Urban Sociology in Theory and Practice

Readings

SES #	TOPICS	READINGS
1	Introduction to the course, orientation at MCI Norfolk	Alexander, Michelle. Chapters 1–3, and 5 in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The New Press, 2012, pp. 1–139 and 178–220. (181 pages) ISBN: 9781595586438.
2	The Sociological Imagination	Marx, Karl. “The Commodity” and “The Process of Exchange.” In Capital, Volume 1. Vintage Books, 1977, pp. 125–77 and 178–87. (61 pages) ISBN: 9780394726571. Weber, Max. “Types of Social Action,” “The Three Pure Types of Authority,” and “The Routinization of Charisma.” In Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. University of California Press, 1978, pp. 24, 215–7, 223–6, 237–8, 241–5, 246, 251–4, and 267–70. ISBN: 9780520035003. [Preview with Google Books] Merton, Robert K. “On Sociological Theories of the Middle Range.” Chapter 2 in Social Theory and Social Structure. Free Press, 1968. ISBN: 9780029211304. [Preview with Google Books] Mills, C. Wright. Chapter 1 in The Sociological Imagination. Oxford University Press, 2000. ISBN: 9780195133738. [Preview with Google Books] Abbott, Andrew Delano. Methods of Discovery: Heuristics for the Social Sciences (Contemporary Societies). W. W. Norton & Company, 2004, pp. 20–52. ISBN: 9780393978148.
3	Early Urban Sociology	DuBois, W. E. B. Chapters 1–2 in The Souls of Black Folk: A Social Study. Tribeca Books, 2011. ISBN: 9781612931074. Simmel, Georg. The Metropolis and Metal Life (PDF) (1903). Park, Robert E. “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the City Environment.” American Journal of Sociology 20, no. 5 (1915): 577–612. Weber, Max. Chapter 1 in The City. Free Press, 1966. ISBN: 9780029342107. Wirth, Louis. “Urbanism as a Way of Life.” In American Journal of Sociology 44, no. 1 (1938): 1–24. Robinson, Cedric. “Historiography and the Black Radical Tradition.” In Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. The University of North Carolina Press, 2000, pp. 212–40. ISBN: 9780807848296.
4	Community and How to Study It	Class 4 Study Guide (PDF) Brint, Steven. “Gemeinschaft Revisited: A Critique and Reconstruction of the Community Concept.” Sociological Theory 19, no. 1 (2001): 1–23. Wellman, Barry. “The Community Question: The Intimate Networks of East Yorkers.” American Journal of Sociology 84, no. 5 (1979): 1201–231. Sampson, Robert J. “What Community Supplies.” In The Community Development Reader. 2nd edition_._ Edited by James DeFillippis and Susan Saegert. Routledge, 2012, pp. 308–18. ISBN: 9780415507769. Fischer, Claude S. “The Subcultural Theory of Urbanism: A Twentieth-Year Assessment.” American Journal of Sociology 101, no. 3 (1995): 543–77. Kelley, Robin. Chapters 1 and 2 in Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America. Beacon Press, 1998. ISBN: 9780807009413. [Preview with Google Books] Kaplan, Elaine Bell. Chapters 1 and 2 in “We Live in the Shadow” Inner-City Kids Tell Their Stories through Photographs. Temple University Press, 2013. ISBN: 9781439907900.
