Magazine
Leaders
For Richer or For Poorer
An Interview with Sudhir Venkatesh
Sudhir Venkatesh rose to national prominence when his article, “Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms?” was featured in the best-selling book Freakonomics. In 2008, Venkatesh published Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets. The book chronicles Venkatesh’s unusual method of research — which included hanging out in a Chicago housing project with the Black Kings gang. Venkatesh also produces and directs documentaries and serves as William B. Ransford Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. Next American City’s Meredith Aska McBride spoke on the phone with Venkatesh about his previous and current projects.
The project for your book, Gang Leader for a Day, began with you walking into a Chicago housing project, looking for people to take a survey on urban poverty, but then morphed into a huge exploration of this community from the inside. At what point did you decide to approach the project the way you did and why?
I decided almost immediately, upon meeting a local street gang and its leader, that the standard way that sociologists try to get information — using a questionnaire with questions written in advance — was not going to help me very much to understand daily life in the housing projects. I’d have to come back to hang out in the social services center or church, and spend a greater degree of time. So I started hanging out with a couple of these kids, and soon I was staying with their families and then I moved in with their families and it grew from there.
The rest of this article is only available in Next American City magazine.
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