Essay on Gang Leader for a Day - 606 Words.
Innovate Your Life In the book, Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociology student from the University of Chicago starts out simply trying to understand “how it feels to be poor and black,” and ends up spending years and years figuring out the ins and outs of a gang society (Venkatesh 14).
Gang Leader for a Day throws into sharp relief the thorny issues of conducting ethical research. For instance, Venkatesh struggles with maintaining allegiances with powerful community members, while trying to forge close ties with less powerful residents. Venkatesh gives refreshingly honest, clear examples of his missteps.
Essay about Gang Leader for a Day 1786 Words 8 Pages In the book, Gang Leader for a Day, a rogue sociologist passionately dives into the lives of one of Chicago’s toughest housing projects in an attempt to develop an insight as to how the urban impoverished lived. Throughout the text it becomes clear that a conflict paradigm is being reflected.
Gang Leader for a Day is the fascinating full story of how Sudhir Venkatesh managed to gain entrance into the gang, what he learned, and how his method revolutionized the academic establishment.
J.T.'s help involves encouraging his foot soldiers to become fully fledged gang members, commit crimes on a daily basis and put themselves in harms way every day because of the gun violence that goes hand in hand with gang membership. However, unlike the majority of gang leaders, he does care about those who work for him.
Gang Leader for a Day Essay INTRODUCTION: While reading this book the first thing that came to my mind is how brave Sudhir Venkatesh is to even have enough nerve to walk into the projects in Chicago (Robert Taylor) to ask questions about being black and poor. I could only think of how there was no way I would have been able to do that.
He consistently puts the lives of the gang members in danger through his telltale description of his research findings in regards to the gang and its’ members. Venkatesh’s claim to become a gang leader for a day, hence the title of the book, is metaphorical at best.
The author of “Gang Leader for a Day”, Sudhir Vankatesh, delivers an intimate look into a world most people would prefer to ignore. In the book, the graduate student formed a friendship with a local gang leader and was able to get the inside information of the gang’s role in the Chicago housing projects.
Venkatesh’s “Gang Leader for a Day”, however, is a useful study for students to add to their academic arsenal for two main reasons: 1.
Gang Leader for a Day Essay Sample. This book is about a Sociologist named Sudhir Venkatesh who is a graduate student at the University of Chicago and was interested in the poor black neighborhoods that surrounded the university and he wanted to study them.
The book Gang Leader for a Day shows the sociological perspective by bringing Robert Merton’s structural strain theory to life. Robert Merton created the structural strain theory in 1938. This theory states that deviance occurs when a society does not give all of its member’s equal ability to achieve socially acceptable goals (Conley 192).
Gang leader for a day In reading Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets, I was worried that at some point Venkatesh would lose sight of his research project and end up taking part in criminal activities in the projects. What is more troubling is the evolution of naivety to shrewd manipulation.
Gang Leader For a Day While reading Sudhir Venkatesh’s book Gang Leader for a Day, use your sociological imagination to identify relevant social problems, concepts, and theories discussed in this course. When you have finished reading the text, you will be required to write a two to three-page paper using the guidelines below.
