Against the Wall: Poor, Young, Black, and Male

List of Contributors

Contributors Elijah Anderson is William K. Lanman, Jr., Professor of Sociology at Yale University and formerly Charles and William Day Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. He received a B.A. from Indiana University, an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University, where he was a Ford Foundation Fellow. He has served as Visiting Professor at Swarthmore College , Princeton University, and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He also served on the National Research Council Panel on the Understanding and Control of Violent Behavior. He is the author of A Place on the Corner: A Study of Black Street Corner Men; Streetwise : Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community (which received the Robert E. Park Award); and Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City, as well as numerous articles and reviews on the black experience. Director of the Philadelphia Ethnography Project, he has served as editor of several professional journals, an officer of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and the American Sociological Association, and as a consultant to numerous government agencies. Luke Anderson, a native Philadelphian, received a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. While at Penn, he worked as a union representative for the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1776, organizing supermarket workers and hospital employees. He spent two years in the graduate program in sociology at Northwestern University, specializing in ethnographic methods and the sociology of culture. He resides in Chicago, working in public high schools on the city’s South and West Sides. Scott Brooks teaches sociology at the University of California, Riverside, and is currently working on a book titled Black Men Can’t Shoot, which 18Anderson_Contrib 279-284.qxd 2/20/08 12:28 PM Page 279 describes the social work required for a young man to become an elite basketball player. L. Janelle Dance, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of MarylandCollege Park, is moving in spring 2008 to the University of NebraskaLincoln . She has conducted ethnographic research with ethnic minority students in the U.S. and Sweden. During the 2006–2007 academic year, she worked on a Swedish research team in a cross-national study funded by the National Science Foundation titled “The Children of Immigrants in Schools.” In addition to ethnographic work with students, she often engages in dialogic interactions with K–12 public school teachers in workshops and seminars. Waverly Duck is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University. He earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from Wayne State University and a Master of Science in Community Medicine from Wayne State School of Medicine. He has taught at the Community College of Philadelphia and been Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. His areas of interest are gender, social psychology, gerontology, and medical sociology. Duck has conducted research projects on a variety of topics including gender and health, welfare reform, and mental illnesses of children in foster care. Troy Duster is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge at New York University, as well as Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California-Berkeley. Over his career, he has done research and writing on the sociology of knowledge and science, deviance and control, and race and ethnicity. He coauthored Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color Blind Society (2003), and was president of the American Sociological Association in 2004–2005. Duster has served on advisory committees for the National Academy of Sciences and the National Institutes of Health. He chaired the Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues Committee of the Human Genome Project. Peter Edelman is Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center . He served as a legislative assistant to Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under President Bill Clinton, and Director of the New York State Division for Youth under Governor Hugh Carey. His most recent books are Searching for America’s Heart: RFK and the Renewal of Hope and Reconnecting Disadvantaged Young Men, coauthored with Harry J. Holzer and Paul Offner. Edelman co-chaired a Task Force on Poverty for the Center for 280 Contributors 18Anderson_Contrib 279-284.qxd 2/20/08 12:28 PM Page 280 American Progress in 2006–2007 and chairs the District of Columbia...