RESEARCH
I received my PhD in Sociology from UCLA (2012), my MA in Sociology from UCLA (2008), my MS in Justice, Law & Society from American University (2006), and my BA in Politics from the University of California, Santa Cruz (2004).
As an urban ethnographer, I use fieldwork, historical, and other qualitative methods to investigate the causes, contours, and consequence of contemporary urban poverty. I’m particularly interested in how recent large-scale forces—most notably, the massive expansion of the criminal justice system, the global shift to the “new economy,” and rising inequalities in relative exposure to violence-related trauma—influence the ground-level conditions and experiences of disadvantaged communities (e.g., neighborhood culture, public interaction, social cohesion, crime, and violence), and how these forces (re)produce social, economic, and racial inequality. I try to leverage these historical developments to rethink prevailing concepts and theories. More recently I've been moving from the diagnosis of social problems to studying real-world solutions. This podcast video covers my urban ethnographic approach and some of my larger studies and findings.
While I primarily write for academic audiences, I also enjoy translating sociological research for broader audiences. My scholarly work has appeared in journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, Social Problems, Urban Studies, Law & Society Review, and Qualitative Sociology, while my essays and research have appeared in The New Yorker, The Economist, Wired, Mother Jones, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, as well as on NPR and the BBC.
My first book, Down, Out, and Under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row, is an in-depth ethnography of Los Angeles’ Skid Row district, the most impoverished and most heavily policed neighborhood in America. Examining the interactions between police officers and the neighborhood's inhabitants, the book considers how zero tolerance policing is re-constituting poverty, crime, and space, as well as the relationship existing between the police and the policed. Down, Out, and Under Arrest received a number of awards, including the Robert E. Park Book Award from the American Sociological Association, the Michael J. Hindelang Book Award from the American Society of Criminology, and the Gordon J. Lang Book Prize from the University of Chicago Press.
In 2020, I published Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy. Based on nearly five years of fieldwork on Chicago’s South Side, the book examines how gang-affiliated youth use social media to commodify representations of poverty and violence, and how these practices reshape gang warfare, community cohesion, and criminal justice entanglements. Ballad of the Bullet introduces the concept of digital disadvantage to more accurately capture the unique stakes and consequences of digital cultural production for impoverished and stigmatized communities. The book received awards from the American Sociological Association’s Communication, Information Technology, and Media Sociology (CITAMS) Section, Children & Youth Section, and Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility (IPM) Section. This podcast video captures some of the main findings from my work in Chicago, and how my own experiences inform my work.
I'm currently completing a third book, The Peacemakers, which is under contract with Viking. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood, the book examines an emerging model of public safety that I call "streetcorner mediation." Rather than relying on coercion, surveillance, or state violence, streetcorner mediators—almost all of whom are formerly incarcerated—prevent violence, de-escalate conflict, reverse overdoses, and respond to behavioral health crises by relying on relationships, reciprocity, and lived experience. The Peacemakers builds on my earlier research on policing and punishment, but asks a very different question. Not just what is wrong with contemporary approaches to policing and punishment, but what might work better in their place. More broadly, the book shows that public safety is a social accomplishment built through everyday interaction, trust, and community.