Edited by Michael Burawoy - In this powerful volume, ten original ethnographies explore two important issues: the ways in which people confront the threats and disruptions of contemporary life, and the ways in which researchers can most effectively study the modern metropolis. With its twofold agenda, the volume emerges as a multi-layered dialogue between researcher and researched, participant and observer, educator and educated.
These essays, produced in a refreshing collaborative effort by a senior scholar and ten graduate students, examine many...
Edited by Michael Burawoy - In this follow-up to the highly successful Ethnography Unbound, Michael Burawoy and nine colleagues break the bounds of conventional sociology, to explore the mutual shaping of local struggles and global forces. In contrast to the lofty debates between radical theorists, these nine studies excavate the dynamics and histories of globalization by extending out from the concrete, everyday world.
The authors were participant observers in diverse struggles over extending citizenship, medicalizing breast cancer...
Edited by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Loïc Wacquant - Increasingly the body is a possession that does not belong to us. It is bought and sold, bartered and stolen, marketed wholesale or in parts. The professions - especially reproductive medicine, transplant surgery, and bioethics but also journalism and other cultural specialists - have been pliant partners in this accelerating commodification of live and dead human organisms. Under the guise of healing or research, they have contributed to a new 'ethic of parts' for which the divisible body is severed from the self, torn...
Edited by Javier Auyero, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, and Philippe Bourgois In the Americas, debates around issues of citizen's public safety--from debates that erupt after highly publicized events, such as the shootings of Jordan Davis and Trayvon Martin, to those that recurrently dominate the airwaves in Latin America--are dominated by members of the middle and upper-middle classes. However, a cursory count of the victims of urban violence in the Americas reveals that the people suffering the most from violence live, and die, at the lowest of the socio-symbolic order, at...
Martín Sánchez-Jankowski - Violence in schools has more potential to involve large numbers of students, produce injuries, disrupt instructional time, and cause property damage than any other form of youth violence. Burning Dislike is the first book to use direct observation of everyday violent interactions to explore ethnic conflict in high schools. Why do young people engage in violence while in school? What is it about ethnicity that leads to fights?
Through the use of two direct observational studies conducted twenty-six years...
Corey Abramson - Senior citizens from all walks of life face a gauntlet of physical, psychological, and social hurdles. But do the disadvantages some people accumulate over the course of their lives make their final years especially difficult? Or does the quality of life among poor and affluent seniors converge at some point? The End Game investigates whether persistent socioeconomic, racial, and gender divisions in America create inequalities that structure the lives of the elderly.
Corey Abramson’s portraits of seniors from diverse backgrounds offer...
By Jovan Scott Lewis - Jovan Scott Lewis tells the story of three young and poor men striving to make a living in Montego Bay, where call centers and tourism are the two main industries in the struggling economy. Scammer’s Yard describes how these young men, seeking to overcome inequality and achieve autonomy, come to view crime as a form of liberation.
By Jovan Scott Lewis - Jovan Scott Lewis retells the history and afterlife of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, from the post-Reconstruction migration of Black people to Oklahoma Indian Territory to contemporary efforts to rebuild Black prosperity. He focuses on how the massacre in Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood—colloquially known as Black Wall Street—curtailed the freedom built there. Rather than framing the massacre as a one-off event, Lewis places it in a larger historical and social context of widespread patterns of anti-Black racism, segregation, and dispossession...
By Martín Sánchez-Jankowski - Education has been increasingly lauded as the path to achieving the American Dream, and in this book Martín Sánchez-Jankowski uses extensive ethnographic research to explore the dynamics of the interrelated barriers that low-income students must surpass in order to make transitions successfully from high school to college. With rigor and compassion, and engaging in participant observation to examine how individual students confront the education system, Potholes in the Road shows how obstacles related to issues of structure,...
