[3] Her doctoral dissertation committee was chaired by Mitchell Duneier and included Paul DiMaggio, Devah Pager, Cornel West, and Viviana Zelizer.
[1] While earning her PhD at Princeton, Goffman co-taught undergraduate courses with Mitch Duneier as a Lloyd Cotsen Graduate Teaching Fellow.
[11][12] 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.
[14] In April 2017, after she was offered a position as a visiting professor at Pomona College, an anonymously authored open letter[15] was written calling for Goffman's appointment to be rescinded due to allegations of racism in her work and research methods.
[20] 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.
Despite the social misery and fragmented relations, she gives us a subtle analysis and poignant portrait of our fellow citizens who struggle to preserve their sanity and dignity.
[30] In addition, some reviewers have accused Goffman, as a white upper-class woman, of writing "jungle book" tropes about poor, young African-American men.
After Goffman responded,[32] Lubet said that she "essentially admits that she embellished and exaggerated her account of a crucial episode, which should leave even the most sympathetic readers doubting her word.
[35][36] Lubet also questioned Goffman's claim, which he called "outlandish", that she had personally witnessed police officers making arrests after running the names of visitors to hospitals.
When I spoke with civil-rights attorneys and public defenders in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., and with a police official in New Haven, Connecticut, I couldn’t find a single person who knew of a case like Alex and Donna’s.
[39] Singal wrote that "Lubet's skepticism seems well-founded" and concluded that "the most likely explanation for these discrepancies is that [Goffman] simply didn't heed her own advice about credulously echoing sources' stories; it might be that important details about how these events unfolded got lost along the way.
Campos asked whether "a friend of Chuck's [was] actually murdered before Goffman's eyes, forcing her to run away, with blood spattering her shoes and pants?
Journalist Gideon Lewis-Kraus published a longform defense of Goffman's book in The New York Times Magazine, in which he argued that most sociologists consider the alleged errors in On the Run the inevitable result of her university's Institutional Review Board requirement that informants be anonymized and field notes be destroyed.
[26] He writes that she "persuasively explains many of the lingering issues" but that "the hardest elements of her story to confirm are the ones that feel like cinematic exaggerations, especially with respect to police practices; several officers challenged as outlandish her claim that she was personally interrogated with guns on the table.
[44] In The Chronicle of Higher Education, sociologist Jack Katz also addressed the ethical dilemmas that accompany Goffman's brand of ethnography: "Most of the time, people doing research on drugs and crime and the police don't report the incidents that potentially compromise them.