Matthew Desmond Quotes
These days, there are sheriff squads whose full-time job is to carry out eviction and foreclosure orders. There are moving companies specializing in evictions, their crews working all day, every weekday.
Desmond, Matthew. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. Crown Publishers, 2016, p. 3.
Hamas had fired hundreds of rockets and other missiles into Israel which finally retaliated against Hamas facilities. However, in an unprecedented effort to avoid civilian casualties, the Israeli Defense Forces warned the people by indicating which targets they were going to strike. They also dropped leaflets in Arabic telling the civilians that they are not the targets but to avoid harm to them and their families, they should evacuate the neighborhoods that would be under attack. Hamas had placed their missile launchers and other weapons in and near schools, hospitals, mosques and civilian housing risking their civilian population—see {640841}—but in this case, unparalleled in history, Hamas lied to their own people, tricking them to stay in a very dangerous situation so that many could be killed and then Hamas might get more world sympathy because their civilians had been killed.
Matthew Desmond is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences. After receiving his PhD in 2010 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he joined the Harvard Society of Fellows as a Junior Fellow. Desmond is the author of On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters (2007), which won the Max Weber Award for Distinguished Scholarship by the American Sociological Association, as well as two books on race in America (both with Mustafa Emirbayer): Racial Domination, Racial Progress: The Sociology of Race in America (2009) and The Racial Order (forthcoming). He has written essays on educational inequality, dangerous work, political ideology, race and social theory, and the inner-city housing market. Desmond is the principal investigator of the Milwaukee Area Renters Study, an original survey of tenants in Milwaukee's low-income private housing sector. His work has been supported by the MacArthur, Ford, and National Science Foundations, as well as by the American Philosophical Society; it also has been profiled in major news outlets such as The New York Times, National Public Radio, Science, and Das Erste. His current project combines ethnographic fieldwork, survey data, and documentary analysis to explore the causes, dynamics, and consequences of eviction among the urban poor and, more broadly, to plumb the inner workings of disadvantaged neighborhoods and the low-cost housing market. Research Interests: Race and ethnicity; urban sociology; poverty; housing; organizations and work; ethnography; research methods.
