Ethnographies of Race, Crime, and Justice

This course provides graduate students with a survey introduction to influential ethnographic and interview-based sociological research on race, crime, and justice. Recent social movements such as the Movement for Black Lives have drawn attention to the problem of mass criminalization in the U.S. These movements have underscored the centrality of the criminal legal system in defining race in America. Each week, students will read ethnographic books and journal articles on the role of race and racism in different dimensions of the criminal legal process from policing to court processing to incarceration written in the early twentieth century to the present. In addition to gaining foundational knowledge on the key debates within the sociological and criminological literature, students will also gain important insight into the most rigorous qualitative social science methods for studying these topics, and how these methods have changed over time.