Alice Goffman was born on 1982 and is an American sociologist, urban ethnographer, and author mostly known for the fierce controversy that resulted from the publication of her 2014 book On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City.
13 Facts About Alice Goffman
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Alice Goffman earned a BA at the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD at Princeton University, both in sociology.
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Alice Goffman has served as a reviewer and board member for several different sociological publications.
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In 2014, Alice 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.
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Since the publication of On the Run, Alice Goffman has delivered talks at dozens of colleges, universities, and conferences.
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Alice Goffman continued working on this project as a graduate student at Princeton, eventually turning it into her doctoral thesis and book.
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The book continued to gain popularity after Alice Goffman's TED Talk, which has over 2 million views and has been widely circulated online.
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Legal ethicist Steven Lubet, reviewing On the Run in The New Rambler, claimed that Alice Goffman had admitted to committing conspiracy to commit murder and "involved her[self] as an accomplice in the evident commission of a major felony" in a passage describing the aftermath of the murder of one of her sources.
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Alice Goffman concluded that "her book is, at the very least, mostly true", though he was unable to obtain precise details of the hospital arrest incident or the arrest of the juvenile "Tim".
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An anonymous 57-page critique of On the Run circulated on academic LISTSERVs claiming that Alice Goffman had fabricated many of the incidents she described.
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Alice Goffman's publishers told The New York Times that they stood behind Alice Goffman and her book.
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Alice Goffman is the daughter of sociologist Erving Alice Goffman and sociolinguist Gillian Sankoff, both Canadian immigrants to the United States.
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Alice Goffman's father died in 1982, soon after her birth.