When Pomona College hired Goffman as a visiting professor, some students demanded that the college revoke the offer.

Others said her book presented a warped view of black life and might harm its subjects. Legal scholars questioned whether she had embellished parts of her book and accused her of committing an apparent felony while researching it. Goffman’s TED talk has been viewed nearly two million times.īut that fame made Goffman’s work the target of intense scrutiny. A paperback edition, issued by Picador, sold about 30,000 copies, according to the publisher. Goffman’s book is written after her completion of a six-year ethnographic observation of a poor black community in Philadephia. Journalists and scholars acclaimed it as a classic. On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City is a book written by a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor named Alice Goffman. Goffman’s On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (University of Chicago Press, 2014) rested on six years of immersive fieldwork in Philadelphia. The influential urban ethnographers Elijah Anderson and Mitchell Duneier nurtured her rise as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania and later as a doctoral student at Princeton. Her father, Erving Goffman, was one of the defining sociologists of the 20th century. Goffman entered sociology with heightened expectations. (And Goffman’s TED Talk has been viewed more than a million times. Alice Goffman On The Run Essay On the Run an ethnographic study by Alice Goffman offers an authentic and appalling view on the lives of black individuals who lives within the streets of Philadelphia, specifically young men. Should privileged, white outsiders tell the stories of poor, minority communities? Can scholars guard research subjects’ privacy while satisfying the growing demand for data transparency? Should students be empowered to block the hiring of scholars whose work they abhor? Alice Goffman’s book On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City is one of the major events in sociology of the past few years, earning high-profile praise, criticism, and controversy. The decision is a low point in the seesaw trajectory that has turned the junior scholar into a symbol of some of the thorniest dilemmas of academic life.

On the run by alice goffman