Albert S Fu
Biographic Data
| ID | 250808 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Albert S Fu |
| GIVEN NAMES | Albert S |
| FAMILY NAME | Fu |
| SIGNATURE | FU A S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Kutztown University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6676-3882 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 50 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Disasters: A sociological approach , by Kathleen Tierney
A central part of Kathleen Tierney’s work on risk and disaster is that catastrophes do not just happen. Instead, they are a social phenomenon. While climatic and geological realities exist, social ...
Incineration, Urbanization, and Municipal Solid Waste in the World-System
Incineration, or waste-to-energy, is a widespread means of greenwashing municipal solid waste collection worldwide. This paper looks at incineration and the trade of bottom ash to discuss how urbanization in one country pressures urban expansion elsewhere in the modern world-system. Incineration is a coping mechanism for excess waste produced by cities under capitalism. It generates energy, reduces the volume of waste, and creates ash that can be…
Risky Cities: The Physical and Fiscal Nature of Disaster Capitalism
Over half the world’s population lives in urban regions, and increasingly disasters are of great concern to city dwellers, policymakers, and builders. However, disaster risk is also of great interest to corporations, financiers, and investors. Risky Cities is a critical examination of global urban development, capitalism, and its relationship with environmental hazards. It is about how cities live and profit from the threat of sinkholes, garbage,…
Can Buildings be Racist? A Critical Sociology of Architecture and the Built Environment
Can buildings be racist? In the study of racism, there is extensive literature on racist popular culture. However, buildings and architecture, as potentially racist cultural products, are understudied. This article examines Spanish-Colonial Revival architecture in Southern California as an example of urban placemaking with racist origins and legacies. This article relies on archival research to examine how buildings can be just as, if not more, r…
Mediterranean Style Gated Communities around the World: Architecture, Globalization, and Transnational Elites
Mediterranean style houses, mansions, and villas are found in elite enclaves around the world. There is a large literature on gated communities. However, the ubiquity of this Mediterranean style as a global and cross–cultural phenomenon has been underexamined. Enclaves in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Middle East often look the same suggesting the global commodification of this aesthetic ideal. Examining the Toskana Vadisi, or Tuscan Valley…
Integrated Sociology Program Assessment: Inclusion of a Senior Portfolio Graduation Requirement
This article presents information about the planning, implementation, and findings of an assessment-based student portfolio designed by the faculty of a sociology program at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, a midsized public regional liberal arts institution. First, we briefly present the rationale for implementing a portfolio system and the thought process by which our particular portfolio assessment tool was created. Then, we explain our fi…
Waste Away: Working and Living with a North American Landfill
Sentimentalizing Racial Reconciliation in the “New South Africa”: Cinematic Representation of the 1995 Rugby World Cup
In an age when the obsessive fixations on virtual reality scenarios and digital simulations of historical events have blurred the boundaries between truth and fiction, collective memory—and the authenticity it purports to maintain—come under threat of irrelevance if not outright extinction. As a distinctive kind of storytelling, filmmaking can be a powerful tool for promoting the collective remembrance of the past. Yet film is a notoriously slipp…
Connecting urban and environmental catastrophe: Linking natural disaster, the built environment, and capitalism
Outside of warfare, natural disaster represents the greatest challenge to the physical nature of cities. This is due to the relative fixity of cities, in which they are bound by particular historical and environmental conditions. Sociologists in the fields of disaster, environmental, and urban studies have addressed the social and political components of natural disaster, and its consequences for urban populations. However, despite the growth of …
Neoliberalism, logistics and the treadmill of production in metropolitan waste management: A case of Turkish firms
This paper examines the domestic growth and overseas expansion of Turkish firms as part of the treadmill of production. The treadmill of production is an environmental and political-economy approach to society’s insatiable hunger for material goods. In this approach, economic growth leads to withdrawals of natural resources, and the addition of waste to the environment that stresses both nature and society. Drawing on the treadmill of production …
The Price of Nuclear Power: Uranium Communities and Environmental Justice
Glorified Fantasies and Masterpieces of Deception on Importing Las Vegas into the 'New South Africa
With the end of apartheid, Johannesburg and other South African cities are now part of a new global race to become 'world-class' tourist and business centers. At the center of this development is the importation of Vegas-style spectacle by local entrepreneurs, firms and other city boosters who create fantasyscapes such as the Emperor's Palace and GrandWest. Financed and run by South African impresarios - whose luxurious empires transcend the cont…
