Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

This talk illustrates how overlapping surveillance systems—police, schools, creditors, social workers, public housing officials, landlords, probation and parole officers—place multiple, contradictory demands on the residents of poor black neighborhoods that are often impossible to satisfy. Reporting on an ethnographic study of residents’ interactions with police and other agents of surveillance, it 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, it 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.

Waverly Duck is an urban ethnographer whose primary research examines the social order of neighborhoods and institutional settings. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and served as the associate director of the Yale Urban Ethnography Project where he is currently a Senior Fellow. His academic areas of interest are urban sociology, inequality (race, class, gender, health and age), qualitative methods, culture, ethnomethodology and ethnography. His recent book, No Way Out: Precarious Living in the Shadow of Poverty and Drug Dealing with the University of Chicago Press, challenges the common misconception of urban ghettos as chaotic places where drug dealing, street crime, and random violence make daily life dangerous for everyone. No Way Out explores how neighborhood residents make sense of their lives within severe constraints as they choose among very unrewarding prospects.

The event will be held in Smathers Library 100 with a reception to follow.

For more information, e-mail Rebecca Hanson.