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My scholarship explores three different areas of
interest (Ethnography, Segregation,
and Theory) which stem from my two
overarching sociological interests: socialization and stratification. This is
evident in the quality and breadth of my publications. These publications use
a diverse array of methods, including historical research, ethnography,
interviews, interpretive analysis, and carnal sociology, while others engage
in methodological and theoretical reflection and development. Specifically, I
focus on unique ways to uncover how stratification works along racial,
cultural, and geographical lines within urban environments. In my past
research, as well as in the new projects I am undertaking, I explore different
methods and theories, which in turn lead me into areas of inter-disciplinary
research. As a result, I draw upon numerous sub-fields of sociology in order
to get at the mechanisms of stratification and inequality that divide people
in contemporary society, as well as those mechanisms of socialization which
legitimate and reproduce those divides.
The following section will be divided into three thematic section of Ethnography,
Stratification, and
Theory. Within those sections, subsections will detail published works,
forthcoming works, and works in progress. ETHNOGRAPHY:
Past
Research: In the
field of ethnography, my work has revolved around the analysis of race and
culture. Three of the articles I have published reflect aspects of a much
larger study on the role of popular culture as a vehicle through which our
understandings of race and and identity come to matter in contemporary
society. The first article, “Put
a Little Color on That!” Sociological
Perspectives. 51(4) (Winter 2008): 783-802),
explores the
narratives through which dancers express and explain their participation in
the Lindy Hop revival. In this reconstruction, I extend Pierre Bourdieu’s
theoretical categories of symbolic
power, symbolic violence, and misrecognition to show how racial domination is
produced and perpetuated, by denigrating and erasing African-American cultural
identity. This study provides a window into understanding how the dominant
racial logic of American society circulates even in the most apparently
innocuous of cultural practices of popular culture. The second article “Learning
How to Make Life Swing.” Qualitative
Sociology 30(2) (June 2007): 113-133), seeks to explain the contradiction between the centrality of
African-American culture and the simultaneous marginality of African-American
people in contemporary American society. My ethnographic work on the Lindy Hop
led to a radical rethinking of current approaches to cultural appropriation.
This article serves as an intervention into ethnographic research on race and
ethnicity by synthesizing Loic Wacquant’s carnal sociology with his call for
the formation of an analytical theory of racial domination. This synthesis, in
which theory and method work reciprocally, offers a new model for undertaking
research in the areas of race and ethnicity by which we are able to
differentiate and dissect the material and symbolic mechanisms that generate
racial domination in particular historical contexts. A Spanish translation of
this article “Aprendiendo Cómo
Hacer que la Vida Tenga Swing.” Pensar:
Epistemologia, Politica, y Ciencias Sociales.
(2008/2009) 3/4: 42-65, was one of three articles selected for a special
ethnographic symposium on carnal sociology. The article was included with a
submission by world-renowned ethnographers Loic Wacquant and Philipe Bourgois.
“Steppin’ Out of Whiteness.” Ethnography
6(4) (2005): 427-462,
discusses current paradigms of identity, especially those found in whiteness
studies, did not sufficiently explain the complex interaction in intersection
of race, culture, and identity. Drawing on extended fieldwork in the Steppin’
dancing community in Chicago, I extend Pierre Bourdieu’s theory practice,
particularly the role of the body in culture, to the study of race and
identity. This article presents an alternative model for explaining racial
identity, grounded in the competencies and embodied knowledge that one enacts
in practice. This approach opens up new anti-essentialist possibilities for
theorizing race and an antiracist politics based and cultural labor. “Following Loic Wacquant into the
Field” in Qualitative Sociology.
32(1)( 2009): 93-100, chronicles the intellectual trajectory of Loic
Wacquant. He is internationally renowned for his work with Pierre Bourdieu and
for his path breaking "carnal sociology" of boxing in the black
American ghetto, however the corpus of his work spans the gamut of issues,
from comparative urban inequality and racial domination to carceral
institutions, to the politics of knowledge and the role of the intellectual in
the public sphere in the age of hegemonic neoliberalism. The article serves as
an introduction to an interview with Loic Waquant “The Body, the Ghetto and
the Penal State” (translated from the French by Roberta Garner). Loic
Wacquant asked me to write this introduction in conjunction with the
publication of the English translation. Finally I
have authored a book review of “Living through the Hoop: High School Basketball, Race, and the American
Dream” by Reuben A. Buford May American
Journal of Sociology. (July 2009). Forthcoming
Research: My book, American Allegory: Lindy Hop, Steppin’ and the Racial Imagination,
explores race/racism as a decidedly embodied cultural practice and process.
