#laurence ralph

[kammartinez]

“My experience with the criminal justice system is wanting to scream, but realizing that you could also find yourself in a more precarious s

[kamreadsandrecs]

“My experience with the criminal justice system is wanting to scream, but realizing that you could also find yourself in a more precarious s

[accuratepicuresofanthropologists]

Laurence Ralph has won the Staley prize for his book Renegade Dreams. I’ve read it -- it’s a good book! 

[its-all-a-little-crazy]

The Torture Letters: Reckoning With Police Violence

By Laurence Ralph.

★★★★★

This book is a must-read. Ralph discusses institutional racism within the police force and the elements of society that need to be tackled so that racism can be eliminated. There is a specific focus on the Chicago Police department and its history of torture. This book is not an easy read, it forces you to face some ugly truths about the society we live in and the way we have failed to deconstruct a racist society. Ralph does, however, offer hope and a direction in which we can move forward.

[ethnographiesofblacklife]

“Ralph emphasized the need for ethnography to attend to intersectionality, building upon Auyero’s discussion of concatenated violence. Drawing on his own research in Chicago, Ralph traced the transforming political subjectivities of disabled gang members through their access to disability entitlements, as well as the reproduction of racial, class, and gendered exclusion within the disabilities community. Ralph also considered how an insistence on waiting in the African American community, rearticulated after Trump’s election, may be based upon a progressive notion of time, which, following Auyero, results in a waiting that further disciplines citizens into suffering patients. Ralph called for the continued interrogation and, indeed, disruption of this version of progressive time through ethnography.” --  Falaris, Marios. "Engaging with Inequality and Affective States: A Review of Culture@Large 2016."SCA Meetings, Cultural Anthropology website, January 5, 2017. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1028-engaging-with-inequality-and-affective-states-a-review-of-culture-large-2016

“Futurity has often been framed in curative terms, a time frame that casts disabled people (as) out of time, or as obstacles to the arc of progress. In our disabled state, we are not part of the dominant narratives of progress, but once rehabilitated, normalized, and hopefully cured, we play a starring role: the sign of progress, the proof of development, the triumph over the mind or body.12 Within this frame of curative time, then, the only appropriate disabled mind/body is one cured or moving toward cure. Cure, in this context, most obviously signals the elimination of impairment but can also mean normalizing treatments that work to assimilate the disabled mind/body as much as possible. The questions animating a curative temporality include: Were you born that way? How much longer do you have to live this way? How long before they invent a cure? How long will a cure take? How soon before you recover?” --  Kafer, Alison. “Time for Disability Studies and a Future for Crips.” Feminist, Queer, Crip, Indiana University Press, 2013, pp. 25–46, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16gz79x.6.

[ethnographiesofblacklife]

Although social isolation has been posited as a critical structural mechanism linking neighborhood disadvantage to the reduced life chances of inner-city reside...

Thinking from a question to Laurence Ralph on casting new light on social isolation within low income urban Black communities, its relationship with criminalization, and the construction of a good gang/bad gang dichotomy.

[ethnographiesofblacklife]

“ ‘They say when you gang bang, when you drug deal, the outcomes are either death or jail...You never hear about the wheelchair. I didn’t know this was an option. And if you think about it, it’s a little bit of both worlds ‘cause half of my body’s dead. Literally. From the waist down, I can’t feel it. I can’t move it. I can’t do nothing with it. The rest of it’s confined to this wheelchair. This is my prison for the choices I’ve made.’” -Tony Akpan in Laurence Ralph’s Renegade Dream (page 25)

Renegade Dreams: Living through Injury in Gangland Chicago. By Laurence Ralph. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Pp. 25