Vesla M Weaver
Vesla Mae Weaver (Phd, Harvard, Government and Social Policy) is the Bloomberg Distinguished Associate Professor of Political Science and Sociology at Johns Hopkins University and a 2016-17 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. She has contributed to scholarly debates around the persistence of racial inequality, colorism in the United States, the causes and consequences of the dramatic rise in prisons and surveillance. Despite being advised that punishment was not a core concern of political science during her early years as a graduate student, Weaver argued that punishment and surveillance was central to American citizenship in the modern era, played a major role in the post-war expansion of state institutions, was a key aspect of how mostly disadvantaged citizens interact with government, and was a political “frontlash” to make an end-run around civil rights advances. Authoring the first article in nearly two decades on the topic of punishment to be published in her discipline’s top journal, she shortly thereafter published an award-winning book with Amy Lerman, Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime Control, the first large-scale empirical study of what the tectonic shifts in incarceration and policing meant for political and civic life in communities where it was concentrated. Weaver is also the co-author of Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America (with J. Hochschild and T. Burch). Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Russell Sage Foundation, National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Brookings Institution. She has served on the Harvard/NIJ Executive Session on Community Corrections, the APSA Presidential Taskforce on Racial Inequality in the Americas, and the Center for Community Change’s Good Jobs for All initiative and has written in the New York Times, Boston Review, Marshall Project, Vox and Slate. She is at work on a new project that will map patterns of citizenship and governance across cities and neighborhoods called the Faces of American Democracy using an innovative technology that creates digital ‘wormholes’ called Portals.
Phone: 617-504-0354
Address: 338 Mergenthaler Hall, 3400 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21218
Phone: 617-504-0354
Address: 338 Mergenthaler Hall, 3400 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21218
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Books by Vesla M Weaver
Is there a distinct type of governance being practiced in communities within our democracy? How is the government oriented toward people in poor communities? How is the power of state agents like the police, social workers, welfare caseworkers, and other front-line administrators of “non-voluntary clients” interpreted, resisted, or deployed by the citizenry?
I propose to launch a multi-method examination of the relationship between poor citizens and communities and government in the United States, The Faces of American Democracy. The study of inequality has received renewed attention amidst alarming findings that we are now more unequal than any other time in recent memory. But the citizenship in poor communities is greater than the sum of exclusions, material insecurity, or private discrimination within the market. Instead, it is a broad difference in the way the government – from police to schools to the welfare system – orients itself towards its residents. Inequality in the United States inheres, not just in what the advantaged have and what subordinated communities lack – not just in gini coefficients and income ratios – but also in the distinctive modes of governance that are pervasive in their neighborhoods, yet largely unknown outside their boundaries. Scholarly neglect of these dynamics has left us without critical theory and conceptual vocabulary to understand the dynamics in Ferguson and beyond, but also lacking the data required to even begin to answer these crucial questions.
Faces of American Democracy will be the first systematic study of how Americans in different communities experience government activity across a multiplicity of sites: schools, social welfare agencies, police and probation agencies, civil ordinances, the housing authority, and child protective services. Faces of American Democracy will involve three kinds of original research: 1) the collection of administrative data on local enforcement practices, financial encumbrances, and institutional practices in three major cities (Baltimore, New York, St. Louis); 2) individual-level data on attitudes and experiences with local agencies in a large and nationally-representative survey sample; and 3) recording of extensive focus groups, or Portals, in two distinct neighborhoods in the same three sites. It will be descriptive as well as analytic. The best major longitudinal studies of urban life – Fragile Families and Wellbeing Study and the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods – focus almost entirely on individual behaviors and choices (how they rear children, how they engaged the labor market, substance abuse and offending patterns, decisions to leave school, etc.). They fail to examine citizen/state contacts as well as dispositions resulting from those socializing experiences. The Faces survey will examine trust in authority, legitimacy, reliance on non-state institutions, political ideas and ideologies, and modes of political behavior. It will attempt to discern and map patterns of citizenship and standing across neighborhoods and cities. The main hypothesis is that varying exposure to institutions that exhibit common institutional characteristics– exit is difficult, requirements extensive, accountability weak, hierarchy of agent to client is pronounced, relations with clients are stigmatizing and coercive –results in a certain set of dispositions to the political system.
The product of this study will be a major book, academic articles, as well as public thought pieces that will deepen our understanding of how American democracy is experienced on the ground. Such a study comes at a pivotal moment. Our generation has witnessed three perilous developments that weigh heavily on our national future: the unbridled rise in the share of the citizenry having adversarial encounters within but also beyond the police and prison, the pitched rise in income inequality, and the growing reality that how one fares depends largely on what neighborhood one calls home.
