Received: 7 August 2018 Revised: 3 November 2018 Accepted: 8 November 2018

DOI: 10.1111/soc4.12652

ARTICLE

Envisioning a feminist urban ethnography:

Structure, culture, and new directions in poverty
studies
Ranita Ray | Korey Tillman

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Abstract
Correspondence
Ranita Ray, Department of Sociology, A “risk” discourse, characterized by the focus on behaviors of
University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Box 455033,
the economically marginalized especially as it relates to
4505 S. Maryland Pkwy., Las Vegas, NV
89154‐5033. drugs, gangs, violence, and teen parenthood, has traditionally
Email: [email protected]
dominated poverty research in the United States. More
recently, this hegemonic risk discourse has become
contoured by the so‐called new cultural turn in urban pov-
erty studies, which has been marked as a departure from
the earlier “blame the victim” perspectives. In this article,
we review the role of urban ethnographers in shaping the
structure versus culture debate in the sociology of poverty
sub‐discipline. We then point to a scant, but growing, body
of work that is encouraging urban ethnographers engaged
in poverty research to expand their vision. To conclude, we
contend that this new direction can be conceptualized as a
feminist urban ethnography frame that advocates for trans-
formation of the poverty research agenda.

1 | I N T RO DU CT I O N

Americans in the United States live extraordinarily unequal lives. Socioeconomically marginalized families and com-
munities remain in poverty across generations (Chetty, Hendren, Jones, & Porter, 2018). Not for this reason alone,
the question of poverty has remained at the center of sociology since the birth of the discipline (Du Bois, 1898). The social
reproduction of poverty is racialized—Black and Brown communities are most likely to remain economically marginalized
across generations and other axes of oppression due to a number of factors including discrimination in the work place,
historically transmitted disadvantages, residential and school segregation, eviction, and mass incarceration, among others
(M. Alexander, 2010; Drake & Cayton, 1945; Du Bois, 1898; Massey & Denton, 1993; Western, 2006; Wilson, 1987). One
central question is how these social forces shape everyday mechanisms and processes of social reproduction of poverty.
Urban ethnographers have been particularly central to shaping the how conversations around the social reproduction of
poverty in Black and Brown communities since the birth of U.S. American Sociology (see Du Bois, 1898). Urban

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ethnography includes the study of city life—within, and outside, the city's various institutions and organizations. However,
urban ethnographies have also been conducted outside the political limits of the city. We will not use this space to discuss
the complexities of what is “urban” in urban ethnography, but simply put, urban denotes “modern” life involving complex
division of labor as opposed to traditional/pre‐modern societies (see Duneier, Kasinitz, & Murphy's, 2014).
Historically, urban ethnographers writing about the everyday lives of economically marginalized Black and Brown
people foregrounded particular topics and questions that established the poor as objects of inquiry for behaving and
living in ways that assaulted the White middle‐class imagination. For example, scholars wrote about topics including
non‐monogamous sex, gangs, underground economy, early parenthood, non‐nuclear families, and drugs (e.g.,
Hannerz, 1969; Liebow, 1967; Stack, 1974), although through a benevolent desire to shatter pejorative stories about
marginalized Black and Brown communities and demystify their lives. Nonetheless, scholars theorized these risk
behaviors as central to understanding the social reproduction of poverty while attempting to argue that larger struc-
tural forces shaped the prevalence of these risk behaviors in marginalized communities to begin with. These accounts
of marginalized communities began to capture the public imagination and solidified racialized and gendered stereo-
types about the economically marginalized.
In the 1960s, the controversial “culture of poverty” logic popularized by Oscar Lewis (1968) and Daniel Patrick
Moynihan (1965) posited that persistent poverty engendered a collection of practices and beliefs among the poor
that would continue to perpetuate across generations despite structural changes. The “culture of poverty” logic
actively entered the public policy domain and maintained that despite its origins in structural conditions, local cultures
take on their own agency in preserving the cycle of poverty.
Following this, some scholars argue, poverty researchers shied away from exploring the relationship between cul-
ture and poverty until William Julius Wilson (1987) put culture back on the agenda in his work The Truly Disadvantaged.
Wilson made arguments about the relevancy of culture more empathetically in works that followed. This incited a
renewed focus on culture not merely as an epiphenomenon but as central to theorizing the social reproduction of pov-
erty (Small, Harding, & Lamont, 2010). As a response to U.S. sociology's apparent focus on structuralist perspectives in
theorizing poverty, scholars then begun a call to bring culture back to research on poverty (Small et al., 2010).
The new culture of poverty scholars draws on cultural sociology to shed light on a range of contexts and issues
the economically marginalized navigate regularly including family (e.g., Lareau, 2003), neighborhood and community
(e.g., D. J. Harding, 2010; Small, 2004), sex lives (D. J. Harding, 2007), work (e.g., Dohan, 2003; Young, 2004), edu-
cation (Carter, 2005; Garot, 2010), and policing (Garland, 2006; Rios, 2011) to name a few. Cultural sociology as a
sub‐discipline, institutionalized around the same time as the resurgence of culture in poverty research, offered con-
cepts such as codes (J. C. Alexander, 2003), frames (Young, 2004), repertoires (Swidler, 1986), and narratives (Connor,
2012) that informed new studies of the culture of the poor. For example, scholars theorized about educational per-
formance among marginalized students in relationship to cultural beliefs about White and Black students (Carter,
2005); explored the relationship between individual and community through cultural beliefs about neighborhoods
among the marginalized (Small, 2004); or made arguments about the sexual and academic behaviors of marginalized
youth through cultural heterogeneity of marginalized neighborhoods (D. J. Harding, 2007).
What implications does this new cultural turn have for sociology as a discipline, and for sociology of poverty in
particular? For one, urban ethnographers began to write about the poor, and their ways of living, with a new zeal.
Scholars in the 1990s and 2000s popularized the urban ethnography model shaping how new sociologists viewed
studies of inequality, and propelled sociology into public discourse in new ways (Anderson, 1990, 1999; Venkatesh,
2000, 2006, 2008; Newman, 1999; Edin & Kefalas, 2005; Duneier, 1999).

