Forrest Stuart

Forrest Stuart is a Professor of Sociology and Director of the Stanford Ethnography Lab, as well as a MacArthur Fellow who earned his PhD from UCLA in 2012. As an urban ethnographer, his research investigates the causes and consequences of contemporary urban poverty, focusing on how large-scale forces—including mass incarceration, the shift to the "new economy," and rising exposure to violence-related trauma—influence disadvantaged communities and reproduce social, economic, and racial inequality. His award-winning scholarship includes, "Down, Out, and Under Arrest," an ethnography of Los Angeles' Skid Row examining how zero tolerance policing reconstitutes poverty, crime, and space, and "Ballad of the Bullet," based on five years of fieldwork on Chicago's South Side, which explores how gang-affiliated youth use social media to commodify representations of poverty and violence, introducing the concept of "digital disadvantage" to capture the unique consequences of digital cultural production for marginalized communities.