Season 01 - Episode 08: "Injury and Healing on Chicago's South Side"

Anthropological Airwaves

In Episode 8 of Anthropological Airwaves, we catch up with Dr. Laurence Ralph (Harvard) at the AAAs to talk about his ethnographic work on violence, injury, and healing on Chicago's South Side. Full episode transcript.

Credits:

On-the-Street - Sarah Carson

Interviewer - Leniqueca Welcome

Producers - Nooshin Sadegh-Samimi and Kyle Olson

Featured Audio:

Alfa Mist - "Breathe" (feat. Kaya Thomas-Dyke)

Langston Hughes - "Dream Deferred"

Featured Quotes:

"Since Chicago has such a long history of research with researchers in communities, the people in those communities have a pretty good sense of what researchers do. And so they ask you 'are you gonna book like this, or are you gonna write a book like that?' And they position you and hold you accountable in a kind of way" - Laurence Ralph

"The idea of gang violence is so over-determined -- when you're researching it people have canned answers, they have answers they've said a million times, [...] it's cliched sometimes, like 'Oh, there's no role models for these kids, they're growing up in broken homes, educations bad -- that's the reason for gang violence'. In doing research with gangs on the question of violence, one has to figure out other ways to talk about the issue, through the proxies that people use. What are people really talking about when they talk about gang violence?" - Laurence Ralph