The manuscript highlights some of the racialized socio-cultural architecture
that underpins two dance forms: the Lindy Hop and Steppin.’ I undertook this
analysis by learning (and eventually teaching) the Lindy Hop, and using that
ethnographically informed experience as a way to explore how we learn and
internalize categories of race as natural phenomena. American Allegory
mobilizes popular dance forms as a way to make sense of the ways in which
racialized bodies are both performative and material, rendered intelligible
and generalizable. In doing so, American Allegory offers “an embedded and
embodied ethnography” that situates the Lindy Hop within a larger Chicago
landscape of segregated social practices. The embodied aspect of the project is explored
through “carnal sociology,” which is a methodological approach to the
Lindy Hop’s cultural/racial contours. Carnal sociology requires that
researchers develop the embodied practical knowledge that their subjects of
study use to understand their world. Because
practical knowledge can be acquired only by putting the self into the
line of fire and subjecting oneself to the social forces under analysis, it cannot
come from a detached perspective. Carnal sociology differs from
auto-ethnography, as well as from traditional participant-observation methods,
as it utilizes both immersion and conversion to enable us to unearth the
practical knowledge of the internal dynamics of the phenomena in question. This book is now under contract in manuscript form
at The University of Chicago Press with the title American
Allegory: Lindy Hop and the Racial Imagination, under the editorial
direction of Douglas Mitchell. The version submitted here is the version that
will be going to press. Finally, I have also authored a “The
Opera Fanatic: Ethnography of an Obsession” by Claudio Benzecry. American
Journal of Sociology. (Forthcoming Fall 2011). Research
in Progress: If You Can’t Stand the Heat…:
Negotiating Culture and Identity amongst Mexican-American Kitchen Workers in
Chicago’s Restaurant Industry is a the next book-length
manuscript underway that incorporates both past and new research, into an
urban ethnography. This project was previously titled: Converging Cultures: Latino Culture(s) Role in Defining Chicago’s
Haute-Cuisine. Previous research was supported by The Egan Urban Center
and an LA&S Summer Grant, while current research has been funded by a
Fellowship at the Center for Latino Studies at DePaul University. Rather than
document how Mexican workers are forced to adapt or assimilate through the
erasure of their traditions into the dominant “hegemonic” culture of the
US, this study of Mexican---American kitchen workers, illuminates how people
negotiate and create their own bicultural identity. This manuscript focuses on
capturing some of these cultural nuances through the use of local material and
symbolic resources. Future lines of research will explore the internal
dynamics of Latino communities within the restaurant industry and to learn how
those communities serve as spaces of survival and self respect in a period of
globalization, changing labor markets, anti-immigrant sentiment, violence in
countries of origin, and the decline of traditional manufacturing. “More than a Soundtrack: Towards a Study of the Musical Practices of
Hardcore Punk,” is an article written with Michael Lorr which is
currently under revise and resubmit status at the Journal
of Contemporary Ethnography. This article explores how music “gets
into” people’s actions and behaviors as they constitute and negotiate
their identities and everyday life through the performance, consumption, and
reception of music. In doing so, we look at how musical practices are part of
the constitution of self and of social interaction, social settings, and
social worlds as ways that socio-musical practices inscribe social relations
and collective modes of action. We argue that there is a value in how musical
practices are experienced in real time and space as meaningful for the
participants’ identity formation. SEGREGATION:
Past
Research:
“From Native Son to The New Chicago:
Segregation and the Windy City” ASA Footnotes. February ( 2011), is an article co-authored with
Roberta Garner. This work builds off and extends previous research that was
published in the Tocqueville Review, and emphasizes new developments in
Chicago (post-2007) around the issues of immigration, growing cultural
diversity, and gentrification of central zones of the city that have modified
historical patterns of segregation. In
addition, the co-authored article “Segregation
in Chicago.” The Tocqueville Review
XXVIII(1) (2007): 41-74), considers of ethno-racial segregation in the
Chicago metropolitan region, specifically the hyper-segregation of African
Americans, as a persistent and long-standing characteristic of the metropolis.
As a result, we chart out spatial distributions of social class, which are
intertwined with patterns of ethno-racial segregation, as well as more recent
developments in areas of immigration, and gentrification which have had
effects on the fundamental historical patterns of segregation but not
significantly transformed or ended them. Research in Progress: “Intersecting Disparities: Race in Chicago in the Era of
Neo-Liberalism” examines the causes of this persistent racial divide and
its accompanying disparities, beginning with a historical argument that draws
on established scholarship in the field. The authors review the phases of
racial dominance that created the foundations of today’s inequality (history
of slavery and de jure segregation, de facto segregation in Chicago
accompanying the Great Migration, etc.) in Chicago. The entrenched practices
of de facto segregation appeared to have ended with the Civil Rights movement
in the 1960s and 1970s but the consequences have lingered much beyond that
period. By drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, we highlight how
Neoliberalism has at once generated new opportunities and individual choices
at the local level and simultaneously exacerbated and deepened these trends of
disparity on the global level. Complementing that approach, we draw on
Foucault’s work on governmentality, security and population, in order to
draw out the mechanisms by which these apparently contradictory developments
are regulated and maintained. In doing so, the Chicago experience teaches us
broader lessons about social conflict in relationship to both continuity and
change. An empirically based version of this article his work will be targeted
as a chapter in The New Chicago II
manuscript (currently in progress with other DePaul faculty). A more
theoretically focused piece will simultaneously be developed for the journal Constellations.
