CER Books

The End Game: How Inequality Shapes our Final Years

Corey M. Abramson
2017

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...

Beyond the Case: The Logics and Practices of Comparative Ethnography

Corey M. Abramson
Neil Gong
2019

Corey M. Abramson - The social sciences have seen a substantial increase in comparative and multi-sited ethnographic projects over the last three decades. Yet, at present, researchers seeking to design comparative field projects have few scholarly works detailing how comparison is conducted in divergent ethnographic approaches. In Beyond the Case, Corey M. Abramson and Neil Gong have gathered together several experts in field research to address these issues by showing how practitioners employing contemporary iterations of ethnographic...

Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair

Jovan Scott Lewis
2020

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.

Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa

Jovan Scott Lewis
2022

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...

Potholes in the Road: Transition Problems for Low-Income Youth in High School

Martín Sánchez-Jankowski
2022

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,...

Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology

Nancy Scheper-Hughes
Philippe Bourgois
2003

Nancy Scheper-Hughes - From Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” to Joseph Conrad’s “fascination of the abomination,” humankind has struggled to make sense of human-upon-human violence. Edited by two of anthropology’s most passionate voices on this subject, Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology is the only book of its kind available: a single volume exploration of social, literary, and philosophical theories of violence.

Cracks in the Pavement: Social Change and Resilience in Poor Neighborhoods

Martín Sánchez-Jankowski
2008

Martin Sanchez-Jankowski - Woven throughout with rich details of everyday life, this original, on-the-ground study of poor neighborhoods challenges much prevailing wisdom about urban poverty, shedding new light on the people, institutions, and culture in these communities. Over the course of nearly a decade, Martín Sánchez-Jankowski immersed himself in life in neighborhoods in New York and Los Angeles to investigate how social change and social preservation transpire among the urban poor. Looking at five community mainstays—the housing project, the small grocery...