario R. Hernandez, Mills College at Northeastern University
- Gentrification, Displacement, Creative Resistance, and Racial Capital in Historically Black Central Brooklyn Neighborhoods – Amanda Boston, University of Pittsburgh
- Green and Resilience Gentrification around Gowanus and Prospect Park – Kenneth Alan Gould, CUNY-Brooklyn College
- Mapping the Landscape Impacts of Super-Gentrification in Brooklyn – John Lauermann, Pratt Institute
Immigrant New York: The Changing American City
Over the last decade, immigration has continued to reshape New York City, reinforcing its status as the quintessential immigrant city and one of the most diverse urban centers in the world. This panel examines how recent demographic shifts, new migration patterns, and evolving federal, state, and local policies have impacted the city’s economy, cultural identity, civic life, neighborhoods, and schools. Panelists will examine the growing presence of immigrants from Asia, Latin America, West Africa, the Middle East and the Caribbean, and how these newcomers are integrating into and transforming New York City. Attention will be given to the role of immigrants in revitalizing local economies and neighborhoods, sustaining essential sectors such as health care and food service, and contributing to New York’s civic and cultural dynamism. The presentations will also address the challenges of housing, labor precarity, and access to social services faced by immigrant New Yorkers, as well as the city’s evolving policy responses, including sanctuary protections and the recent influx of asylum seekers. By bringing together scholars of migration and urban studies, the panel highlights the opportunities and tensions that immigration generates, offering a nuanced understanding of how newcomers are reshaping this city of “eight million stories” in the 21st century.
Session Participants:
Session Organizer: Van C. Tran, CUNY-Graduate Center
Presider: Van C. Tran, CUNY-Graduate Center
Asian Americans and the Making of a Modern New York City – Margaret May Chin, CUNY-Hunter College
Biting into the Big Apple: The Impact of African Immigrant Communities on New York City – Dialika Sall, CUNY-Lehman College
Immigrant City: How the Newest Immigrants Have Transformed New York – Nancy Foner, CUNY-Hunter College
Latino New Yorkers Maintaining the City – Ernesto Castañeda, American University
Putting Palestinians on the New York Map: The Politics of Cuisine and Protest – Randa B Serhan, Barnard College
New York City Memory, Monuments, & the Presence of the Past
New York City has a rich and multifarious mnemonic landscape. One can feel the presence of the past across the city’s diverse array of neighborhoods and in various places and spaces of significance to different communities. This mnemonic landscape includes a wide variety of monuments, commemorative sites, historical markers, and other places that carry social memories and keep that past alive for residents and tourists alike. Some evoke controversial, difficult, or traumatic episodes and situations. Others focus our attention on important times and events and connect them to our present lives. And still other places, in their ongoing transformations, contain traces of past times now fading or forgotten. This panel includes scholars working in different traditions who explore the mnemonic significance of New York City. While they focus on different topics and cases, they come together on this panel around their shared interest in the social memories of New York City.
Session Participants:
Session Organizer: Thomas DeGloma, CUNY-Hunter College
Presider: Thomas DeGloma, CUNY-Hunter College
- Erasing the Past: Race, Space, and Power in Gentrifying Brooklyn – Amanda Boston, University of Pittsburgh
- In the Open, In the Shadows: Black Lesbians, Shared Memories, and Community-Building in Mid-Twentieth Century New York – Mignon R. Moore, Barnard College
- Mnemonic Traces: Race and Colonialism in NYC’s Commemorative Landscape – Amy Sodaro, CUNY-Borough of Manhattan Community College
- On September 11, 2026: Reflections on a Reverberating Past – Christina Simko, Williams College
New York City Politics: A Harbinger or a Special Case?
This session will assess the current state of urban and national politics by examining how New York City’s current political dynamics compare with those of other large cities throughout the nation. Rather than presenting formal papers, the panelists will address a set of questions, formulated by the moderator, that asks them to consider the ways recent political developments in New York — such as the emergence of a new generation of influential left-leaning political actors — point to widespread and continuing shifts in the American electorate or, alternatively, represent a special case that is not likely to be replicated elsewhere.
Session Participants:
Session Organizers: Kathleen Gerson, New York University; Mignon R. Moore, Barnard College
Presider: Daniel Laurison, Swarthmore College
Panelists: John Mollenkopf, CUNY Graduate Center; Kimberly Johnson, New York University; Jacob William Faber, New York University; Angela Marie Simms, Barnard College-Columbia University
NYC Crime, Control, and Criminal Justice Policy in the Age of Trump
The combination of the activist policies of the federal government toward crime control efforts in large urban cities (i.e. national guard deployment; reductions to federally funded crime prevention programs and to research addressing racial disparities in the justice system; state budget cuts), along with the election of a new mayor of New York, presents difficult and unique challenges for policy makers. This panel will examine how the mayor and local officials can craft both just and effective crime control policies in the face of declining federal resources and unpredictable federal interventions. Panelists will present and discuss research on effective and promising programs for community-based crime and violence prevention and policing. The panel will also discuss how the new mayor might implement such programs in an environment of an emerging fiscal crisis and an increasingly hostile federal administration. Topics will include the current state of the plan to close Rikers Island; the utility of increasing resources to policing versus building the capacity of non-profits and civil society; research on the relationship between immigration (documented and undocumented) and crime; recent changes in deportation policy and implementation.
(Session Organizer) Michael Jacobson, CUNY Graduate Center and CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance; (Presider) Michael Jacobson, CUNY Graduate Center and CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance; (Discussant) Nancy Lavigne, Rutgers-Newark; (Panelist) Michael Jacobson, CUNY Graduate Center and CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance; (Panelist) Stanley Richards, The Fortune Society; (Panelist) Elizabeth Glazer, Vital City and New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice; (Panelist) Patrick Sharkey, Princeton University
Organizational Inequality in an Era of DEI Resistance
Despite decades of efforts to expand fairness and opportunity, inequities tied to race, gender, class, and other social positions remain deeply embedded in organizational structures and practices. At the same time, political and cultural debates have fueled resistance to DEI policies, raising pressing questions about the future of equity work. This panel brings together scholars whose work examines systemic inequities in organizations and the growing backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. It features a moderated conversation among panelists, who will share insights from their research and reflect on how inequities are reproduced across industries, as well as how organizations are navigating both the promise and the challenges of equity initiatives amid DEI retrenchment. While New York City offers a particularly important context for understanding these dynamics, the discussion will also highlight national patterns and implications across regions and industries. Through an interactive dialogue, panelists will explore the persistence of inequities, organizational responses, and strategies for sustaining equity-focused efforts in a political moment of heightened resistance.
(Session Organizer) Tsedale M Melaku, Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College, CUNY; (Presider) Tsedale M Melaku, Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College, CUNY; (Panelist) Angie Beeman, CUNY-Baruch College; (Panelist) James T Carter, Cornell University; (Panelist) Yung-Yi Diana Pan, CUNY-Brooklyn College; (Panelist) McKenzie Preston, New York University; (Panelist) Sandra Portocarrero, London School of Economics