Ethnographic Café

Friday, April 18, 2025 12-1:30 pm PT / 3-4:30pm ET

Randol Contreras in conversation with Ranita Ray 

The Marvelous Ones: Drugs, Gang Violence, and Resistance in East Los Angeles

Zoom Meeting ID: 999 3910 8952

Password: 1234

Randol Contreras acquired his Ph.D. from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of the multiple-award winning book, The Stickup Kids: Race, Drugs, Violence and the American Dream, which captures how the transformation of an illegal drug market in the South Bronx shaped and influenced drug dealers to become violent drug robbers. He has also done research in South Central, where he examined the ethnic conflicts between Mexicans and African Americans, especially in how residents interpret ethnic gangs. 

His recent book entitled, The Marvelous Ones: Drugs, Gang Violence, and Resistance in East Los Angeles, was published by the University of California Press (April 2024). It is based on field research in East Los Angeles and documents how aging Mexican gang members struggle to matter in the world as they deal with the traumas of violence, substance abuse, and homelessness. A common theme in his work is the critical intersection of history, social structure, and biography, an intersection that sheds light on how criminal phenomena emerge and how they shape the behavior and meanings of people.

Ranita Ray is an ethnographer, author, and reluctant sociologist. Her work deals with teacher racism; K-12 schools as hostile institutions; gendered racial violence in education; social mobility and racialized poverty; and reproductive justice. Ray's 2018 book The Making of a Teenage Service Class: Poverty and Mobility in an American City recounts the three years she spent with 16 economically marginalized young Black and brown people to challenge common wisdom that focusing on "risk behaviors" such as drug use, gangs, violence, and teen parenthood is the key to ameliorating poverty in Black and brown communities. Her next book, Slow violence: Confronting Dark Truths in the American Classroom is an unflinching exposé of the American public education system’s indifference toward Black, brown, immigrant, queer, and economically marginalized children. Ranita is a vigilant ethnographer, cautious of its dark history and unpleasant pitfalls; nonetheless, she believes in its radical potential. 

Friday, March 28, 2025 12-1:30 pm PT / 3-4:30pm ET

THE BURAWOY ETHNOGRAPHIC LOVEFEST

Zoom Meeting ID: 999 3910 8952

Password: 1234

Watch the recording here.

THE BURAWOY ETHNOGRAPHIC LOVEFEST is a special session of the Ethnographic Café aiming to celebrate the work and person of ethnographer extraordinaire Michael Burawoy, who passed away tragically on February 3, 2025.

Four former students of Michael's from diverse sociological walks and generations (Emine Fidan Elcioglu, Sheba George, Emily Ruppel, Jeffrey Sallaz) will reflect upon learning the craft of fieldwork from Michael for 10 minutes each. The rest of the session will then be devoted to reminiscences, testimonials and sundry contributions from around the globe.

Emine Fidan Elcioglu is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her work examines the relationship between everyday political behavior under conditions of extreme inequality, by drawing on different instances of migration politics. She is the author of Divided by the Wall: Progressive and Conservative Immigration Politics at the U.S.-Mexico Border (University of California Press, 2020).

Sheba George is professor in the College of Medicine at the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science and Adjunct Professor in the Community Health Sciences Deptin the Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA. She has studied health inequities among vulnerable, under-resourced populations and currently directs a range of health professional training programs for pre-health professional students, community health workers and medical students. She is the author of When Women Come First: Gender and Class in Transnational Migration (University of California Press, 2005).

Emily Ruppel is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at UC Berkeley and incoming assistant professor at UC Davis (in fall 2026). Michael Burawoy was her dissertation chair and primary mentor throughout graduate school. Her dissertation focuses on job training programs for disabled workers, using historical research to trace the growth of this industry since the 1970s and ethnographic fieldwork to investigate contemporary labor practices. Papers from this project have been published in American Sociological Review, Work and Occupations, Social Science & Medicine, and Critical Sociology.

Jeff Sallaz is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona.  He is an ethnography of work, labor, and markets. He is author, most recently, of Lives on the Line from Oxford University Press.