My areas of specialization are social stratification, urban sociology, race and ethnicity, and the sociology of work and occupations.

OVERVIEW

My research explores how stratification works along racial and cultural lines. My past research, as well as new projects I am currently undertaking, uncover how practices of everyday life serve as mechanisms for upholding or undermining stratification and inequality in contemporary society. By identifying these mechanisms through ethnographic immersion, I expose how everyday practices and embodied subjectivities are connected to the larger societal organization of economic/social/cultural capitals in institutionalizing social stratification. In my dissertation, entitled “American Allegory: Lindy Hop and the Racial Imagination,” I engaged a fundamental contradiction in American society—African-American culture continues to be symbolically central in American culture, while African-Americans remain economically and politically marginalized—through a multi-method urban ethnography that examined the dance worlds of the Lindy Hop and Steppin’, both in the city of Chicago. I am currently completing a book on the cultural and racial politics of the social world of dance entitled American Allegory: Lindy Hop and the Racial Imagination.

     As a Senior Faculty Fellow at the Egan Urban Center my current research project, in collaboration with EUC colleague John Koval, aims to understand social stratification by race and class through studying the economic mobility of Mexican immigrants in Chicago ’s restaurant industry. This work challenges the two dominant social science paradigms of explanation, skill/spatial mismatch and economic restructuring, and instead offers an alternative model of “creative-adaptation” to explain how a significant portion of immigrant Mexicans in metropolitan Chicago have transformed food service into a Mexican industrial niche, while also attaining occupational mobility within the industry. Their research seeks to identify the processes and mechanisms whereby many immigrant Mexicans have transformed their economic well-being from low income and underpaid workers to middle income and stable economic positions with clear occupationally-linked mobility paths. As a result, this project proposes to identify both the micro and macro dynamics contributing to this transformation in the face of the growing information-based high technology / service sector hourglass shaped bifurcation of the economy.

Egan Urban Center:  http://ctcp.edn.depaul.edu

SELECTED ARTICLES

Black Hawk Hancock, “Steppin’ Out of Whiteness.” Ethnography 6(4): (December 2005): 427-462.

Black Hawk Hancock, “Learning How to Make Life Swing.” Qualitative Sociology 30(2) (June 2007): 113-133.

Roberta Garner, Black Hawk Hancock, Kiljoong Kim “Segregation in Chicago .” The Tocqueville Review XXVIII(1) (2007): 41-74.

Black Hawk Hancock
DePaul University
Department of Sociology
990 West Fullerton Ave. #3131
Chicago IL, 60614
Vox: 773.325.4920
Fax: 773.325.4923
bhancock@depaul.edu