Venkatesh to Speak on Urban Ghetto

March 17, 2008 == MEDIA ADVISORY

Summary: Calvin College will host Columbia professor Sudhir Venkatesh on April 10 for a talk on the urban ghetto.

Full story see http://www.calvin.edu/news/releases/2007-08/venkatesh.htm

Calvin College will be bringing a well-known sociologist to Grand Rapids in mid-April for its annual Bouma Lecture.

Sudhir Venkatesh will speak on April 10 at 3:30 pm in the Meeter Center Lecture Hall on "Law and Order in the Urban Ghetto."

Calvin sociology professor Mark Mulder says Venkatesh is a good fit for the annual Bouma Lecture, named for Donald Bouma who taught at Calvin from 1946 to 1960 and did groundbreaking work in civil rights and community organization.

"Dr. Bouma was always very passionate about issues of social justice," said Mulder, "as is our current department. Venkatesh conducts exhaustive ethnographic research that offers compelling insights on urban poverty in the U.S. Most significantly, his findings interrogate numerous assumptions and misconceptions about poverty. There are complex social organizations, networks and processes that exist in what Venkatesh calls the urban ghetto."

Venkatesh is a professor of sociology at Columbia University and the director of the Center for Urban Research.

In 2006 his qualitative work on a Chicago gang was featured in a chapter of Freakonomics entitled, "Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms?" Earlier this year Venkatesh published Gang Leader for a Day, a memoir of the near-decade that he conducted research in and near the Robert Taylor Homes housing project in Chicago.

Contact Mark Mulder at 616-526-6755 or mmulder@calvin.edu

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Received on Mon Mar 17 10:55:36 2008