334 - Author Meets Critics Session. On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (University of Chicago Press, 2014) by Alice Goffman

Session Submission Type: Invited Session

Abstract

Alice Goffman began an ethnographic study in Philadelphia as an undergraduate and then continued it for the next six years. As is common in ethnography, she get to know people, hung out with them, and accompanied them as they went through their daily lives. As a result of the increase in mass incarceration, many men in the community had relationships with the criminal justice system. Goffman shows the depth of the police surveillance in the community. For example, young men in compliance with their parole were afraid to go to the emergency room after they had been mugged for fear since the police officers hung out there. The critics include ethnographers who have studied the criminal justice system; Victor Rios wrote *Punished*; John Van Maanen authored *Tales of the Field*. Glenn Loury is an economist who has written extensively on many issues including mass incarceration. C. J. Pascoe is an ethnographer who has thought hard about masculinity.

Sub Unit

• Author Meets Critics

Session Organizer

• Annette Lareau, University of Pennsylvania

Author

• Alice Goffman, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Presider

• Waverly Duck, University of Pittsburgh

Critics

• Victor M. Rios, University of California-Santa Barbara

• Glenn Cartman Loury, Brown University

• C.J. Pascoe, University of Oregon

• John Van Maanen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology