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result(s) for
"Duck, Waverly"
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The Complex Dynamics of Trust and Legitimacy
This article demonstrates how various forms of surveillance can lead to coping strategies that are corrosive of trust and legitimacy between black neighborhood residents and law enforcement. This article introduces the coping strategy of submissive civility as a method of self-preservation enacted in social situations where power relations are asymmetrical and the dominant party can administer sanctions. Reporting on an ethnographic study of residents’ interactions with police and other agents of surveillance, this article surveys a range of problems that residents face as they try to meet conflicting demands while avoiding sanctions. The analysis shows that issues of trust, legitimacy, and the discretionary authority of police and other outsiders in the neighborhood pervade these interactions. Further, the analysis highlights the complex ways in which family dynamics, unemployment, debt, and drug dealing intersect with the activities of law enforcement and the threat of imprisonment that is woven into the fabric of residents’ lives.
Journal Article
An Ethnographic Portrait of a Precarious Life: Getting By on Even Less
This article presents an ethnographic study of life in an impoverished black urban neighborhood through the experiences and perspectives of a single mother of four. Her survival strategies shed light on the disproportionate effects of recent social policies on poor racial-ethnic minority groups. Having trouble paying bills is nothing new. As Carol Stack has shown, extended kinship networks offer crucial resources that can enable single-parent families to survive. Over the past decade and a half, however, welfare reform, increases in the rates of arrest and incarceration for poor black men, and a spate of evictions are putting serious pressure on networks that were already overextended and now have too few solvent members. Poor families are left in a precarious situation. The in-depth story of one woman illuminates the issues that many people in this precarious position face in everyday life.
Journal Article
Black and Jewish: “Double Consciousness” Inspired a Qualitative Interactional Approach that Centers Race, Marginality, and Justice
Classic theoretical arguments by seven Black and Jewish sociologists—informed by their experience of “double-consciousness”—comprise an important legacy in sociology. Approaches that ignore the role of racism and slavery in the rise of Western societies suppress and distort this legacy in favor of a White Christian Hero narrative. By contrast, Durkheim, a Jewish sociologist, took Roman enslaved and immigrant guild-workers as a starting point, positing the “constitutive practices” of their occupations as media of cooperation for achieving solidarity across diversity. His argument marks a transition from the treatment of social facts as durable symbolic residue in homogeneous cultures, to the qualitative study of constitutive social fact making in interaction in diverse social situations. Because making social facts in interaction requires mutual reciprocity, troubles occur frequently in contexts of inequality. Like W.E.B. DuBois, who first theorized double consciousness as a heightened awareness produced by racial exclusion, Harold Garfinkel looked to troubles experienced by the marginalized as clues to the taken-for-granted practices for making social order, calling them “ethno-methods.” Together with other Black and Jewish sociologists—Eric Williams, Oliver Cromwell Cox, Erving Goffman, and Harvey Sacks—they challenge popular interpretations of classical social theory, center Race and marginality, and explain how features of practice that unite/divide can be both interactional and institutionalized.
Journal Article
\Fractured Reflections\ of High-Status Black Male Presentations of Self: Nonrecognition of Identity as a \Tacit\ Form of Institutional Racism
This article examines the effects of \"tacit\" expectations about race, which are institutionalized in an Interaction Order that frames how we \"see\" high-status occupational identity. There is an essential moment in presenting Self before Other(s) when it is the turn of the Other(s) to recognize, respond to, and ratify that presentation. The Self is a social accomplishment that requires mutual cooperation from others. Failure to recognize and ratify competent presentations of self, reported frequently by black men, can strip those presentations of the social identity they claim and the dignity, power, and authority associated with that identity. We argue that these \"tacit\" expectations about identity follow black men wherever they go-no matter how successful they are. Using accounts drawn from interviews, we examine the persistent failure of Others to recognize and ratify high-status black male identities and the legitimate authority they carry.