5	The Ethnographic Tradition	Wilson, William Julius, and Chaddha Anmol. “The Role of Theory in Ethnographic Research.” Ethnography 10, no. 4 (2009): 549–64. Choose one of the following four ethnographies to read and present to the class as a group: Anderson, Elijah. Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City. W. W. Norton & Company, 2000. ISBN: 9780393320787. Reviews Wacquant, Loïc. “Scrutinizing the Street: Poverty, Morality, and the Pitfalls of Urban Ethnography.” American Journal of Sociology 107, no. 6 (2002): 1468–532. Anderson, Elijah. “The Ideologically Driven Critique.” American Journal of Sociology 107, no. 6 (2002): 1533–50. Klinenberg, Eric. Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 2003. ISBN: 9780226443225. [Preview with Google Books] (skip chapter 5) Reviews Duneier, Mitchell. “Ethnography, the Ecological Fallacy, and the 1995 Chicago Heat Wave.” American Sociological Review 71, no. 4 (2006): 679–88. Klinenberg, Eric. “Blaming the Victims: Hearsay, Labeling, and the Hazards of Quick-Hit Disaster Ethnography.” American Sociological Review 71, no. 4 (2006): 689–98. Pattillo, Mary. Chapters 2, 3, and 5–7 in Black on the Block: The Politics of Race & Class in the City. University of Chicago Press, 2007. ISBN: 9780226649313. [Preview with Google Books] Small, Mario Luis. Villa Victoria: The Transformation of Social Capital in a Boston Barrio. University of Chicago Press, 2004. ISBN: 9780226762920. [Preview with Google Books]
6	Urban Political Economy: Cities, Industrialization, and Deindustrialization	Class 6 Study Guide (PDF) Katznelson, Ira. Chapters 2, 3, and 8 in City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States. Chicago University Press, 1981.  ISBN: 9780226426730. [Preview with Google Books] Wilson, William Julius. Chapters 1 and 2 in When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. Vintage, 1997. ISBN: 9780679724179. Dawson, Michael C. Chapters 1 and 2 in Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics. Princeton University Press, 1995. ISBN: 9780691025438. [Preview with Google Books] O’Connor, Alice. “Introduction.” In Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History. Princeton University Press, 2002. ISBN: 9780691102559. [Preview with Google Books]
7	Urban Political Economy: Elites, Political Power, and Urban Dynamics	Dahl, Robert A. Chapters 19–20 and 24–25 in Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City. Yale University Press, 2005. ISBN: 9780300103922. Stone, Clarence. Chapters 1–9 and 11–12 in Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946–1988. University Press of Kansas, 1989. ISBN: 9780700604166. Lukes, Steven. “Introduction.” Chapter 1 in Power: A Radical View. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ISBN: 9780333420928. Marwell, Nicole P. Chapters 1 and 3 in Bargaining for Brooklyn: Community Organizations in the Entrepreneurial City. University of Chicago Press, 2007. ISBN: 9780226509075. Recommended Scott, James C. Chapter 1 in Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. Yale University Press, 1992. ISBN: 9780300056693.
8	Theories of Urban Inequality	Harvey, David. Chapters 1 and 6 in Social Justice and the City. University of Georgia Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780820334035. [Preview with Google Books] Tilly, Charles. Chapters 1–3 and 5–6 in Identities, Boundaries, Social Ties. Routledge, 2006. ISBN: 9781594511325. Marable, Manning. “Introduction.” In How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society. South End Press, 1999. ISBN: 9780896085794. [Preview with Google Books]
9	Identities, Boundaries, and Inequality	Class 9 Study Guide (PDF) Fanon, Franz. Chapter 2 in Toward the African Revolution. Grove Press, 1994. ISBN: 9780802130907. Omi, Howard Winant, and Michael. Chapter 4 in Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960’s to the 1980’s. Routledge, 1986. ISBN: 9780415039864. Lopez, Ian F. Chapter 1 in White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. NYU Press, 2006. ISBN: 9780814736944. [Preview with Google Books] Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. “Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation.” American Sociological Review 62, no. 3 (1997): 465–80. Rumbaut, Ruben G. “Pigments of Our Imagination: On the Racialization and Racial Identities of ‘Hispanics’ and ‘Latinos’.” In How the United States Racializes Latinos: White Hegemony and Its Consequences. Edited by José A. Cobas, Jorge Duany, and Joe R. Feagin. Routledge, 2015. [Preview with Google Books] Prashad, Vijay. “Of Antiblack Racism.” In The Karma of Brown Folk. University of Minnesota Press, 2001. ISBN: 9780816634392. [Preview with Google Books] Young, Iris Marion. Chapter 2 in Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton University Press, 1990. ISBN: 9780691023151. [Preview with Google Books] Carby, Hazel. “White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood.” Chapter 2 in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader. Edited by Houston A. Baker Jr. and Manthia Diawara. University of Chicago Press, 1996. ISBN: 9780226144825. [Preview with Google Books] Nash, Jennifer C. “Practicing Love: Black Feminism, Love-Politics, and Post-Intersectionality.” Meridians 11, no. 2 (2011): 1–24.
