If Burawoy is concerned primarily with the back end of ethnographic methodology-how fieldworkers use data to make arguments and amend theory-I am concerned primarily with the front end: how fieldworkers construct their basic objects of analysis.
The present essay, by contrast, deals with a level of analysis a few strata below those taken up by Burawoy. By “orienting level of analysis,” Burawoy means an argument’s relation to the micro or macro by “object of analysis,” he means the stuff fieldworkers use to make arguments. Burawoy’s eye is trained on the relation between the ethnographic case and theory, historical processes, and macro-structural forces. 273, 280) comes close-even mentioning the “orienting level of analysis” adopted by various ethnographic approaches and comparing extended case method’s “object of analysis” with grounded theory’s-while stopping short of calling into question the fundamental constitution of ethnographic objects. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 and the 1988 banning of housing discrimination against families with children were major historical events designed to prevent housing injustice, but Desmond suggests that they have had little effect in reality.Burawoy ( 1991, pp. In America, the history of slavery, Jim Crow, other racist government policies, and informal (illegal or extralegal) racism have created extreme forms of segregation, discrimination, and housing injustice. He discusses the history of slums and tenement housing, which have existed for many centuries as a way for property owners to make money out of the most impoverished people in a given society.
Along with the recession, Desmond also references a range of historical events that together have created the disastrous housing situation that exists in America today. This meant that landlords and property owners could make enormous profits from buying cheap houses and renting them out at exorbitant rates, while tenants-many of whom lost jobs and found their welfare checks stagnant or declining-find themselves spending 80 or 90 percent of their income on rent. As Desmond explains, during the recession house prices plummeted while rental rates continued to climb. Although it is not always addressed in a direct and explicit way, the main historical event lingering in the background of Evicted is the 2008 recession, and particularly the role that the housing bubble, the subprime mortgage crisis, and the foreclosure crisis had on the rental market.
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