Alice Goffman

Alice Goffman began ethnographic fieldwork in a predominantly black Philadelphia neighborhood as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania in 2003, continuing the study as a graduate student at Princeton University. When On the Run, chronicling six years embedded in the community, was published, the book received many positive notices—one reviewer called it an “ethnographic classic”—while some sociologists criticized her for having become too much of a participant to have made proper scientific observations and for having destroyed records to protect the anonymity of her sources.