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QUESTION: Social Justice in Florida

Submitted by Anonymooose on Mon, 10/08/2007 - 7:23pm
question / pregunta: 

Hello -

I am looking for resources that will help me identify trends (say over a 5-10 year period) in social, economic and environmental justice in Florida. Other than the U.S. Census, are there resources or research institutes that you could recommend? I am also looking for data on trends (Florida) in privatization and gentrification, to the extent that it is available.

Answers

Answer posted by: laura

One book you may want to take a look at (if you haven't already) is Carl Hiaasen's Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World. It's a short work, and it's older (1998), but it deals with many of the issues you are interested in, and it's owned by a number of libraries, including (we hope!) one to which you have access.

A number of Radical Reference librarians have suggested various other possibilities which may be of use.

Your local library may have access to research databases, which are searchable collections of magazine, newspaper, and journal articles. A search for "florida" and "privatization" in EBSCO's MasterFILE Premier and Academic Search Elite, for instance, gets 4 hits. "Florida" and "gentrification" gets 7 hits. Other databases that might be helpful include SocIndex (or Sociological Abstracts at many colleges), Social Sciences Citation Index, Business Source Premier, Factiva, and Lexis Academic.

If you are looking for data, you can find many different government resources at USA.gov's reference shelf. For data specific to Florida, try the Florida Bureau of Economic Research, which has economic analyses and population studies that may be relevant to your research.

Other resources suggested are the Miami Workers Center, which deals with gentrification and fair housing issues and the Data Center, which has internet links designed specifically to search out social justice information divided by topics.

Finally, to find more books, you may want to try searching Google's Book Search for "Florida" and "gentrification OR privatization OR social justice," etc.

Answer posted by: jenna

Here are responses and links two other librarians gathered:

Jim Miller jmiller2@umd.edu
My first reaction is:
If this is a popular or personal interest thing, Masterfile Premier at public libraries may help [gentrification and florida] [gentrification and miami] etc.

On the Web, usa.gov will help with state as well as federal sites and even some documents.

http://www.gpoaccess.gov/ is worth a try, though it may require broader searches: [social and justice and florida] gets only 2 hits. Using quotes to search ["social justice" and florida] gets no hits.

If this is for a college or even high school project, I would try databases such as Academic Search, SocIndex (or Sociological Abstracts at many colleges), Social Sciences Citation Index, Business Source Premier, Factiva, and Lexis Academic.

This is WELL worth a try in Google Books. Even if you find no "full view" (no copyright restrictions) books, you will get page numbers to try in the limited view books - which you can search in your own library if it's a big one. Or if you have to depend on a small library to get books for you on ILL, try www.worldcat.org. Open Worldcat will even tell you the mileage to the nearest libraries that have a book - and in MANY cases will let you click on those library names so you don't have to hunt around for each one's catalog to see if the book is checked out.

tripmastermonkey

Miami Workers Center is a group that i thought of just off the top of my head. When I contacted the Miami Workers Center, they said that they have been working long-term on issues around gentrification and fair housing- they can send you newsletters of what they've worked on.

The Data Center has internet links designed specifically to search out

from Left Turn