A provocative assessment of the contemporary carceral state for American democracy, Arresting Citizenship argues that the broad reach of the criminal justice system has fundamentally recast the relation between citizen and state, resulting in a sizable—and growing—group of second-class citizens. From police stops to court cases and incarceration, at each stage of the criminal justice system individuals belonging to this disempowered group come to experience a state-within-a-state that reflects few of the country’s core democratic values. Through scores of interviews, along with analyses of survey data, Amy E. Lerman and Vesla M. Weaver show how this contact with police, courts, and prisons decreases faith in the capacity of American political institutions to respond to citizens’ concerns and diminishes the sense of full and equal citizenship—even for those who have not been found guilty of any crime. The effects of this increasingly frequent contact with the criminal justice system are wide-ranging—and pernicious—and Lerman and Weaver go on to offer concrete proposals for reforms to reincorporate this large group of citizens as active participants in American civic and political life.
The authors examine the components that make up a racial order and focus on the specific mechanisms influencing shifting demographics in the United States: immigration, multiracialism, genomic science, and generational change. Cumulatively, these mechanisms increase heterogeneity within each racial or ethnic group, and decrease the distance separating groups from each other. The authors show that individuals are moving across group boundaries and that genomic science is challenging the whole concept of race. Economic variation within groups is increasing and the traditional hierarchy of whites on the top and blacks at the bottom is breaking down. Above all, young adults understand and practice race differently from their elders: their formative memories are 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and Obama’s election—not civil rights marches, riots, or the early stages of immigration.
Portraying a vision, not of a postracial America, but of a different racial America, Creating a New Racial Order examines how the structures of race and ethnicity are altering a nation.
Articles by Vesla M Weaver
about policing between individuals in communities where this form of state
action is concentrated. Based on more than 800 recorded and transcribed
conversations across 12 neighborhoods in five cities, the largest collection of
policing narratives to date, we analyze patterns in discourse around policing.
Our goal in closely analyzing these conversations is to uncover how people
who experience state authority in our time through policing characterize
democratic governance by mapping citizens’ experiences with and views
of the state, how they judge the responsiveness of authorities, and their
experience-informed critiques of democracy. Methodologically, we argue
that observing through Portals real conversations of ordinary people largely
unmediated by the researcher allows us to transcend certain limitations
of traditional, survey-based techniques and to study politics in beneficially
recursive ways. Theoretically, we demonstrate that Portals participants
characterize police as contradictory—everywhere when surveilling people’s
everyday activity and nowhere if called upon to respond to serious harm. We
call this Janus-faced interaction with the state “distorted responsiveness,”
and we demonstrate the organic connection of this characterization of
police to our participants’ theorization of their broader relationship with the state. We argue that their understandings of their own relationships
with the key state institutions in their lives are foundational to developing
a fuller understanding of democracy in action. In short, by focusing on how
individuals experience citizenship in the city through ordinary experiences
with municipal bureaucrats who figure prominently in their lives, we can
develop a theory of the state from below.
ABSTRACT: The significance of class is increasing in the United States, in the sense that economic inequality is rising within the black and Latino populations as well as among whites. Growing inequality is associated with increasing disparities in lived experiences. Is class also increasingly significant in political life? Survey evidence shows that the answer is yes: compared with prior decades, well-‐off blacks and Latinos are less strongly liberal in some policy preferences and feel more politically efficacious, while poor blacks and Latinos tend to move in the opposite direction. Well-‐off nonwhites have not, however, lost any commitment to racial justice, so the United States is not becoming 'post-‐racial'. Given the complex patterns of change and persistence in opinions, Wilson's arguments about when and how race is significant remain as important and controversial as when first expressed.
Is there a distinct type of governance being practiced in communities within our democracy? How is the government oriented toward people in poor communities? How is the power of state agents like the police, social workers, welfare caseworkers, and other front-line administrators of “non-voluntary clients” interpreted, resisted, or deployed by the citizenry?
I propose to launch a multi-method examination of the relationship between poor citizens and communities and government in the United States, The Faces of American Democracy. The study of inequality has received renewed attention amidst alarming findings that we are now more unequal than any other time in recent memory. But the citizenship in poor communities is greater than the sum of exclusions, material insecurity, or private discrimination within the market. Instead, it is a broad difference in the way the government – from police to schools to the welfare system – orients itself towards its residents. Inequality in the United States inheres, not just in what the advantaged have and what subordinated communities lack – not just in gini coefficients and income ratios – but also in the distinctive modes of governance that are pervasive in their neighborhoods, yet largely unknown outside their boundaries. Scholarly neglect of these dynamics has left us without critical theory and conceptual vocabulary to understand the dynamics in Ferguson and beyond, but also lacking the data required to even begin to answer these crucial questions.
