Fieldwork in New York

Each week, students are expected to complete fifteen hours of fieldwork. Students may also suggest independent research projects related to communities or research materials located in the city. Students may wish to put forward research interests that might develop into a senior thesis, or other advanced independent studies that must be undertaken within the city.

As a young man, I did volunteer work in an old age home, a mental hospital, a court-mandated home for delinquent boys, urban soup kitchens, and in Sunflower County, Mississippi, with civil rights pioneers. I taught in an urban high school for two years. All of this work prepared me well for professional fieldwork as an anthropologist/sociologist. I've studied political radicals, office workers in a gigantic bank, worker/owners of cooperatives across the country, executives in major industrial corporations,Wall Street investment bankers, advertising and public relations practitioners, journalists, New York Police Department detectives, state and federal prosecutors, attorneys engaged in civil practice, Congressional staff, and counter-terrorism experts in this country and abroad.

Fieldwork teaches students how to observe and listen, how to enter into others' experiences, and how to understand those experiences from the inside out. Fieldwork thrusts students into the dense, intricate, and overlapping social worlds that characterize modern society. It teaches, and demands, critical, reflective, open habits of mind. And it fosters an understanding of the multiple dimensions and ambiguities of social structures and human experiences.

—Professor Robert Jackall (Founding Director)