Person:

Rosen, Eva

Meaning-making is an essential feature of social life: as humans make their way through their daily lives, they inevitably interpret themselves, their actions, those of others, and the environment that surround them. Thus, understanding social life requires attending to the cultural dimension of reality. Yet, when it comes to the study of low-income populations, factoring in culture has often been a contentious project. This is because explaining poverty through culture has been equated with blaming the poor for their predicaments. Lamont and Small (2008) and Harding, Lamont and Small (2010) have tried to move the debate forward by making a case for integrating culture in explanations of poverty. They have suggested that this requires going beyond the “culture of poverty” debate to incorporate concepts that cultural sociologists have developed and used over the last thirty years to understand the role of meaning making in basic social processes: concepts such as frames, narratives, institutions, repertoires, and boundaries.1 These concepts are analytical devices typically used to capture intersubjective definitions of reality, as opposed to normative positions. They have been useful for identifying a diversity of frameworks through which low-income populations understand their reality and develop paths for mobility. The present paper builds on these contributions by exploring the place of culture in studies of American low-income populations in three important areas of social life: family, neighborhood, and work. The three core sections of this paper describe scholarship that has incorporated culture concepts from cultural sociology, as well as other approaches to culture, to illuminate crucial aspects of social processes related to poverty considered as an explanans or an explanandum. Each section concludes with a few proposals for future research.

In the past two decades, changes in American housing policy have transformed the landscape of high-rise ghetto poverty. In its place, has emerged what I call the horizontal ghetto, where high-rise public housing has been demolished and poverty is turned on its side, spreading across the cityscape. Researchers are now beginning to document the reconcentration of voucher holders in moderately poor neighborhoods. This dissertation examines how residents come to live in this type of neighborhood, and how this new context shapes social organization for those who reside within it. I examine a case study neighborhood in Northwest Baltimore called Park Heights, in which I conducted 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork and 102 in-depth interviews. This neighborhood has a large population of working class black families who settled there in the late 1960's, a recent influx of voucher holders, and also a population of residentially unstable unassisted renters. I examine two complementary explanations for how and why voucher holders end up in neighborhoods like Park Heights. I propose that the landlord is an important piece of the puzzle; landlord practices sort the most disadvantaged voucher holders into some of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods, serving as a mechanism in the reproduction of spatial inequality and the concentration of poverty. I also consider how residents' experiences in contexts like Park Heights shape their decisions to remain in, and move to similar neighborhoods. Finally, I examine how the neighborhood context shapes social organization, and I argue that although poverty may be more moderate than in neighborhoods dominated by large-scale public housing, the horizontal context of instability and clustered voucher use may have deleterious consequences for social relations.