Alice Goffman (born 1982) is an American sociologist, urban ethnographer, and author. She was assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and visiting assistant professor of sociology at Pomona College. She is known for the controversy that resulted from the publication of her 2014 book On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City.
Contents
Early life and education
Born in 1982, both of Alice Goffman's parents, who were Canadian immigrants to the United States, were social scientists. Her father was the famed sociologist Erving Goffman, while her mother, Gillian Sankoff, is a sociolinguist. Erving Goffman died from stomach cancer in 1982, soon after Alice's birth. In 1993, her mother married the sociolinguist William Labov, who later legally adopted Alice.
Goffman attended The Baldwin School, a private school for girls in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. She earned a BA at the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD at Princeton University, both in sociology. Her doctoral dissertation committee was chaired by Mitchell Duneier and included Paul DiMaggio, Devah Pager, Cornel West, and Viviana Zelizer.
While earning her PhD at Princeton, Goffman co-taught undergraduate courses with Mitch Duneier as a Lloyd Cotsen Graduate Teaching Fellow. In 2010, she was awarded a two-year fellowship at the University of Michigan as a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar.
Career
Beginning in the fall of 2012, Goffman taught both undergraduate and graduate level courses as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. At UW Madison, she established the Wisconsin Collective for Ethnographic Research with a colleague and served on several committees. She has served as a reviewer and board member for several different sociological publications.
In 2014, Goffman published On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, an ethnographic account of her fieldwork on the impact of policing on the lives of young black men in Northeast Philadelphia. Since the publication of On the Run, Goffman has delivered talks at dozens of colleges, universities, and conferences. In 2015, she gave a TED Talk titled "How we’re priming some kids for college—and others for prison." That same year, she was accepted to the one-year fellowship program at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
In April 2017, after she was offered a position as a visiting professor at Pomona College, an anonymously authored open letter was written calling for Goffman's appointment to be rescinded due to allegations of racism in her work and research methods. The offer was not rescinded.
In 2019, she was denied tenure at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
On the Run
On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, published by University of Chicago Press, began as a research project Goffman started as a second-year undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, when she immersed herself in a disadvantaged neighborhood of Philadelphia with African-American young men who were subject to a high level of surveillance and police activity. Goffman continued working on this project as a graduate student at Princeton, eventually turning it into her doctoral thesis and book. Issued in paperback in April 2015, the book uses the experience of Goffman's subjects to illustrate how police treat and mistreat young black men within the framework of the American criminal justice system, and how this reshapes the lives of families in America's poor, black neighborhoods.
In the book's introduction, Goffman highlights her central argument: "The sheer scope of policing and imprisonment in poor Black neighborhoods is transforming community life in ways that are deep and enduring, not only for the young men who are their targets but for their family members, partners, and neighbors."
Several sociologists, including Howard Becker, Elijah Anderson, and Carol Stack, reviewed the book favorably.
Cornel West wrote, "Alice Goffman's On the Run is the best treatment I know of the wretched underside of neo-liberal capitalist America. Despite the social misery and fragmented relations, she gives us a subtle analysis and poignant portrait of our fellow citizens who struggle to preserve their sanity and dignity."
On the Run was also favorably received outside academia. The New York Times named it one of "100 notable books of 2014." The New York Times Book Review also named it as its weekly "Editor's Choice" selection on July 6, 2014. In The New York Times, Alex Kotlowitz called it "a remarkable feat of reporting." Writing in The New York Review of Books, Christopher Jencks predicted that the work would become "an ethnographic classic."
The book continued to gain popularity after Goffman's TED Talk, which has over 2 million views and has been widely circulated online. The talk describes the consequences of incarceration and policing for marginalized young people, calling for an end to mass incarceration and highlighting the need for criminal justice reform. Goffman's argument that "tough on crime" policing has done more harm than good has resonated with many advocates for reform on social media.
Awards
2010 Jane Addams Award for Best Article, Community and Urban Section of the American Sociological Association, for "On The Run: Wanted Men in a Philadelphia Ghetto" published in the American Sociological Review.
2011 Dissertation Award, American Sociological Association, for "the best PhD dissertation for a calendar year."