Director of Institute for the Study of Societal Issues; Chair of the Center for Ethnographic Research; Professor of Sociology
University of California, Berkeley
Martín Sánchez-Jankowski, who directs the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues and the Center for Urban Ethnography, taught at Wellesley College and the University of New Mexico before coming to Berkeley in 1984. He received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in political science. His research has focused on inequality in advanced and developing societies with a particular interest in the sociology of poverty. His early research was on understanding the factors that have influenced the process by which young Mexican Americans are socialized into the social and political system of the United States. Some of the results of this research are reported in City Bound: Urban Life and Political Attitudes Among Chicano Youth (1986). His later research has been directed toward understanding the social arrangements and behavior of people living in poverty. The first study of this research project was focused on urban gangs and the results were published in Islands in the Street: Gangs and American Urban Society (1991). Subsequent studies have been directed at education, some of the results being reported in a book co-authored with five other Berkeley faculty entitled Inequality By Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth (1996); and neighborhoods with those results being published in Cracks in the Pavement: Social Change and Resilience in Poor Neighborhoods (2008).