Triggering Inequality: How Gun Availability Shapes Life in Urban Poverty

Objective:
This study aims to document how increased gun availability shapes everyday life in poor, urban neighborhoods in ways that further exacerbate social inequality. Unlike previous studies, this study explores how guns affect aspects of social life that may not be directly associated with violence, such as employment, family dynamics, and education. In the ethnographic tradition, the researcher will study a primary sample of individuals who the researcher has observed and interviewed over time with the goal of participating in their lives as closely as possible. As of summer 2024, the researcher has spent approximately 1.5 years living in Chicago’s West Side, where guns and gun violence proliferate. There are three groups of people comprising the core sample: (1) street-affiliated teenagers and young men; (2) friends, partners, and family of group 1; and (3) frontline workers. This fieldwork centered on a network of connected people from each group, with the goal of “describing a system of relationships, to show how things hang together in a web of mutual influence or support or interdependence, to describe the connections between the specifics the ethnographer knows by virtue of having been there.

Funded By:
New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center (GVRC)

Project Status:
In progress - Pilot

Principal Investigator (PI):
Megan Kang, PhD Candidate 

Co-Investigator:
Faculty Sponsors: Matthew Desmond and Patrick Sharkey

Amount Awarded:
$5,000.00