Alice Goffman, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

Authors

Dzhamilia Makashova, Kansas State University

Abstract

"Alice Goffman’s On the Run is an ethnographic study of the impacts of the war on drugs and policing in an American urban neighborhood. Her research started during her sophomore year at the University of Pennsylvania in Dr. David Grazian’s urban ethnography class. As a part of the class, Goffman’s assignment was to pick a site to observe and take notes, and she got a job at a cafeteria at the west edge of Penn’s campus with Miss Deena, a Black woman in her sixties who managed the staff. Through this job, Goffman was introduced to Miss Deena’s family and their local Black community. These connections made it possible for Goffman to spend six years in a segregated Black neighborhood in Philadelphia (pseudonymously called 6th Street). During her years of intensive research, Goffman explored the impact of mass incarceration in the United States, and tough on crime policies on this poor Black community, particularly on the lives of young Black men who circulate in and out of prisons and the lives of their loved ones."

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Makashova, Dzhamilia (2015) "Alice Goffman, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City," Qualitative Criminology (QC): Vol. 3: No. 1, Article 7.
Available at: https://dc.swosu.edu/qc/vol3/iss1/7