![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() In the history of academic sociology, ethnographic immersion in social life on “the other side” has been an important contributor to political culture in the US, going back to studies of gangs and “vice” institutions in the 1920s, through Becker’s and others’ studies of “deviance” in the 1950s and 1960s… I see Alice in that tradition and fear that academic sociologists, the great majority of whom work at a much safer distance from the people they write about, who indeed spend virtually all of their research life within the halls of academe, will become very wary of fieldwork that takes the researcher intimately into social worlds that are rife with what the government considers crime. Alice Goffman, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City. The extent to which crime elicits harsh policing, or policing itself contributes to a climate of violence and illegality, becomes impossible to sort out. As someone who, in order to inform policy and advance sociological knowledge, promotes close-up descriptions of social life through immersion fieldwork, I’m concerned about the potential of this controversy to quash the whole field of participant observation research in areas of social life that the government considers rife with criminality. Intensive policing and the crime it intends to control become mutually reinforcing. On the Run Fugitive Life in an American City Alice Goffman Forty years in, the War on Drugs has done almost nothing to prevent drugs from being sold or used, but it has nonetheless created a little-known surveillance state in America’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods. ![]()
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