Politics of Urban Development and Wildfires in California and Turkey
While Turkey and California suffer similar wildfire risks, they have developed diametrically opposed fire-suppression strategies: the former adopted an increasingly centralized strategy, while the latter depends upon a highly decentralized system. This paper is a comparative analysis that relates the politics of land use in wildland-urban interfaces (WUIs) to this divergence in firefighting strategies. Our argument is that the evolution of the di…
The new century of the metropolis: Urban enclaves and orientalism
Tom Angotti's The New Century of the Metropolis is an ambitious examination of urbanization around the world. In the preface of the book, he notes that this project began as a follow up to Metropol
The Façade of Safety in California's Shelter-In-Place Homes: History, Wildfire, and Social Consequence
This article examines the seemingly incongruous ways in which Shelter-in-Place (SIP) practices have been sold, deployed, and discussed in Southern California to battle wildfire. In particular, this will be a critique of the technical literature and application of fire safety in housing, as well as the anthropocentric hubris that humans can outsmart wildfire. Rather than focus on the success or failure of SIP, I am situating the SIP within the con…
Materializing Spanish-Colonial Revival Architecture: History and Cultural Production in Southern California
In the early twentieth century, Spanish-Colonial Revival became embedded in the local culture of Southern California. However, this architectural style did not simply appear, rather it was materialized by architects, builders, realtors, and manufacturers of construction materials who built for and sold to homeowners. This process was not simply about using “history” and “heritage.” Rather, these social actors had to legitimize the ubiquitous use …
Shared intelligence: American painting and the photograph
edited by Barbara Buhler Lynes and Jonathan Weinberg Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011, 240 pages ISBN: 9-780-52026-906-4 (hardcover) Price $39.95 Reviewed by Albert S
Contradictions in California’s orientalist landscape: Architecture, history and Spanish-Colonial Revival
Cinema and the edgy city: Johannesburg, carjacking, and the postmetropolis
Oliver Schmitz's Hijack Stories (2000) is a story of cross‐over cultures and mixed genres set in Johannesburg. In this blurring of boundaries, he presents us an interplay between the dangerous city of both fact and fiction. Schmitz's cinematic depiction of the city, weaves in and out, as well as to and from yuppie neighbourhoods and Soweto. Thus, we see how post‐apartheid Johannesburg is a place of hybrid identities not only in the different spac…
The Price of Nuclear Power: Uranium Communities and Environmental Justice
Waste Away: Working and Living with a North American Landfill
Connecting urban and environmental catastrophe: Linking natural disaster, the built environment, and capitalism
Outside of warfare, natural disaster represents the greatest challenge to the physical nature of cities. This is due to the relative fixity of cities, in which they are bound by particular historical and environmental conditions. Sociologists in the fields of disaster, environmental, and urban studies have addressed the social and political components of natural disaster, and its consequences for urban populations. However, despite the growth of …
Glorified Fantasies and Masterpieces of Deception on Importing Las Vegas into the 'New South Africa
With the end of apartheid, Johannesburg and other South African cities are now part of a new global race to become 'world-class' tourist and business centers. At the center of this development is the importation of Vegas-style spectacle by local entrepreneurs, firms and other city boosters who create fantasyscapes such as the Emperor's Palace and GrandWest. Financed and run by South African impresarios - whose luxurious empires transcend the cont…
The new century of the metropolis: Urban enclaves and orientalism
Tom Angotti's The New Century of the Metropolis is an ambitious examination of urbanization around the world. In the preface of the book, he notes that this project began as a follow up to Metropol
Mediterranean Style Gated Communities around the World: Architecture, Globalization, and Transnational Elites
Mediterranean style houses, mansions, and villas are found in elite enclaves around the world. There is a large literature on gated communities. However, the ubiquity of this Mediterranean style as a global and cross–cultural phenomenon has been underexamined. Enclaves in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Middle East often look the same suggesting the global commodification of this aesthetic ideal. Examining the Toskana Vadisi, or Tuscan Valley…
Politics of Urban Development and Wildfires in California and Turkey
While Turkey and California suffer similar wildfire risks, they have developed diametrically opposed fire-suppression strategies: the former adopted an increasingly centralized strategy, while the latter depends upon a highly decentralized system. This paper is a comparative analysis that relates the politics of land use in wildland-urban interfaces (WUIs) to this divergence in firefighting strategies. Our argument is that the evolution of the di…
Can Buildings be Racist? A Critical Sociology of Architecture and the Built Environment
