preview

A Graduate Student At The University Of Chicago

Good Essays

You’re a graduate student at the University of Chicago and you’re pursuing your degree in sociology. You’ve been going to seminars and they do not seem to be doing anything for you. You want to get to the root of problems. You go searching for answers and you find them in the office of a professor. Still there seems to be something missing and you go looking for it. This is what Sudhir Venkatesh goes through. As a rogue sociologist, Venkatesh struggled with changing a research project, getting information from a gang, and the ethical issues that came with the research that he was conducting with African Americans that were part of said gang. By using the ethnography method, conducting interviews, and getting to know the people that were part of the gang, Venkatesh was able to have an advantage over other researchers that just did questionnaires to get answers. Sudhir Venkatesh, was a sociology graduate student at the University of Chicago. As part of his heavy course work, he had to attend seminars “where professors parsed the classic sociological questions: How do an individual’s preferences develop? Can we predict human behavior? What are the long-term consequences, for instance, of education on future generations?” (Venkatesh 3). Venkatesh did not like the questions that these researchers were asking. He thought that they were “cold and distant, abstract and lifeless” (Venkatesh 3). He was particularly curious as to why these researchers did not seem to be interested in

Get Access