2 | U R B A N E T H N O G R A P H E R S , ST R U C T U R E , A N D C U L T U R E

Urban ethnographies, as part of the new culture of poverty research agenda, do not pathologize the culture of the
poor, or presume its deterministic and explanatory sovereignty. These scholars attempt to highlight the intricate ways
RAY AND TILLMAN 3 of 10

in which structural forces intersect with local cultures to shape the lives of the marginalized, and advocate for more
measurable conceptualizations of culture (see Small et al., 2010). Most importantly, this group of scholars are careful
to recognize the heterogeneity of marginalized communities when it comes to beliefs, values, attitudes, and behaviors.
These urban ethnographies, highlighting the lives of the economically marginalized, have had various theoretical,
methodological, and policy payoffs. These studies have been key to providing new perspectives on dire issues facing
the poor that were not previously in the public debate. For example, Matthew Desmond (2016) highlighted the
urgent need to focus on housing as a core issue in his Pulitzer prize‐winning book Evicted. Kathryn Edin and Laura
Lein (1997) in their book Making Ends Meet exposed how neither welfare nor jobs were able to allow low‐income
mothers to survive—making important contributions to the work and welfare debate.
Other recent works have attempted to humanize those living in the margins of society by highlighting a moral
order framing the chaos in their lives. For example, in his book Sidewalk, Mitchell Duneier (1999) sheds light on
the lives of Black men making a living in various ways on the sidewalks of Greenwich Village. Duneier documents
the moral order in this place highlighting how the men navigate stigma, humanizing a group that the public simply
perceived as a nuisance. Phillippe Bourgois (1995, Bourgois & Schonberg, 2009) in his works has attempted to
humanize and understand drug users and dealers living on the extreme margins of society and searching for basic
human dignity.
Challenging myths about the poor as jobless, lazy, or having the wrong moral values, other scholars have
highlighted their participation in low‐wage jobs to argue that the poor espouse similar types of work and family
values as, and aspire to resemble, the White middle‐class (Newman, 1999). Edin and Kefalas (2005) show how poor
women treasure marriage so much so that they postpone it until circumstances are ideal. In turn, they tend to have
children before getting married. This insightful finding debunks myths about “unmarried childbearing” that claims
poor women do not value marriage. Others attempt to alter negative stories about teen mothers by highlighting
how women become mothers early as a consequence of how they navigate relationships with men, obstacles they
face in school, and how they understand sex (Kaplan, 1997).
Scholars who laid the ground for the new generation of urban ethnographers argued that socioeconomic segre-
gation of economically marginalized communities from “mainstream” cultures as well as social networks shaped a par-
ticular set of “ghetto specific” or “oppositional” culture/cultural frames. This culture was conceptualized as a reaction
to blocked opportunities (Wilson, 1987). Challenging the deterministic undertone of this line of work, contemporaries
of this early generation of urban ethnographers began to recognize and theorize cultural heterogeneity to underscore
variations in behaviors as well as educational, occupational, and family outcomes among the economically marginal-
ized (D. J. Harding, 2007; Small, 2004). This even newer group of scholars surmises that much like any given social
context, those living in socioeconomically marginalized neighborhoods are exposed to a wide range of cultural frames
(D. J. Harding, 2007; Small, 2004). For instance, scholars (e.g., D. J. Harding, 2007) demonstrate how poor youth in
marginalized neighborhoods are left to navigate a heterogeneous array of “cultural frames” that include “ghetto spe-
cific” and “mainstream.” Youth draw on this wide range of cultural frames to then shape their actions/decisions
regarding sexual behaviors and romantic relations. These frames provide an outline for both social interactions as well
as the decisions they make. For example, framing pregnancy as a mechanism through which to establish one‐self as
an adult (“ghetto specific” frame) versus as an obstruction to opportunities that may lead to future upward social
mobility (“mainstream” frame) will have implications for youth's chances of becoming pregnant. D. J. Harding
(2007, 2010) contends that youth in marginalized communities are able to find support for both types of frames
especially though cross‐age interactions. Romantic and sexual behavior among poor urban youth, thus, as Harding
argues, must be understood within this context of cultural heterogeneity.
These portraits of marginalized communities are valuable to understanding how poverty functions and shapes
the lives of those impacted by it, and how the economically marginalized navigate their oppression. As many scholars
have argued, it also allows the non‐poor to perhaps get a sense of the lives of the poor and comprehend the
continuity that belie what the privileged and marginalized value in life—a bourgeois heteronormative life course/living.
To what extent is this framing of the social reproduction of poverty able to get at questions that concerns sociologists
4 of 10 RAY AND TILLMAN

