Alice Goffman

Alice Goffman (born in 1982) is an American sociologist, urban ethnographer, and author. She was an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin and Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Pomona College. Goffman wrote On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City about over-policing, poverty, and incarceration experienced by young black men and their families in Philadelphia, a best-selling book for which she received widespread praise before it was widely criticized. 

She was denied tenure at Wisconsin in 2019. Goffman attended the Baldwin School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. She earned a BA at the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. at Princeton University, both in sociology. Her doctoral dissertation committee was chaired by Mitchell Duneier and included Paul DiMaggio, Devah Pager, Cornel West, and Viviana Zelizer. While earning her Ph.D. at Princeton, Goffman co-taught undergraduate courses with Mitch Duneier as a Lloyd Cotsen Graduate Teaching Fellow.

In 2010, she was awarded a two-year fellowship at the University of Michigan as a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar. Beginning in the fall of 2012, Goffman taught both undergraduate and graduate-level courses as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At Madison, she established the Wisconsin Collective for Ethnographic Research with a colleague and served on several committees. She has served as a reviewer and board member for several different sociological publications.

In 2014, Goffman published On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, an ethnographic account of her fieldwork on the impact of policing on the lives of young black men in Northeast Philadelphia. Since the publication of On the Run, Goffman has delivered talks at dozens of colleges, universities, and conferences. In March 2015, she gave a TED Talk titled "How we’re priming some kids for college – and others for prison."

In 2015, she was accepted to the one-year fellowship program at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. In April 2017, upon being offered a position as a Visiting Professor at Pomona College, an open letter was written by unnamed activists calling for her offer to be rescinded due to claims of racism in her work and research methods. In 2019, she was denied tenure at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City began as a research project. Goffman started as a second-year student at the University of Pennsylvania when she immersed herself in a disadvantaged neighborhood of Philadelphia with African-American young men who were subject to a high level of surveillance and police activity. Goffman continued working on this project as a graduate student at Princeton, eventually turning it into her doctoral thesis and book. 

Issued in paperback in April 2015, the book uses the experience of Goffman's subjects to illustrate how young black men are treated and mistreated by police within the framework of the American criminal justice system and how this reshapes the lives of families in America's poor, black neighborhoods. In the book’s introduction, Goffman highlights her central argument: "The sheer scope of policing and imprisonment in poor Black neighborhoods is transforming community life in ways that are deep and enduring, not only for the young men who are their targets but for their family members, partners, and neighbors."