THEORY:
Past Research:
“Towards a Philosophy of Containment: Reading Goffman in the 21st
Century.” The American Sociologist.
(Journal Online) Forthcoming 42 (4) 2011. Co-authored with Roberta
Garner,
this article provides a generative reading of Erving Goffman in order to
understand the possible incoherence of social life and to preserve the social
order from collapsing. Goffman's analysis becomes an opening into engagements
with the work of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault around the notion of the
normative order and the issues of containment and transgression. Thinking
through Goffman's philosophy of containment as the framework for an analysis
of social ordering offers an approach to understanding the instability that
confronts both our contemporary society and the discipline of sociology. Research
in Progress: Paradigm Shift: The Evolving
Discipline: Contemporary Theory and the Sub-fields of Sociology. As
co-editor and co-author with Roberta Garner and Grace Budrys, this manuscript
explores the question whether a paradigm shift has taken place in the last
three or four decades in sociology, as the discipline has moved beyond
structural-functionalism, conflict theories, and micro-interactionist
theories. We argue that we can indeed discern a new paradigm, one which we
term conflict constructionism, but that it has permeated the sub-fields
of sociology very unevenly. The manuscript identifies the elements of the new
paradigm: attention to the micro-level, interest in discourses and frames,
focus on the body, emphasis on hybridity and transculturation, and new ways of
theorizing conflict, the state, difference and dominance, and deviance and
punishment. In doing so the manuscript traces how these new themes emerged and
why sub-fields of the discipline (Culture, Race&Ethnicity, Gender,
Political and Urban, amongst others), have experienced different trajectories
into contemporary conditions. This manuscript is currently under contract with
Paradigm Press under the editorship of Dean Birkenkamp. “Jacques Derrida and the Photograph of Tomorrow.” Manuscript under
submission at Philosophy and Social
Criticism, explores the role of photography in Athens,
Still Remains and forces us to grapple with our existence and the finite
temporality within which that existence unfolds. The relationships between
photography, art & archive, finitude & survival, are not merely
analytic categories, rather they are approaches to rethinking our practice of
living. “Mapping the Territories
of the Self in the Age of the Hyper-real.” This is the first of two
articles, co-authored with Roberta Garner, which explores Goffman’s
theorization of mass media and consumer society. By juxtaposing the
theorizations of the self in Gender
Advertisements and “Territories of the Self,” in relation to the work
of Debord, Baudrillard and Jameson, we argue that Goffman offers a theory of
the self that provides a point of purchase for negotiating the self in
relation to the ongoing transformations and regulatory mechanisms of the
contemporary mediascape. “Towards a Critical Social Psychology: The Thesis of the
Disintegrating Self.” The second Goffman based article co-authored with
Roberta Garner, explores a dominant theme in social thought: that modern
societies produce a disintegrated self characterized by weak boundaries,
multiple personae, and fragile self-regulation. The authors review the
disintegrating-self thesis as part of a project of critical social psychology
whose tone has become strongly pessimistic. They conclude with a discussion of
the contributions of Erving Goffman as an existentialist. Becoming Michel Foucault: Self
Narrative and Intellectual Formation in the United States, is a book
length study that focuses on Michel Foucault’s intellectual development and
self-realization. This study approaches Foucault’s work through a sociology of ideas perspective, that is, by exploring the social
processes by which a thinker’s ideas, beliefs, arguments, assumptions,
emerge, develop and change. To do so, this
analysis looks beyond broad economic, political, and cultural
conditions—to a range of locally configured institutional settings, in this
case the University of California Berkeley, focusing on the local
social-cultural contexts and academic milieus of that institution.
Foucault’s intellectual trajectory will be examined in relationship to the
self-concept he came to fashion through these new intellectual pursuits. This
research has been supported by a research trip to the Berkeley Archives
through the Department of Sociology and through an LA&S Summer Grant 2011.
“Erving Goffman and Michel Foucault: The Normative Order and Power as Theories of the Social.”By drawing on the concept of “socialization,” as an alternative conceptualization to both Erving Goffman’s “interaction order” and Michel Foucault’s “power,” this project draws out the relations between the two theorists. In doing so, we see how both thinkers implicitly elaborate each other’s fundamental concerns on different levels of inquiry: The primacy of society over the individual; the existence of the social as a phenomenon that is sui generis and not the sum total of individual behaviors or actions; and the cohesion of society through a collective world view and a normative order or shared intelligibility of the world. The analysis does not seek to reconstruct one theorist’s work with the other, rather it is to show how their thinking, when viewed simultaneously, provides the grounds for a more robust theorizing of the social. Partial List of Publications (pdf format)
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As
co-author with Roberta Garner,
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Black Hawk Hancock |