and policy makers: why is poverty reproduced from one generation to another, and what can we do about it? Take for
example the case of teen parenthood, if avoiding teen parenthood does not drastically improve chances of social
mobility among those dealing with various obstacles (Geronimus, 1996, 1997, 2003; Luker, 1996; Ray, 2017), then
why must we seek to know why Black and Brown youth have children early? In fact, scholars have argued that
the moral and public health panic around teen motherhood is part of a larger history that criminalizes and
problematizes Black and Brown motherhood in the United States, and in the process privileges White cultural
supremacy (Roberts, 1998).
Despite its significant departure from older “culture of poverty” studies, contributions to sociology as a discipline,
and the role in highlighting the predicament of the poor, some scholars have demonstrated that new ways of
conceptualizing culture fall prey to the limits set by its intellectual histories, and genealogy of knowledge (O'Connor,
2002; Rios, 2015; Rodríguez‐Muñiz, 2015). For example, urban ethnographers highlighted in this review continue to
conceptualize drugs, gangs, violence, and early parenthood as the central stories of poverty as they attempt to
theorize how and why the marginalized may denounce “mainstream” values of work and education. While these
ethnographers demarcate differential outcomes in risk behaviors in similar contexts (e.g., Anderson, 1999; D. J.
Harding, 2007; McLeod, 1987), and sympathetically highlight why those living in marginalized communities
participate in risk behaviors via structuralist explanations (e.g., Edin & Kefalas, 2005; Kaplan, 1997), the direction
of scholarship on poverty has shaped public discourse and policy in ways that much of our government and
nonprofit monies and other resources are directed to preventing risk behaviors in marginalized communities (see
Randles, 2017).
It may seem as though, in writing about drugs, gangs, and violence in the 1990s and 2000s, scholars were simply
responding to “real” increases in drugs, gangs, and violence. We argue that in theorizing social reproduction of
poverty, a portrait of aforementioned phenomenon is partly irrelevant. For example, those who are not part of the
negative outcome statistics are also unable to become socially mobile, and all social groups use drugs at the same
rate. Why then must we write about the marginalized in ways that produce and reproduce narratives—and
consequently policies—that reinforce systems of racism and classism? The excessive emphasis on risk behaviors
among scholars in the 1990s and 2000s strengthened policies and practices that focused on risk behavior prevention,
and reinforced narratives about marginalized communities as social problems, at the cost of providing resources.
Moreover, this focus on risk behaviors also misidentifies how poverty is reproduced from one generation to another.
It would behoove us to also note here that the academic enterprise plays a significant role in the production of
oppressive systems of knowledge, for example, a push to publishing books that center sensational stories, written
in ways that is readable to the “Upper East Side” reader, may often prohibit theory building.
In his 2015 paper “Intellectual inheritances: Cultural diagnostics and the state of poverty knowledge,” Michael
Rodríguez‐Muñiz questions the narrow focus of recent poverty scholarship and highlights how the socio‐historical
processes of knowledge production has shaped how we think and write about poverty today. The economically mar-
ginalized and their cultures have always been at the center of poverty research, reflecting what Rodríguez‐Muñiz
(2015) calls “ontological myopias”—scholars unable to break away from the shackles of the intellectual histories of
the discipline (O'Connor, 2002). Drawing on this line of thinking, we discuss, and provide examples of, what makes
particular works of urban ethnography feminist.

