Book Talk | Sharon Cornelissen | The Last House on the Block: Black Homeowners, White Homesteaders, and Failed Gentrification in Detroit

Join the Institute for Public Knowledge on Monday, February 2 (5:30-7:00 PM) for an event with Sharon Cornelissen. She will discuss her book, The Last House on the Block: Black Homeowners, White Homesteaders, and Failed Gentrification in Detroit, with Tom Sugrue and Iddo Tavory.

Sharon Cornelissen is a sociologist and national housing expert. As director of housing at the Consumer Federation of America, she leads research and advocacy to help end our housing crisis. She received her doctorate in sociology from Princeton University and previously worked at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. Originally from the Netherlands, she now lives in Washington DC.

Thomas J. Sugrue is Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History and the founding Director of Cities Collaborative at New York University.  He is author of four books, including Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North, and editor of five others. He has contributed to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the London Review of Books, The Nation, and Salon. He is a frequent commentator on modern American history, politics, civil rights, and urban policy. Sugrue has given over 450 public lectures throughout the United States and in Argentina, Canada, England, France, Germany, and Japan.

Iddo Tavory is Professor of sociology at NYU. He is broadly interested in the interactional and experiential patterns through which people come to construct and understand their lives across situations. His books Abductive Analysis and Data Analysis in Qualitative Research (both with Stefan Timmermans) provide a pragmatist account that allows researchers to make the most of the surprises that emerge in the process of research. His book, Summoned, is an ethnography of a Jewish neighborhood in Los Angeles as well as a treatise on the co-constitution of interaction, identity and social worlds. His book (with Sonia Prelat and Shelly Ronen) Tangled Goods explores the relationship among goods in pro bono advertising, and theorizes the coordination of different forms of worth in action. Iddo is currently writing a theoretical manuscript on culture and interactionism as well as writing a book based on an ethnography of an advertising agency in New York. Among other awards, Iddo has received the Lewis A. Coser Award for theoretical agenda setting in sociology.