The new ethnographers of urban disorder

The New Urban Ethnographers of Urban Disorder emerged early in the twenty-first century when Elijah Anderson in his important ethnography, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life in 1999, in which his careful study of street gangs in Philadelphia revealed an underlying tension between violence on the streets and the search for decency by those who wanted to join a better world. Anderson's influence, while not ubiquitous, impressed a number of younger ethnographers, including Waverly Duck who had been Anderson's post-doc fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale. Duck, in many ways, provided the theoretical frame that was understated in Anderson's writing. In No Way: Out Precarious Living the Shadow of Poverty in 2015 Duck authored a strong theory of fungible interaction orders in a local community by which people dealt with difficult pterllenges in order to live ordinary lives. At much the same time, AbdouMaliq Simone, in books like City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads (2009), who was studied at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, took up in an essentially world-wide study of communities in the Global South where people migrating from poverty and civil war came to invent new communities on the margins of traditional cities. Others among the New Ethnographers, like Nikki Jones and Victor Rios studied those in a similar position of being subject to surveillance and punishment by dominant authorities, who found a way out. A remarkable instance among the New Ethnographers is Matthew Desmond's Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2O11) which has become for many the model of how new ethnographers must work-first by taking up an ill-studied subject, the evicted, then, after publication, establishing a research program on the subject. Then too there is Alice Goffman's On the Run: Fugitive Life in 2014 which some consider the most brilliant original ethnography of the day, while others jealously attempt to dismiss it.