ASOB16016U Critical Reading and Re-analysis

The course uses the award-winning ethnography, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio, by Philippe Bourgois to provide us with a journey into an American urban ghetto known as Spanish Harlem. He brings us into the world of Puerto Rican drug dealers and helps us get to know them, their families, friends and customers. 

We learn the details of their lives as children, their time at school, at home, their love, anger and work. We hear about how they feel about their lives. We become witnesses of the violence done to themselves, the community and society.  Through all of these layers, we see their humanity and the making of marginality in the United States. This journey provides us with context to compare marginality across place, including Europe.

The class will use short articles and chapters from other scholars to help us explore the nature of marginality, regimes of urban marginality across different places, and related issues; such as the process of integration and control, inclusion and exclusion, ghettos and anti-ghettos, the state, metropolis and the symbolic, social and physical making of marginality.