Faces of American Democracy will be the first systematic study of how Americans in different communities experience government activity across a multiplicity of sites: schools, social welfare agencies, police and probation agencies, civil ordinances, the housing authority, and child protective services. Faces of American Democracy will involve three kinds of original research: 1) the collection of administrative data on local enforcement practices, financial encumbrances, and institutional practices in three major cities (Baltimore, New York, St. Louis); 2) individual-level data on attitudes and experiences with local agencies in a large and nationally-representative survey sample; and 3) recording of extensive focus groups, or Portals, in two distinct neighborhoods in the same three sites. It will be descriptive as well as analytic. The best major longitudinal studies of urban life – Fragile Families and Wellbeing Study and the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods – focus almost entirely on individual behaviors and choices (how they rear children, how they engaged the labor market, substance abuse and offending patterns, decisions to leave school, etc.). They fail to examine citizen/state contacts as well as dispositions resulting from those socializing experiences. The Faces survey will examine trust in authority, legitimacy, reliance on non-state institutions, political ideas and ideologies, and modes of political behavior. It will attempt to discern and map patterns of citizenship and standing across neighborhoods and cities. The main hypothesis is that varying exposure to institutions that exhibit common institutional characteristics– exit is difficult, requirements extensive, accountability weak, hierarchy of agent to client is pronounced, relations with clients are stigmatizing and coercive –results in a certain set of dispositions to the political system.
The product of this study will be a major book, academic articles, as well as public thought pieces that will deepen our understanding of how American democracy is experienced on the ground. Such a study comes at a pivotal moment. Our generation has witnessed three perilous developments that weigh heavily on our national future: the unbridled rise in the share of the citizenry having adversarial encounters within but also beyond the police and prison, the pitched rise in income inequality, and the growing reality that how one fares depends largely on what neighborhood one calls home.
A provocative assessment of the contemporary carceral state for American democracy, Arresting Citizenship argues that the broad reach of the criminal justice system has fundamentally recast the relation between citizen and state, resulting in a sizable—and growing—group of second-class citizens. From police stops to court cases and incarceration, at each stage of the criminal justice system individuals belonging to this disempowered group come to experience a state-within-a-state that reflects few of the country’s core democratic values. Through scores of interviews, along with analyses of survey data, Amy E. Lerman and Vesla M. Weaver show how this contact with police, courts, and prisons decreases faith in the capacity of American political institutions to respond to citizens’ concerns and diminishes the sense of full and equal citizenship—even for those who have not been found guilty of any crime. The effects of this increasingly frequent contact with the criminal justice system are wide-ranging—and pernicious—and Lerman and Weaver go on to offer concrete proposals for reforms to reincorporate this large group of citizens as active participants in American civic and political life.
The authors examine the components that make up a racial order and focus on the specific mechanisms influencing shifting demographics in the United States: immigration, multiracialism, genomic science, and generational change. Cumulatively, these mechanisms increase heterogeneity within each racial or ethnic group, and decrease the distance separating groups from each other. The authors show that individuals are moving across group boundaries and that genomic science is challenging the whole concept of race. Economic variation within groups is increasing and the traditional hierarchy of whites on the top and blacks at the bottom is breaking down. Above all, young adults understand and practice race differently from their elders: their formative memories are 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and Obama’s election—not civil rights marches, riots, or the early stages of immigration.
Portraying a vision, not of a postracial America, but of a different racial America, Creating a New Racial Order examines how the structures of race and ethnicity are altering a nation.
about policing between individuals in communities where this form of state
action is concentrated. Based on more than 800 recorded and transcribed
conversations across 12 neighborhoods in five cities, the largest collection of
policing narratives to date, we analyze patterns in discourse around policing.
Our goal in closely analyzing these conversations is to uncover how people
who experience state authority in our time through policing characterize
democratic governance by mapping citizens’ experiences with and views
of the state, how they judge the responsiveness of authorities, and their
experience-informed critiques of democracy. Methodologically, we argue
that observing through Portals real conversations of ordinary people largely
unmediated by the researcher allows us to transcend certain limitations
of traditional, survey-based techniques and to study politics in beneficially
recursive ways. Theoretically, we demonstrate that Portals participants
characterize police as contradictory—everywhere when surveilling people’s
everyday activity and nowhere if called upon to respond to serious harm. We
call this Janus-faced interaction with the state “distorted responsiveness,”
and we demonstrate the organic connection of this characterization of
police to our participants’ theorization of their broader relationship with the state. We argue that their understandings of their own relationships
with the key state institutions in their lives are foundational to developing
a fuller understanding of democracy in action. In short, by focusing on how
individuals experience citizenship in the city through ordinary experiences
with municipal bureaucrats who figure prominently in their lives, we can
develop a theory of the state from below.
