Dear RSF:
Please join us next Wednesday, February 5th at 11 in the library and on Zoom for Visiting Scholar Waverly Duck’s presentation, “Troubled Interactions: The High Cost of Exclusion, Bigotry and Marginality in Everyday Life.” Click here for a brief description of the talk and three background articles (one, two and three) for your review that form the building blocks for his new book.
Duck is North Hall Chair Endowed Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the Center on Black Studies Research at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He holds a PhD and BA in Sociology and an M.Sc. in Community Health Services from Wayne State University.
Duck is an urban ethnographer and the author of No Way Out: Precarious Living in the Shadow of Poverty and Drug Dealing (University of Chicago Press, 2015), a finalist for the Society for the Study of Social Problems 2016 C. Wright Mills Book Award. His second book on unconscious racism, Tacit Racism, co-authored with Anne Rawls (also with the University of Chicago Press), was the 2021 winner of the Charles Horton Cooley Book Award from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction and the 2022 Book Award winner for the North Central Sociological Association. He also co-authored and curated a book with Anne Rawls and Kevin Whitehead, titled Black Lives Matter: Ethnomethodological and Conversation Analytic Studies of Race and Systemic Racism in Everyday Interaction (Taylor and Francis, 2020). His current research investigates the challenges faced by socially marginal groups. HIs work is directly concerned with the interaction order of marginalized communities and how participants identify problems and what they think are viable solutions.
At RSF, Duck’s book explores the idea that exclusion and inequality hinder cooperation in society, affecting relationships, organizations, institutions, and societal structures. By examining the experiences of historically marginalized individuals, particularly racial, gender, and LGBTQ+ minorities, Duck is working to shed light on the hidden social order that remains unseen by those who are not marginalized.