Department of Sociology
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720
Telephone: (510) 643-8779
sanjan@berkeley.edu
Martín Sánchez-Jankowski who directs the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues and the Center for Urban Ethnography taught at Wellesley College and the University of New Mexico before coming to Berkeley in 1984. He received his BA from Western Michigan University, MA from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and his Ph.D. for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in political science and economics. His research has focused on inequality in advanced and developing societies with a particular interest in the sociology of poverty. His early research was on understanding the factors that have influenced the process by which young Mexican Americans are socialized into the social and political system of the United States. Some of the results of this research are reported in City Bound: Urban Life and Political Attitudes Among Chicano Youth (1986). His later research has been directed toward understanding the social arrangements and behavior of people living in poverty. The first study of this research project was focused on urban gangs and the results were published in Islands in the Street: Gangs and American Urban Society (1991). Subsequent studies have been directed at education, some of the results being reported in a book co-authored with five other Berkeley faculty entitled Inequality By Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth (1996); and neighborhoods with those results being published in Cracks in the Pavement: Social Change and Resilience in Poor Neighborhoods (2008).
He is in the process of finishing two books that report the findings from two studies analyzing poverty’s impact on academic achievement and school violence, and is currently engaged in comparative field research on poverty among indigenous groups within the US and Fiji.