3 | F E M I N I S T U R B A N E T H N O G R A P H Y : EN V I S I O N I N G N E W D I R E C T I O N S
I N P OV E R T Y ST U D I E S

This is a call for urban ethnographers to look to feminisms to guide their quest for documenting and understanding
marginalized urban communities. While feminist ethnography has a strong tradition across disciplines, most urban
ethnographers largely ignore its tenets, which we believe partially explains why scholars continue to posit “risk
behaviors” at the center of understanding the reproduction of poverty in urban communities.
RAY AND TILLMAN 5 of 10

Beverly Skeggs astutely points out that perhaps ethnography is inherently exploitative considering its role in
legitimizing the colonial enterprise. Yet there can be multiple forms of ethnographies and feminisms, lending
ethnography its radical potential. Ethnography allows us to think beyond the shackles of particular disciplines and
make novel discoveries. Ethnographers are allowed to scheme out a wide range of cultural, structural, and physical
potentials for meanings and social action (Skeggs, 2001). We think, a feminist urban ethnography may not solely,
or at all, entail centering gender. We believe that an urban ethnographer conducts feminist work when they harness
ethnography's radical potential to ask new questions, beyond what is allowed by the constraints of the discipline, by
speaking across sub‐disciplines and disciplines. As scholars read beyond their sub‐disciplines they might find it
hard to ignore, for example, how systems of binary gender or White supremacist structures oppress those they
write about.
For urban ethnographers of poverty, conducting a feminist ethnography would entail not merely operating with
the knowledge that those we write about—especially those who live in the margins of society—are necessarily
impacted by what we write, but it is our responsibility to read widely beyond our discipline so as to understand
the phenomenon we see in the field with enhanced clarity. It is almost cliché, but with the radical power of ethnog-
raphy comes important responsibility to do justice to what we encounter. For example, if those writing about teen
motherhood had paid attention to Black feminist writings about reproductive justice, they would have had to at least
engage in a conversation with scholars who have a different story to tell about motherhood among Black and Brown
women. What this indicates, in fact, is a citation politics. As Sandra Harding (1991) points out, while feminists are
often required to engage with “nonfeminist” work, many urban ethnographers of poverty, for instance, have entirely
circumvented feminist scholarship from a wide range of disciplines including education, anthropology, and legal
studies, even when they are deeply relevant to understanding the oppression of Black and Brown people marginalized
by urban poverty. Below, we discuss some examples of feminist urban ethnographies from various disciplines, and
sub‐disciplines in sociology.
Feminist sociologist Julie Bettie's (2003) Women Without Class skillfully challenges simplistic understandings of
class to demonstrate the cultural politics of social reproduction of race, class, and gender. Other scholars such as soci-
ologist Ann Arnett Ferguson (2000) in her book Bad Boys and urban anthropologist Damien Sojoyner (2016), in his
book First Strikes, highlights the present and socio‐historical processes through which institutions and institutional
agents function to create contexts for problematization of Black and Brown bodies in urban communities.
Ann Arnett Ferguson, for example, frames her ethnographic data within theories of radical schooling to underline
how public schools as institutions shape Black masculinity. As opposed to depicting the resistance of the boys as a
departure from “mainstream,” Ferguson highlights how public schools reinforce White cultural supremacy. As another
example, legal anthropologist Khiara M. Bridges (2011) in her book Reproducing Race draws on extensive
ethnographic data at “Alpha” hospital to highlight the frictions between (mostly) White providers and predominantly
women of color patients. Bridges situates her data within the complex history of the setting itself to highlight how
Medicaid is used to police and manage the bodies of economically marginalized women of color. A moment of
universal healthcare is thus circumscribed by the construction of these women as diseased. Bridges deftly
demonstrates how history of medical racism continues to shape the everyday lives of women of color. In another
instance of feminist urban ethnography, feminist criminologist Susila Gurusami (2017) draws on 18 months of
participant observation to build on the voices of Black women who were formerly incarcerated to provide an
analyses of the state's attempt to “transform formerly incarcerated black women from ‘criminals’ to ‘workers’” within
the frames of intersectional capitalism (p. 451). Gurusami avoids simply depicting the daily lives of the women;
instead, she amplifies their own critiques of the state and situates them as the primary voices of resistance.
Sociologist Victor Rios (2011) in his book Punished, for example, documents how a range of social institutions
interacted to form a “youth control complex,” hypercriminalizing young Black and Latino men. In his work, Rios also
centers the voices of the youth themselves situating his data at the intersection of critical criminology and urban
ethnography. Beyond simply highlighting the lives of the young men in isolation, Rios aptly underscores how police
presence, in their lives, impeded opportunities and well‐being.
6 of 10 RAY AND TILLMAN

