Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

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.

*Co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law