I will return to the ethical issues later, as these are not neatly separable from scholarly issues. This was classic participant-observation research, and the degree of participation described was enough to make this reader, who has done and supervised such research for years, question his assumptions about when lines are crossed. The book validates this claim.įor a period of about a decade, first as an undergraduate doing class projects and subsequently as a graduate student learning and applying the repertoire of qualitative research methods, the author lived closely with and recorded the day-to-day activities of a group of young men who were at various points fugitives from law enforcement. In a journal article several years before this book appeared, the author presented early findings and argued that the age of mass incarceration was demanding a new generation of urban ethnographies to reflect the new social facts of mass surveillance and incarceration and the drastic ways in which these practices have transformed conditions of life in the inner cities of the United States. Whyte and the Chicago School of Sociology. On The Run is a study in the great tradition of urban ethnography dating back in parallel lines to William F. In the rest of this review, I will concentrate on the book’s contribution as social science. The book took a long time to produce but is an instant classic. Whatever readers may feel about how she did what she did and what she concludes, the material for a wide range of reactions to this work is presented with clarity, eloquence, and extraordinary ethnographic detail. The ammunition for both sides of such debates, however, is right there in the book. The research procedures can be challenged on ethical grounds and the conclusions on scientific grounds. In the more colloquial sense of general approbation, the book is also a sensational piece of social science research based on in-depth fieldwork, meticulous recording of field data, astute analysis, and fearless social advocacy. Indeed, it is fundamentally about cops-and- robbers chases.

The content is sensational in the manner of tabloid journalism, comprising stories of desperate and violent activities, fraught relationships, and cops-and-robbers chases. Sullivan | March 2015Īlice Goffman’s On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City is a sensational book in two senses of the word. Publisher: Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014. On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

On the Run by Alice Goffman