Tallahassee is a national leader among mid-size cities in e-governance. With a young and well-educated population and a digitally progressive government, the city has made successful investments in information communication technology. Tang et al. (2021) view Tallahassee’s city management app, DigiTally, with its 6,000 regular monthly users, as a best-case scenario for a smart city…
Category: Tallahassee Community
How the Disney debacle broke the back of Florida’s conservative consensus | Opinion
This article originally appeared in the Tallahassee Democrat. The Republican retribution against Disney involved with dissolving the Reedy Creek Improvement District is striking in its swiftness, cattiness, and irrationality. The brazen partisanship that drove the legislation may have also broken the back of the principled conservative consensus that built much of Florida’s prosperity. Perhaps the…
Amazon distribution center provides lessons for promoting economic development
This post first appeared in the Tallahassee Democrat. Something extraordinary is unfolding on 118 acres of land in the northwest corner of Mahan and I-10 in Tallahassee. It’s not just the 2.8 million square foot building, or the $200 million worth of concrete, steel, piping, and engineering. The sprawling Amazon fullment center may well be…
Social Movement Perspective: Understanding Black Lives Matter and the #Tally19
This was first posted October 5th, 2020. Sociologists are interested in the interplay between structure and agency. While individuals theoretically have the agency to make the choices they want, these choices are constrained by factors out of their control, such as their social class, or social location. Social movements scholars, in particular, are interested in…
Halloween Screams Prosperity
As consumers purchase candy, costumes, and pumpkin spice lattes, Halloween can be a time to reflect on traditions and prosperity.
Social Movement Perspective: Understanding Black Lives Matter and the #Tally19
Sociologists are interested in the interplay between structure and agency. While individuals theoretically have the agency to make the choices they want, these choices are constrained by factors out of their control, such as their social class, or social location. Social movements scholars, in particular, are interested in the agency that comes into play when…
How to Fix the Nursing Home Crisis, Now and After the Pandemic
This piece first appeared in the Tampa Bay Times. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused tens of thousands of deaths and more than three million infections, with predictions of many more to come. Nursing home residents have been among the most affected by the pandemic. In some states, half or more of all COVID deaths have…
Social Equity: The Predictable Disproportionate Impact of COVID-19 on Minority Communities
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has demanded global attention as it claims the lives of more than 560,000 humans globally and more than 135,000 humans in the United States alone. COVID-19 death data in the United States by race, reveals a striking image of inequity. The data indicate that there are disproportionate deaths in Black and…
DeSantis’ Coronavirus Leadership Reflects the Prudence Florida Needs Overall
This piece first appeared in the Tallahassee Democrat. Six months into America’s COVID-19 crisis and, remarkably, the virus continues to confound experts. Nevertheless, Gov. DeSantis continues to be attacked as if the best approaches are obvious and clear. In fact, DeSantis, like his peers in other states, is being forced to make severe policy trade-offs…
Suffering in Silence: How COVID-19 School Closures Inhibit the Reporting of Child Maltreatment
The rapid spread of COVID-19 has generated immediate challenges for policymakers across multiple areas including health, fiscal, environmental, and education policy. To contribute to ongoing policy discussions, recent academic work has sought to understand the impact of COVID-19 policy responses on outcomes ranging from job losses to mortality to pollution. In a recent paper, we…
Wicked Problems, Wicked Solutions 