Beginning in her sophomore year at the University of Pennsylvania and continuing through her graduate work at Princeton, she observed a group of young men in a neighborhood she pseudonymously called 6th Street. 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. On the Run is the story of the six years Goffman spent conducting an ethnographic study in a poor black community in West Philadelphia. In On The Run, Alice Goffman focuses on a particular group of young Black men living in a poor neighborhood, struggling to live a good and fair life. 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.
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