Loïc Wacquant would like to introduce you to Randol Contreras:

"I want to alert you to the work of Randol Contreras, a young first-rate ethnographer of urban marginality and violence. He has been on long journey that has taken him from the streets onto Tompkins Community College to CUNY-Graduate Center where he received his Ph.D. He has just turned in a superb book manuscript entitled The Stickup Kids: Drugs, Violence, and the American Dream, forthcoming with Univ. of California Press (Public Anthropology Series).

RC is influenced by Marx and Durkheim, C. Wright Mills and Bourdieu, urban anthropology of the political-economic variety and Randall Collins' microsociology. His method is deep ethnography of a kind rarely practiced; he immerses himself in and melts with the scene, and he captures and communicates the "taste and ache" of action in the urban trenches. His dissertation fieldwork and book track Dominican drug robbers (that is, street operators who assault and steal from drug dealers for a living) in a barren
section of the South Bronx. It approaches and at times matches on all fronts, methodological, theoretical and empirical, the fieldwork reported in Philippe Bourgois' In Search of Respect and Nancy Scheper-Hughes' Death Without Weeping, two classics of the genre.

CR is the rare breed of ethnographers who study race, poverty and crime from the ground up while paying due attention to structural factors. His ethnography is dense, precise, and vibrant. Just the kind of work we need to truly understand the intersection of the murky worlds of crime, destitution, ethnoracial anguish, and masculine hubris.  His book shows like no other study I know how drug robbers live in a state of double marginality and structural liminality (as criminals who attack other criminals); captures the positive yet pained moment of attraction to criminal action (theorized but never observed by Jack Katz); unravels the complexity of the dynamic interplay of masculinity and criminal violence (postulated by never dissected by Messerschmidt); and dramatizes the fact that so much urban violence is intra-criminal. His view of how "angustia racial" contributes to the perpetuation of class marginality and street aggression is insightful and calls for further development. His elaboration of "Standpoint Crisis" and of the "Triple Representational Dilemma" faced by minority insider research in the book's methods section is poignant and provocative; it forces the reader to reconsider many accepted tenets (or biases) of conventional ethnographic methodology.

Most impressive, RC produced this book manuscript while bearing a 4 + 4 + 4 teaching load. This is someone who should be in a top-15 department where he would blossom and be an intellectual boon to his colleagues and students, given his unique mix of existential, analytic, and empirical perspectives. His newer research is on "black-brown" tensions and conflict on the streets of California cities. I urge you to check out RC's work and give it the attention it merits.

Cordially,
Loïc

An enormous amount of great talks were given at this year's RC21, organised by the International Sociological Association. Notably, the AUM's Kennosuke gave a talk on undocumented day labourers in the United States.

Some of the talks are available in paper form and are accessible to all.We thoroughly encourage you to explore their page but in the meantime, here are some of our picks:

- (Re)mapping Los Angeles: marginality in/through the city, by Susanna Rosenbaum (Rutgers University)
- 'Informality and ‘slum clearance’: the development and demolition of urbanized villages in the Chinese peri-urban area', by Fulong Wu, Fangzhu Zhang and Chris Webster (Cardiff University)
- 'Howrah – a case study on urban poverty and slum transformation in Kolkata', by Pascal E. Kallenberger (EtH Zurich)
- 'The evolution and dynamics of land squatting in Montevideo, Uruguay', by María José Álvarez Rivadulla (Universidad del Rosario, Bogotá, Colombia)
- 'The forgotten housing demand: the urban slums in Rome, Italy', by Giulia Agostini (Sapienza University of Rome)
- 'Relocation and Displacement in the Case of Budapest: The Social Consequences of Gentrification in Ferencváros', by Csaba Jelinek (Central European University, Budapest)
- ‘State-facilitated Gentrification’ in Seoul, South Korea: for Whom, by Whom and with What Result?', by Shinwon Kyung (Urban Institute, Washington), Kwang-Joong Kim (Seoul National University).
- 'The Breeder Feeder: Tracing Gentrification in Athens City Centre', by Georgia Alexandri (Harokopio University, Athens)
- 'Debates on right to the city in Istanbul', by Hade Türkmen (Cardiff University)