As another prominent example, anthropologist Aimee Meredith Cox in her book Shapeshifters (2015) examines
how young Black women living in a homeless shelter in Detroit resist dominant narratives about themselves and
reject their position as liminal citizens. Cox draws on 8 years of fieldwork to highlight Black women's agency in
how they navigate economic marginalization, and race and gender violence, to envision their lives. Cox recounts
how the women use poetry and dance as ways to disrupt their marginalization, while also demonstrating how the
women rethink family itself. To frame the young women's experiences, Cox carefully weaves in larger forces like
the Great Migration and Detroit's history.
A growing group of urban ethnographers have provided a more relational understanding of poverty highlighting
the interaction between the marginalized, and the oppressor (Auyero, 2012; Desmond, 2016; Rios, 2011), and
provided complex and contextualized understandings of risk behaviors (Fader, 2013). Ray (2018) in her book
The Making of a Teenage Service Class offers a feminist urban ethnography drawing on women of color feminisms,
critical race theory, and sociology of education and work to ask different questions about the social reproduction
of poverty. Drawing on research that centers the lived experiences of a group of Black and Brown economically
marginalized youth who “play by the rules of the game,” Ray documents how they become low‐wage service workers
despite avoiding risk behaviors, and preparing for college. Ray argues that a focus on those who play by the rules
highlights the theoretical shortcomings of focusing on drugs, gangs, and violence to explain the social reproduction
of poverty. Moreover, as feminists of color demonstrate, Black and Brown economically marginalized individuals
are constructed as social problems and burdens on the state through a particular cultural and socio‐historical process
(Ferguson, 2000; Ray, 2017; Roberts, 1998).
A new direction in poverty research will benefit from drawing on women of color feminisms when theorizing the
social reproduction of poverty. This intervention not simply imply inquiry into the lives of the privileged and
functioning of oppressive institutions, but also question the bourgeois heteronormative life course/living imperative
that belie its knowledge production systems and logics (Collins, 1990; Lorde, 1984). The theorizing of risk behaviors
as key to understanding, and breaking, the cycle of poverty reinforces a false dichotomy of “behaviors,” “attitudes,”
and “frames” etc. assigning them explanatory value.
In her book, feminist urban ethnographer Ranita Ray (2018) demonstrates how this inordinate focus on risk
behaviors not only diverts resources that can foster educational and occupational mobility among marginalized youth,
but simultaneously reinforces race and class hierarchies. Recent innovative theorizations in urban ethnography, thus,
while accounting for a shift away from “blame the victim” rhetoric, continue to posit that all Black and Brown youth
are social problems in need of resolutions. Policy work and change within this frame originate predominantly from
correcting behaviors of “at‐risk” youth. Additionally, as Ray outlines in her book, this focus reifies middle‐class
cultural norms:

In understanding the lack of social mobility, the majority of these portrayals of marginalized communities,
however, continue to foreground drugs, gangs, violence, and early parenthood as central narratives. They
leave out the trajectories of youth … who follow the rules they were prescribed, and continuously struggle
to become upwardly mobile. These studies continue to place emphasis on the question of why
socioeconomically marginalized individuals either embrace or reject middle‐class culture at any given
point. In answering this question, scholars simultaneously construct teen parenthood, violence, gangs,
and drugs as ubiquitous social problems and risk behaviors in marginalized communities, and privilege
middle‐class culture, reifying it as static. Rooted in white hypermasculine traditions, such
representations, while meant to “normalize” the poor or the “other,” work to perpetuate stereotypes
(Ray, 2018, p. 15–16).