10	Social Capital and Social Networks	Class 10 Study Guide (PDF) Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Forms of Capital.” In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. Edited by John Richardson. Greenwood, 1986, pp. 46–58. ISBN: 9780313235290. Coleman, James S. “Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital.” American Journal of Sociology 94 (1988): S95–S120. Lin, Nan. “Building a Network Theory of Social Capital (PDF - 1.8MB).” Connections 22, no. 1 (1999): 28–51. Burt, Ronald S. “Structural Holes and Good Ideas.” American Journal of Sociology 110, no. 2 (2004): 349–99. Small, Mario Luis. Chapters 1 and 7 in Unanticipated Gains: The Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life. Oxford University Press, 2010. ISBN: 9780199764099. [Preview with Google Books]
11	Neighborhood Effects: Order, Disorder, and Collective Efficacy	Class 11 Study Guide (PDF) Sampson, Robert J. “Moving to Inequality: Neighborhood Effects and Experiments Meet Social Structure.” American Journal of Sociology 114, no. 1 (2008): 189–231. Sharkey, Patrick. “Residential Mobility and the Reproduction of Unequal Neighborhoods.” Cityscape (2012): 9–31. ———. “Geographic Migration of Black and White Families Over Four Generations.” Demography 52, no. 1 (2015): 209–31. Sharkey, Patrick, and Jacob W. Faber. “Where, When, Why, and for Whom Do Residential Contexts Matter? Moving Away from the Dichotomous Understanding of Neighborhood Effects.” Annual Review of Sociology 40 (2014): 559–79. Chetty, Raj, Nathaniel Hendren, et al. “Where Is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States (PDF - 2.3MB).” No. w19843. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2014. Chetty, Raj, Nathaniel Hendren, et al. “The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment.” American Economic Review 106, no. 4 (2016): 855–902. Pattillo, Mary, Sherrilyn Ifill, et al. “Why Integration?” NewYork University Furman Center (2014).
12	Social Origins of Violence	Class 12 Study Guide (PDF) Sampson, Robert J., Stephen W. Raudenbush, et al. “Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy.” Science 277, no. 5328 (1997): 918–24. Morenoff, Jeffrey D., Robert J. Sampson, et al. “Neighborhood Inequality, Collective Efficacy, and the Spatial Dynamics of Urban Violence.” Criminology 39, no. 3 (2001): 517–58. Kirk, David S. “A Natural Experiment on Residential Change and Recidivism: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina.” American Sociological Review 74, no. 3 (2009): 484–505. Gould, Roger V. “Collective Violence and Group Solidarity: Evidence from a Feuding Society.” American Sociological Review 64, no. 3 (1999): 356–80. Collins, Randall. Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory. Princeton University Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780691143224. [Preview with Google Books] Goffman, Alice. “On the Run: Wanted Men in a Philadelphia Ghetto.” American Sociological Review 74, no. 3 (2009): 339–57. Stoudt, Brett G., and Maria Elena Torre. The Morris Justice Project: Participatory Action Research. Sage Research Methods Cases. Sage (2014).
13	Collective Action	Class 13 Study Guide (PDF) Olson, Mancur. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Harvard University Press, 1971, pp. 9–16. ISBN: 9780674537514. Ransby, Barbara. Chapter 12 in Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. The University of North Carolina Press, 2003. [Preview with Google Books] Fernandez, Johanna. “Community Organizing in New York City.” In Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980. Edited by Jeanne F. Theoharis and Komozi Woodward. Palgrave Macmillian, 2003, pp. 255–77. ISBN: 9780312294687. McAdam, Doug. “Introduction.” Chapters 3 and 6 in Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970. University of Chicago Press, 2010. [Preview with Google Books] Gould, Roger V. “Multiple Networks and Mobilization in the Paris Commune, 1871.” American Sociological Review 56, no. 6 (1991): 716–29. McAdam, Doug, Sidney Tarrow, et al. Chapter 2 in Dynamics of Contention. Cambridge University Press, 2001. ISBN: 9780521011877. [Preview with Google Books]