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. In the process, I’ve tried to improve ethnographic fieldwork and multi-methods research. I’ve developed a model of what I call “abductive reflexivity,” which bridges insights from ethnomethodology and American pragmatism to systematically test hypotheses and construct counterfactual analyses while in the field (Stuart 2017). I’m also building an approach for combining ethnographic and computational methods, using the latter to test hypotheses developed through small-n fieldwork studies while using the former to ensure the validity, or “ground truth,” of computational analyses (Stuart et al. 2020).
The Criminalization of Urban Poverty
Criminal justice expansion is arguably the most consequential development over the last half century for urban poor communities. This line of my research analyzes the impacts of criminalization for everyday life, neighborhood culture, and community vitality. My first book, Down, Out, and Under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row(University of Chicago Press), 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.
For the last few years, I’ve been engaged in a multi-year, collaborative project (with Katherine Beckett and Monica Bell) examining an innovative public safety program (called LEAD) developed in Seattle, Washington, that deploys social workers, rather than police, in response to homelessness and behavioral health crises. This project offers an evidence-based, sociologically informed model for redesigning policing and criminal justice in America. Some of the resulting articles have examined methods for addressing urban disorder without police involvement (Stuart and Beckett 2021) and what the “defund” movement looks like on the ground (Bell et al. 2021).
Urban Poverty in the New Economy
Another major line of my research investigates the impacts of the shift to the new economy and the proliferation of digital social media on urban poor communities. As blue-collar manufacturing jobs continue to disappear, urban poor residents increasingly seek alternative, online means of economic survival and social organization. In contrast to an increasingly outmoded depiction of such communities as unproductive, socially isolated, and disordered “ghettos,” my work re-conceptualizes them as sites of intense cultural production, embedded in social and institutional networks stretching well beyond neighborhood boundaries. 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.
In related publications, I use my Chicago fieldwork to update traditional theories of urban violence—particularly the “code of the street”—to the interactional and cultural dynamics of the digital age (Stuart2020; Moore and Stuart 2022; Lane and Stuart 2022).
The Sociology of Violence and Trauma
Despite a historic decline in overall violence over the last two decades, the gap between the safest and most dangerous neighborhood has actually increased. Today, residents of poor neighborhoods of color are even more likely than residents of more privileged neighborhoods to experience violence, death, and associated trauma. Some of my new work examines how this often-overlooked form of inequality affects community life. A paper from this project analyzes one of the key symbolic barriers that community members confront in their efforts to garner support and resources from the state, media, and public—namely, their territorial stigma as residents of impoverished Black neighborhoods (White et al.2020). Using hierarchical logistic regression models to analyze every news article written about every homicide victim in Chicago in 2016, the study finds that residents killed in Black neighborhoods are significantly less likely than those killed in White neighborhoods to be seen as newsworthy and deserving of compassion. Another paper combines qualitative interviews and supervised machine learning to extract and classify over 100,000 gang-associated tweets in order to identify moments of elevated traumatic grief occurring in 18 distinct Chicago gang territories (Stuart et al.2020). In partnership with Chicago violence prevention organizations, I’m hoping to use this methodology to build an automated “early warning system” that will leverage Twitter activity to alert outreach workers when residents require trauma-informed interventions.