Moreover, this focus on risk behaviors does not offer much explanatory power when it comes to social reproduction
of poverty, which is essential if we were to challenge it. Urban ethnographers invested in understanding the
intricacies of culture do not successfully tell us why it is important to understand the culture of the oppressed in
relationship to the social reproduction of poverty—for example, as we alluded to briefly earlier, why is it important
RAY AND TILLMAN 7 of 10

to write about the sex lives of marginalized youth when we know that postponing childbirth does not necessarily
increase chances of socio‐economic mobility among the poor (Geronimus, 1991; Luker, 1996)? On the contrary, this
ubiquitous problematization of teen parenthood further stigmatized all Black and Brown women (Ray, 2017). Or what
does family values have to do with social reproduction of poverty when, irrespective of family forms, Black and Latinx
economically marginalized people find it hard to find employment due to racial discrimination?
Without being over‐prescriptive, our vision of a feminist urban ethnography, broadly speaking, would center
power and the relational nature of oppression in the fieldsite, and encourage conversations across and within
disciplines so as to knowledgeably frame data. This will also necessitate we pay attention to citation politics. Urban
ethnographers writing about those living in the margins of society must upend what we think we should be writing
about and ask entirely new questions about poverty by looking to scholars across sub‐disciplines in sociology, as well
as critical criminology, legal studies, anthropology, and more. We believe that doing this would allow scholars to be
more reflexive, critical, and intersectional.

4 | CONCLUSIONS AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS

In this review, we have argued that when analyzing the social reproduction of poverty, scholars ask a particular set of
questions. First, scholars examine how the economically marginalized respond to the constraints of poverty. Second,
they explore why there are variations in responses to poverty: Why do some of those living in poverty become early
parents while others do not; why some take up low‐wage work as others participate in drug economy; and why some
have stronger communal ties, etc. Third, they ask a set of questions which tackles the White middle‐class anxiety
about a challenge to White hegemonic norms, and aim to “debunk” any “cultural” variations from the same. A small
group of scholars have begun to conceptualize poverty as a relational phenomenon—outlining how power, privilege,
and marginalization function in relationship to one another highlighting how the social reproduction of poverty is not
circumscribed by local cultures of marginalized communities alone.
We have established the contemporary history of at least one strand of poverty scholarship, and it's relationship
to previously denounced culture of poverty arguments. We argued that while contemporary scholars of poverty have
successfully attempted to move away from “culture of poverty” arguments, an empirical focus on drugs, gangs, and
violence in marginalized communities, without analytically marking its relational nature, and stressing its uniform
presence in all communities, only reinvents a new culture of poverty argument.
This argument continues to allow us to stress on changing individual behaviors at the cost of challenging
structural failings. Studying the “poor,” and specifically, how the marginalized live and why, does not amount to
studying poverty (O'Connor, 2002, see also Rodríguez‐Muñiz, 2015). A focus on these questions continues to
provide risk behaviors with explanatory currency when it comes to the social reproduction of poverty—allowing
for policy makers to invest in teen pregnancy and drug prevention, marriage education programs, and the like (e.g.,
Randles, 2017).

ORCID
Ranita Ray https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8817-4846
Korey Tillman https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9804-986X

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
Ranita Ray is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her book, The Making of A
Teenage Service Class: Poverty and Mobility in an American City follows sixteen Black and Brown youth for 3 years
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and documents what happens to economically marginalized youth who play by the prescribed rules of social
mobility. (University of California Press, 2018), She is currently conducting a longitudinal ethnography of educa-
tion and policing in Las Vegas.

Korey Tillman is completing his doctoral studies in the Department of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las
Vegas. He is conducting an ethnographic project that examines the relationship between policing and homeless-
ness in Las Vegas. His research interests include Inequality, Culture, Poverty, Policing, and Qualitative Methods.

How to cite this article: Ray R, Tillman K. Envisioning a feminist urban ethnography: Structure, culture, and
new directions in poverty studies. Sociology Compass. 2019;13:e12652. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12652