Featured IRP Graduate Research Fellow: Matthew Desmond

Fall 2007-2008

This is the first in a series of profiles of graduate students in poverty studies who have participated in IRP’s multidisciplinary Graduate Research Fellows Program. Carolyn Heinrich, IRP Associate Director of Research and Training and Professor of Public Affairs, heads the rigorous training and mentoring program, which IRP launched in fall 2004 to prepare the next generation of poverty scholars and researchers.

On Thursday, September 27, 2007, former IRP Graduate Research Fellow Matthew Desmond, a University of Wisconsin-Madison Sociology doctoral candidate and Harvey Fellowship recipient, returned to IRP to talk to this year’s fellows about his work and book, On the Fireline, recently published by the University of Chicago Press. Desmond described his current research (PhD expected in 2009), outlined how he prepared a book proposal based on his master’s thesis, and described how he found a publisher.

Matthew Desmond Dissertator in Sociology on Harvey Fellowship, University of Wisconsin-Madison M.S., Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2004 B.S., Justice Studies, Arizona State University, 2002 B.S., Communication, Arizona State University, 2002 Summa Cum Laude, Outstanding Graduate of the College of Public Programs Research Areas: Urban Sociology & Poverty, Race & Ethnicity, Organizations & Work, Culture, Theory, Ethnography and Quantitative Methods Advisor: Mustafa Emirbayer Dissertation: “The Dynamics of Eviction in Inner-City Milwaukee” (expected PhD 2009) Dissertation Research Support: This dissertation has received funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and IRP.

How I Benefited from the IRP Graduate Research Fellows Program

I was an Institute for Research on Poverty Graduate Research Fellow during the inaugural year of the program, from 2004 – 2005. During this year I was writing everyday, revising my master’s thesis into what would become On the Fireline. (Visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/218633.ctl to learn more about the book and read an excerpt.) I found in the Graduate Research Fellows an energetic, committed, and passionately interdisciplinary group of young scholars who challenged and stretched my ideas and intellectual assumptions (conditioned by my host discipline) and helped me to increase the rigor and breadth of my thinking.

IRP Associate Director of Research and Training Carolyn Heinrich developed a program that focused on cutting-edge social-scientific research. She invited established scholars from various disciplines and tendered lively discussion topics. She promoted our professional development, using her experience as the editor of Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory to guide us through the universe of academic publishing.

The skills I learned at IRP proved useful when I was writing my book and, later on, while seeking out its publisher. Besides intellectual support and guidance, the IRP Graduate Research Fellows Program offered financial support in the form of funding a trip I took to the University of California—Berkeley in May 2005. At this conference, one that centered around the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, I presented a chapter of On the Fireline, receiving creative and stimulating feedback and, what is more, an invitation to publish the chapter as an article in the interdisciplinary journal Ethnography, which I did the following year.

Summary of My Doctoral Dissertation

The process of eviction, which has been virtually ignored by urban poverty scholars despite the fact that thousands of poor families are forcibly removed from their apartments each year, holds strategic value for advancing social-scientific knowledge of the reproduction of inner-city poverty. By studying eviction, one can obtain a unique perspective into (1) the ways in which the dynamics of the low-income housing market exacerbate conditions of chronic poverty, (2) the degree to which poor people experiencing a crisis rely on their social networks, and (3) how cultural dynamics of the inner city reinforce conditions of poverty. Set in inner-city Milwaukee, this dissertation will analyze some of the causes, dynamics, and consequences of eviction by employing both quantitative and qualitative methods.

Why On the Fireline Might Interest Poverty Researchers

On the Fireline seeks to understand how a high-risk organization, the United States Forest Service, motivates its workers to participate in life-threatening activity. Because the distribution of professional risk takers reflects the established social order, to study risk is to study power and inequality. The sacrifices that professional risk takers endure are borne primarily by a narrow segment of society—mainly working-class men—not simply by “brave,” “heroic,” “thrill-lusting,” “action-seeking” individuals from all walks of life.

The men who fill the ranks of America’s million-and-a-half-person fighting force are the sons of steelworkers, railroaders, and teamsters; men of color are overrepresented in subordinate military positions, and the educated and the rich are strikingly absent from the army’s ranks. The same is true in the world of wildland firefighting, a working-class world in which approximately 80 percent of firefighting positions are filled by men. Working-class men staff most of the positions within high-risk organizations while their well-to-do counterparts watch from a safe distance. Certain bodies, deemed precious, are protected, while others, deemed expendable, protect.

On the Fireline is my attempt to understand how organizations that demand much from their workers—indeed, sometimes their very lives—tap into and rely upon America’s economic inequalities, how individuals’ classed lifestyles and backgrounds influence their decision to sign up for jobs that could kill them, and how individuals’ social positions, personal histories, and specific paths through life predispose them to the rigors of risky work.

“In recent years, ethnographers have tried to face up to the Bourdieuian challenge of showing how aspects of culture are rooted in daily practices and bodies. In this beautifully written work of participant observation, Matthew Desmond takes us into the world of wildland firefighters to help us better understand the dynamics of dangerous organizations and the workers who hold the line. At the same time, he moves ethnography forward: rather than following the all too common procedure of asserting the existence of knowledges that ‘go without saying’ for his subjects, Desmond shows in detail how habitus actually operates in everyday life.” —Mitchell Duneier, author of Sidewalk and Slim’s Table