Can buildings be racist? In the study of racism, there is extensive literature on racist popular culture. However, buildings and architecture, as potentially racist cultural products, are understudied. This article examines Spanish-Colonial Revival architecture in Southern California as an example of urban placemaking with racist origins and legacies. This article relies on archival research to examine how buildings can be just as, if not more, r…
Materializing Spanish-Colonial Revival Architecture: History and Cultural Production in Southern California
In the early twentieth century, Spanish-Colonial Revival became embedded in the local culture of Southern California. However, this architectural style did not simply appear, rather it was materialized by architects, builders, realtors, and manufacturers of construction materials who built for and sold to homeowners. This process was not simply about using “history” and “heritage.” Rather, these social actors had to legitimize the ubiquitous use …
Incineration, Urbanization, and Municipal Solid Waste in the World-System
Incineration, or waste-to-energy, is a widespread means of greenwashing municipal solid waste collection worldwide. This paper looks at incineration and the trade of bottom ash to discuss how urbanization in one country pressures urban expansion elsewhere in the modern world-system. Incineration is a coping mechanism for excess waste produced by cities under capitalism. It generates energy, reduces the volume of waste, and creates ash that can be…
Neoliberalism, logistics and the treadmill of production in metropolitan waste management: A case of Turkish firms
This paper examines the domestic growth and overseas expansion of Turkish firms as part of the treadmill of production. The treadmill of production is an environmental and political-economy approach to society’s insatiable hunger for material goods. In this approach, economic growth leads to withdrawals of natural resources, and the addition of waste to the environment that stresses both nature and society. Drawing on the treadmill of production …
The Façade of Safety in California's Shelter-In-Place Homes: History, Wildfire, and Social Consequence
This article examines the seemingly incongruous ways in which Shelter-in-Place (SIP) practices have been sold, deployed, and discussed in Southern California to battle wildfire. In particular, this will be a critique of the technical literature and application of fire safety in housing, as well as the anthropocentric hubris that humans can outsmart wildfire. Rather than focus on the success or failure of SIP, I am situating the SIP within the con…
Contradictions in California’s orientalist landscape: Architecture, history and Spanish-Colonial Revival
Cinema and the edgy city: Johannesburg, carjacking, and the postmetropolis
Oliver Schmitz's Hijack Stories (2000) is a story of cross‐over cultures and mixed genres set in Johannesburg. In this blurring of boundaries, he presents us an interplay between the dangerous city of both fact and fiction. Schmitz's cinematic depiction of the city, weaves in and out, as well as to and from yuppie neighbourhoods and Soweto. Thus, we see how post‐apartheid Johannesburg is a place of hybrid identities not only in the different spac…
Cinema and the edgy city: Johannesburg, carjacking, and the postmetropolis
Oliver Schmitz's Hijack Stories (2000) is a story of cross‐over cultures and mixed genres set in Johannesburg. In this blurring of boundaries, he presents us an interplay between the dangerous city of both fact and fiction. Schmitz's cinematic depiction of the city, weaves in and out, as well as to and from yuppie neighbourhoods and Soweto. Thus, we see how post‐apartheid Johannesburg is a place of hybrid identities not only in the different spac…
Contradictions in California’s orientalist landscape: Architecture, history and Spanish-Colonial Revival
Materializing Spanish-Colonial Revival Architecture: History and Cultural Production in Southern California
In the early twentieth century, Spanish-Colonial Revival became embedded in the local culture of Southern California. However, this architectural style did not simply appear, rather it was materialized by architects, builders, realtors, and manufacturers of construction materials who built for and sold to homeowners. This process was not simply about using “history” and “heritage.” Rather, these social actors had to legitimize the ubiquitous use …
Shared intelligence: American painting and the photograph
edited by Barbara Buhler Lynes and Jonathan Weinberg Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011, 240 pages ISBN: 9-780-52026-906-4 (hardcover) Price $39.95 Reviewed by Albert S
The new century of the metropolis: Urban enclaves and orientalism
Tom Angotti's The New Century of the Metropolis is an ambitious examination of urbanization around the world. In the preface of the book, he notes that this project began as a follow up to Metropol
The Façade of Safety in California's Shelter-In-Place Homes: History, Wildfire, and Social Consequence
This article examines the seemingly incongruous ways in which Shelter-in-Place (SIP) practices have been sold, deployed, and discussed in Southern California to battle wildfire. In particular, this will be a critique of the technical literature and application of fire safety in housing, as well as the anthropocentric hubris that humans can outsmart wildfire. Rather than focus on the success or failure of SIP, I am situating the SIP within the con…
Glorified Fantasies and Masterpieces of Deception on Importing Las Vegas into the 'New South Africa
With the end of apartheid, Johannesburg and other South African cities are now part of a new global race to become 'world-class' tourist and business centers. At the center of this development is the importation of Vegas-style spectacle by local entrepreneurs, firms and other city boosters who create fantasyscapes such as the Emperor's Palace and GrandWest. Financed and run by South African impresarios - whose luxurious empires transcend the cont…
