Waverly Duck

A Bit about Me

Waverly Duck is an urban ethnographer and the North Hall Chair Endowed Professor of Sociology. He is the author of No Way Out: Precarious Living in the Shadow of Poverty and Drug Dealing (University of Chicago Press, 2015), a finalist for the Society for the Study of Social Problems 2016 C. Wright Mills Book Award. His second book on unconscious racism, Tacit Racism, co-authored with Anne Rawls (also with the University of Chicago Press), was the 2021 winner of the Charles Horton Cooley Book Award from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction and the 2022 Book Award winner for the North Central Sociological Association. He also co-authored and curated a new book with Anne Rawls and Kevin Whitehead, titled Black Lives Matter: Ethnomethodological and Conversation Analytic Studies of Race and Systemic Racism in Everyday Interaction (Taylor and Francis, 2020). Like his earlier work, his current research investigates the challenges faced by socially marginal groups. However, his work is more directly concerned with the interaction order of marginalized communities and how participants identify problems and what they think are viable solutions.