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Fosse, Nathan

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    Religion, Romance, and Work: Sources of Resilience among Low-Income Men
    (2013-02-20) Fosse, Nathan; Lamont, Michele; Wilson, William Julius; Edin, Kathryn
    Despite a resurgence of qualitative research on the cultural aspects of poverty, very few studies have examined how low-income men find resilience in response to the risks of living in severe disadvantage. Moreover, virtually no research has compared how resilience strategies differ between low-income black and white men. These omissions are particularly surprising since low-income men disproportionately experience the life-altering risks of extreme disadvantage, such as criminal punishment, chronic unemployment, drug abuse, and poor physical health. To address these limitations, I draw on recent insights from developmental psychology and from cultural sociology to examine the sources of risk and resilience among black and white men living in severe poverty. Drawing on several years of ethnographic fieldwork, statistical analysis of qualitative data, and on over ninety in-depth interviews with low-income men in Greater Boston, I find striking racial differences in the sources of risk: while white men are more likely to report having a mental health diagnosis and an addiction to opiates, black men are more likely to report living in extremely poor, racially-segregated neighborhoods. Although exposed to different risk factors, I find surprising similarities across racial groups in the sources of resilience: both black and white men respond to the life-changing stressors of extreme poverty by constructing narratives around religious redemption, enduring romantic relationships, and work-related aspirations. Notwithstanding these similarities, I find that white men report greater disaffiliation from organized religion and black men a narrower range of entrepreneurial and athletic vocations. I show that these racial differences in resilience are due to the steep decline in religious affiliation with the Catholic Church among the white poor and enduring economic segregation of the black poor, respectively. In summary, black and white men cope with the risks of living in severe poverty in broadly similar ways: by appeals to religion, long-term romantic relationships, and work; that is, the very ideologically-dominant American institutions from which they are often claimed to be disconnected culturally.
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    Beyond the Culture of Poverty: Meaning-Making among Low-Income Population around Family, Neighborhood, and Work
    (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013-12-19) Bell, Monica; Fosse, Nathan; Lamont, Michele; 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.