This page is no longer being updated and remains online for informational and historical purposes only. The information is accurate as of the last page update.
For questions about page contents, contact the Communications Division.
New York University sociologist and award-winning author Eric Klinenberg will speak on “Not There News: Chains, Conglomerates, and the Assault on Local Media” 4:30 p.m. today in the Kirby Hall of Civil Rights auditorium.
Sponsored by the Emile Durkheim Society, The Lafayette, and the anthropology and sociology department, Klinenberg’s presentation will address how news is produced. For further information, contact William Bissell or David Shulman, assistant professors of anthropology and sociology.
An assistant professor at NYU, Klinenberg is the author of Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2002), which received the Robert Park Book Award from the American Sociological Association, Mirra Komarovsky Book Award from the Eastern Sociological Society, Biannual Book Award from the Urban Affairs Association, and Sociology of Health and Illness Book Award from the British Sociological Association. It also was a “Favorite Book” selection of the Chicago Tribune.
While teaching at Northwestern and working on Heat Wave, Klinenberg began examining how city news reporters and major media organizations operate. He became embedded inside different newsrooms and learned firsthand how reporters and editors perform their craft in the context of new technologies, emerging market pressures, and a dynamic field of cultural production. He is expanding the project to include New York City media outlets, and collaborating with Richard Sennett to write a book on interpretive sociology.
“I am an urban sociologist, committed to the gritty work of ethnography but motivated by theoretical questions, interpretive challenges, and a passion for public and politically engaged social science,” he says.
Klinenberg is co-editor of The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness (Duke University Press, 2001), based on a three-day conference he helped organize at University of California, Berkeley in April 1997. It is believed to be the first conference to assess the contributions and limitations of research on whiteness. The event drew over 1,000 people and was extensively covered in the media. He also is co-editor of The New Urban Marginality in the Dual Metropolis: Poor Urban Youths in France and the United States.
Klinenberg’s first forays into sociological theory took place in Paris, where he worked in the center for cultural sociology directed by Pierre Bourdieu. He also spent five years doing fieldwork, interviews, and archival research to explain why more than 700 people died during a short heat wave in Chicago, and to understand why these deaths were so easy to ignore, deny, and forget.
In fall 2003, Klinenberg began directing a multidisciplinary graduate workshop in Urban Studies through NYU’s sociology Department.
A member of Phi Beta Kappa, he is a recipient of the American Sociological Association’s 1999 Shils-Coleman Prize for Sociological Theory and its 1998 award for Best Graduate Student Paper, Urban and Community Studies Section. He also won the 1998 Best Graduate Student Paper in Social Problems Theory from the Society for the Study of Social Problems.
Klinenberg earned a Ph.D. and M.A. in sociology from University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. with majors in history and philosophy from Brown University, where he graduated magna cum laude.