Journal Article
'Senseless' violence: Making sense of murder
This article, based on an ethnographic study conducted over a three-year period in an impoverished, predominately African American and Latino neighborhood in the northeastern US, describes how a drug gang narrative was created by the police and prosecutors to explain a series of unsolved murders. The narrative that the authorities constructed retroactively tied these unrelated crimes together by connecting them to neighborhood drug dealers whom they construed as a gang. Through this narrative, the authorities were able to prosecute all the cases in sequence and deploy a series of defendants and witnesses to win convictions – even in cases where they had little evidence. Murders like these are typically described by law enforcement agencies and the media as 'senseless' acts of 'random violence'. When examined with ethnographic detail, however, these acts of murder turn out to have motives that community members understand but have nothing to do with gang activity.
Journal Article
Interaction Order as Cultural Sociology within Urban Ethnography
Abstract
Classic urban ethnography has often viewed urbanization and the urban condition as pathological and the city as disorganized, with urban areas producing problems to be solved through the managerial control of urban space. This chapter presents an alternative view, introducing an Interaction Order approach within urban ethnography. This way of studying culture builds on the work of Emile Durkheim (1893), W. E. B. Du Bois (1903), Harold Garfinkel (1967), Erving Goffman (1983), and Anne Rawls (1987). Interaction Orders are shared rules and expectations that members of a group use to coordinate their daily social relations and sense-making, which take the form of taken-for-granted practices that are specific to a place and its circumstances. The power of this social order, which is constructed by the interactions among participants themselves, renders outsiders’ interventions counterproductive. Understanding local interaction orders enables ethnographers to interpret problems differently and imagine solutions that work with local culture.
Book Chapter
Interaction orders of drug dealing spaces: local orders of sensemaking in a poor black American place
Based on ethnographic data, this essay analyzes the social order properties of a poor urban street, in a small city in the northeast United States, on which drug dealing is the principle occupation. Rather than treating drug dealing as an agent of disorder, we focus on the order properties of drug dealing and the ordered character of the local code of conduct that develops around it. Like Sudhir Venkatesh (American Journal of Sociology 103:82–111,
1997
) we examine the interface between drug dealing and the neighborhood. However, in this small urban space the drug dealers are not outsiders, rather, they are long term residents: established insiders who are well integrated into community life. As such their work practices and the requirements they place on behavior in public spaces impact the neighborhood in comprehensive ways. We detail the phenomenon Elijah Anderson called the “code of the street” (Anderson
1999
) as a set of practices and social markers, a local Interaction Order (Goffman, American Sociological Review 48:1–17,
1983
; Rawls, Sociological Theory 2:136–149,
1987
), that furnishes basic day to day sensemaking tools for residents (Rawls
2009
). We propose that this order has a constitutive character that furnishes stable expectations (Garfinkel
1963
,
1967
) for meaningful social action and identity in the neighborhood. In a context of industrial decline and urban poverty, drug dealing careers constitute a major socialization factor, that touches everyone here—especially children.
Journal Article
Black Male Sexual Politics: Avoidance of HIV/AIDS Testing as a Masculine Health Practice
This paper reports on a study of the effects of the sexual, racial and status identity on health and health seeking behavior among a cohort of African American men. Focus groups and structured interviews were conducted to explore the attitudes of a cohort of African American men about their masculinity and its relationship to their health related behaviors. Their narratives indicate that being sexually active is an important component of masculinity. Both younger and older members of the cohort described their use, intended use, and avoidance of sexual activity as a health behavior to preserve a masculine identity. They stated that avoidance would be especially necessary if they were faced with an \"incurable\" medical diagnosis that could interfere with the freedom of their sexual activities. A diagnosis of HIV/AIDS, for example, was information they said they would avoid by not being tested for AIDS. Evaluating this behavior within the framework of hegemonic masculinity suggests that the behavior is irrational. To remedy this, the paper considers leading theories of gender and masculinity, including \"hyper\" and hegemonic masculinity and attempts—with the aid of the men's narratives about masculinity—to formulate a notion of masculinity with greater relevance to African American men.
Journal Article