Politics of Urban Development and Wildfires in California and Turkey
While Turkey and California suffer similar wildfire risks, they have developed diametrically opposed fire-suppression strategies: the former adopted an increasingly centralized strategy, while the latter depends upon a highly decentralized system. This paper is a comparative analysis that relates the politics of land use in wildland-urban interfaces (WUIs) to this divergence in firefighting strategies. Our argument is that the evolution of the di…
Connecting urban and environmental catastrophe: Linking natural disaster, the built environment, and capitalism
Outside of warfare, natural disaster represents the greatest challenge to the physical nature of cities. This is due to the relative fixity of cities, in which they are bound by particular historical and environmental conditions. Sociologists in the fields of disaster, environmental, and urban studies have addressed the social and political components of natural disaster, and its consequences for urban populations. However, despite the growth of …
Neoliberalism, logistics and the treadmill of production in metropolitan waste management: A case of Turkish firms
This paper examines the domestic growth and overseas expansion of Turkish firms as part of the treadmill of production. The treadmill of production is an environmental and political-economy approach to society’s insatiable hunger for material goods. In this approach, economic growth leads to withdrawals of natural resources, and the addition of waste to the environment that stresses both nature and society. Drawing on the treadmill of production …
The Price of Nuclear Power: Uranium Communities and Environmental Justice
Sentimentalizing Racial Reconciliation in the “New South Africa”: Cinematic Representation of the 1995 Rugby World Cup
In an age when the obsessive fixations on virtual reality scenarios and digital simulations of historical events have blurred the boundaries between truth and fiction, collective memory—and the authenticity it purports to maintain—come under threat of irrelevance if not outright extinction. As a distinctive kind of storytelling, filmmaking can be a powerful tool for promoting the collective remembrance of the past. Yet film is a notoriously slipp…
Integrated Sociology Program Assessment: Inclusion of a Senior Portfolio Graduation Requirement
This article presents information about the planning, implementation, and findings of an assessment-based student portfolio designed by the faculty of a sociology program at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, a midsized public regional liberal arts institution. First, we briefly present the rationale for implementing a portfolio system and the thought process by which our particular portfolio assessment tool was created. Then, we explain our fi…
Waste Away: Working and Living with a North American Landfill
Mediterranean Style Gated Communities around the World: Architecture, Globalization, and Transnational Elites
Mediterranean style houses, mansions, and villas are found in elite enclaves around the world. There is a large literature on gated communities. However, the ubiquity of this Mediterranean style as a global and cross–cultural phenomenon has been underexamined. Enclaves in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Middle East often look the same suggesting the global commodification of this aesthetic ideal. Examining the Toskana Vadisi, or Tuscan Valley…
Risky Cities: The Physical and Fiscal Nature of Disaster Capitalism
Over half the world’s population lives in urban regions, and increasingly disasters are of great concern to city dwellers, policymakers, and builders. However, disaster risk is also of great interest to corporations, financiers, and investors. Risky Cities is a critical examination of global urban development, capitalism, and its relationship with environmental hazards. It is about how cities live and profit from the threat of sinkholes, garbage,…
Can Buildings be Racist? A Critical Sociology of Architecture and the Built Environment
Can buildings be racist? In the study of racism, there is extensive literature on racist popular culture. However, buildings and architecture, as potentially racist cultural products, are understudied. This article examines Spanish-Colonial Revival architecture in Southern California as an example of urban placemaking with racist origins and legacies. This article relies on archival research to examine how buildings can be just as, if not more, r…
Incineration, Urbanization, and Municipal Solid Waste in the World-System
Incineration, or waste-to-energy, is a widespread means of greenwashing municipal solid waste collection worldwide. This paper looks at incineration and the trade of bottom ash to discuss how urbanization in one country pressures urban expansion elsewhere in the modern world-system. Incineration is a coping mechanism for excess waste produced by cities under capitalism. It generates energy, reduces the volume of waste, and creates ash that can be…
Disasters: A sociological approach , by Kathleen Tierney
A central part of Kathleen Tierney’s work on risk and disaster is that catastrophes do not just happen. Instead, they are a social phenomenon. While climatic and geological realities exist, social ...
Sociology (11 works) · Political science (10 works) · Law (8 works) · Economics (7 works) · History (7 works) · Archaeology (6 works) · Art (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Architecture (5 works)