My primary interest is in researching and analyzing structural conditions that restrict opportunities for racial/ethnic groups, women of color and youth. My main concern has to do with how people make meaning of their lives given the socioeconomic barriers they face.
My recent book, “We Live in the Shadow”: Inner-City Kids Tell Their Stories through Photographs (with 53 photos) is an ethnographic study that explores life from the perspectives of Black and Latino inner-city kids. My concerns have to do with how inner-city kids make decisions to help them cope with family life, peer relations and academic achievement and handle the negative options that can make poverty a life sentence; pregnancy, gang involvement and drug abuse.
Publications
“We Live in the Shadow”: Inner-City Kids Tell Their Stories through Photographs
Published by Temple University Press (website)
Other Selected Publications:
2020
“The Millennial/Gen Z Leftists are Emerging: Are Sociologists Ready for Them?” Sociological Perspectives (June 21). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0731121420915868
2010
Doing Care on the Run: Family Strategies in the Contested Terrain of Gender and Institutional Intransigence. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography November 14, 2010 vol. 39 no. 6 587-618
2003
I Want to Read Stuff on Boys; White, Latina and Black Girls Reading Seventeen Magazines and Encountering Adolescence. Adolescence, 38 (149): 141-160 (co-authored with Leslie Cole)
2000
Using Food as a Metaphor for Care: Middle-School Kids Talk about Family, School and Class Relationships. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, August 29 (4): 479-509.
1997
Elaine Bell Kaplan. Not Our Kind of Girl: Unraveling the Myths of Black Teenage Motherhood. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2nd Printing.
Contact
Address
USC Dornsife Department of Sociology
851 Downey Way
Hazel & Stanley Hall 314
Los Angeles, CA 90089-1059