SPECIAL EVENT

More than Just Race
Being Black and Poor in the Inner City

A new framework for understanding racial inequality
with the author

William Julius Wilson
Harvard University

 

and discussants

Orlando Patterson
Harvard University

Sudhir Venkatesh
Columbia University

 

Moderated by

Michèle Lamont
Harvard University

 

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WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2009
4:15-6:00 PM

CGIS South-010 (Tsai Auditorium)
Concourse Level, 1730 Cambridge Street

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About the panelists

 

William Julius Wilson is the Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University and Director of the Joblessness and Urban Poverty Research Program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Education and the Institute of Medicine. He is also past President of the American Sociological Association, and is a MacArthur Prize Fellow. In 1998 he was awarded the National Medal of Science. His books include Power, Racism and Privilege (1973), The Declining Significance of Race (1978), The Truly Disadvantaged (1987), When Work Disappears (1996), The Bridge over the Racial Divide (1999), There Goes the Neighborhood (2006, co-author), Good Kids from Bad Neighborhoods (2006, co-author), and, most recently, More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City (2009).

 

Orlando Patterson, a historical and cultural sociologist, is John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. His academic interests include the culture and practice of freedom; the comparative study of slavery and ethno-racial relations; the sociology of underdevelopment with special reference to the Caribbean; and the problems of gender and familial relations in the black societies of the Americas. He is especially interested in the ways that cultural processes relate to poverty and other social outcomes. Patterson is the author of numerous academic papers and 5 major academic books, including Slavery and Social Death (1982); Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (1991); and The Ordeal of Integration (1997).

 

Sudhir Venkatesh is William B. Ransford Professor of Sociology at Columbia University in the City of New York. He is a researcher and writer on urban neighborhoods in the United States (New York, Chicago) and Paris, France. He is also a documentary film-maker. His most recent book is Gang Leader for a Day (Penguin Press). He has also published Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor (Harvard University Press, 2006) about illegal economies in Chicago, which received a Best Book Award from Slate.Com (2006) as well as the C. Wright Mills Award (2007). His first book, American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto (2000) explored life in Chicago public housing. His other writings and stories have appeared in The American Prospect, This American Life, and The Chicago Tribune, and he is a frequent commentator on National Public Radio.

 

Michèle Lamont is Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and Professor of Sociology and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Lamont’s scholarly interests center on shared concepts of worth and their impact on hierarchies in a number of social domains. She has written on how culture contributes to ethno-racial and class inequality and on the evaluation of excellence in higher education. She is the author of The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (Harvard University Press and Russell Sage Foundation, 2000); Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class. (University of Chicago Press, 1992); and How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment (Harvard University Press, 2009).