The Chicago School and the roots of urban ethnography: An intergenerational conversation with Gerald D. Jaynes, David E. Apter, Herbert J. Gans, William Kornblum, Ruth Horowitz, James F. Short, Jr, Gerald D. Suttles and Robert E. Washington

As an economist who teaches African American Studies, I became aware of the rich legacy of the Chicago tradition when I began reading the works of St Clair Drake & Horace R. Cayton, E. Franklin Frazier, Charles Spurgeon Johnson &, for that matter, the novelist Richard Wright. This generation of African American scholars was -- with the stellar exception of W.E.B. Du Bois -- the first to place black people in rural & urban communities at the center of sociological inquiry & to employ theoretical frameworks that enabled them to analyze the dynamics within black communities in sociological terms, as well as to shed light on what was then called 'race relations'. The dialogue they began continues today, as African Americans & members of other formerly marginalized racial-ethnic groups have entered the academy as researchers & teachers as well as subjects of inquiry. Today, both scholars of color & social scientists who do not come from these groups have taken the social interactions of ordinary people as their subject. The Chicago School traced the path that others follow in conducting ethnographies that address the issues people find most pressing in their lives & connecting their predicaments to larger matters of social structure. The conversation that follows brings together scholars who have continued to work in the spirit of the Chicago School in their relentless melding of theory & empiricism, often through ethnography. Each of them explains what the Chicago School has meant to them in terms of their personal history & their relationships with its leading figures & intellectual traditions. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]