ABSTRACT: The significance of class is increasing in the United States, in the sense that economic inequality is rising within the black and Latino populations as well as among whites. Growing inequality is associated with increasing disparities in lived experiences. Is class also increasingly significant in political life? Survey evidence shows that the answer is yes: compared with prior decades, well-‐off blacks and Latinos are less strongly liberal in some policy preferences and feel more politically efficacious, while poor blacks and Latinos tend to move in the opposite direction. Well-‐off nonwhites have not, however, lost any commitment to racial justice, so the United States is not becoming 'post-‐racial'. Given the complex patterns of change and persistence in opinions, Wilson's arguments about when and how race is significant remain as important and controversial as when first expressed.
We first demonstrate the recent growth in class disparities within each of the four main conventional American racial or ethnic groups, and show how diverging class positions are associated with diverging lived experiences within each group. We then use the American National Election Studies (ANES) from the mid-1980s and 2012 to show how growing inequality is reflected in attitudes and preferences. Blacks and Latinos continue to express strong group loyalty, but well-off non-whites, like well-off whites, sometimes support government social welfare expenditures less than poorer members of their group do and less than their counterparts did several decades ago. Poor blacks and Latinos, in contrast, sometimes show increasing commitment to their class and decreasing commitment to their racial or ethnic group. Well-off blacks and Latinos feel more politically efficacious, and poorer non-whites feel less politically efficacious, than several decades ago.
We offer three categories of mechanisms to explain the link between rising inequality and rising class conflict within groups -- motivations that are the same across groups (self interest or ideological conservatism), motivations that differ across groups but yield similar political outcomes, and changes in context or group composition. We then turn to case studies, with the twin goals of deepening the explanations of changing attitudes, and exploring whether survey results are borne out by real political and policy disputes on the ground. We explore contextual changes that make current intra-group class conflict different from long-standing tensions between rich and poor, and develop a typology of types of local conflicts that mirrors the set of mechanisms to explain attitudinal change. With due respect for the fact that micro- and macro-level analyses necessarily and desirably differ, we aspire to link explanations of class conflict as revealed in surveys and as revealed in actual disputes. We anticipate costs as well as benefits to increasing class divergence within American racial and ethnic groups, so we urge scholars and journalists to move beyond simple group categories in exploring American political conflicts.
its surplus military supplies with local police departments
and as Americans aremore exposed tomilitarized police
forces, study of its historical political development (1)
or examination of its effects for American communities
has mostly escaped scholarly attention. No national
data source across the nation’s 18,000 police agencies
tracks the incorporation of tactics, personnel, or gear
traditionally used in military operations abroad. Without
such a repository, scholars can neither measure
the prevalence of police militarization and how it
varies across American communities, nor develop empirical
insights about how these developments affect
the security of Americans.
In his PNAS article, Jonathan Mummolo expands
scholarly understanding of the consequences of increasingly
militarized police forces in the United States,
its politics, and its racial geography (2). Compiling detailed
administrative data in one state of one kind of
militarization, “special weapons and tactics” (SWAT)
deployments, a national panel of which states acquired
a special tactics team, and an original survey experiment
of different levels of militarization, Mummolo examines
whether militarization contributes to the safety
of police officers, local crime reduction, and confidence
in police among Americans. Militarized policing does
not result in the anticipated public safety gains nor
does it abet officer safety; it does impair confidence
in police and elevate perceived crime.
Professors Jennifer Hochschild of Harvard University and Vesla Weaver of Yale University note that crucial life experiences—such as being the victim of a crime, living in a segregated neighborhood, obtaining higher education, being arrested, or benefitting from access to public officials—are more class-stratified within racial and ethnic groups today than they have been since the nineteenth century. They suggest that diverging intra-group racial and economic views that are associated with high levels of inequality and increasingly disparate life experiences may have political consequences. Their main goal of their project is to document and explain the political effects of differences tied to increased intra-group class stratification.
Despite the evidence that the political preferences of non-whites have seldom varied by class, Hochshild and Weaver hypothesize that this pattern may mask intra-group tensions. First, they will examine whether non-whites have experienced the kind of liberal and conservative political and economic divisions that characterize the white population. They suggest that there are no theoretical grounds for non-whites to divide with regard to group identity issues, and no reason to expect intra-group class divisions in regard to group-specific policies such as affirmative action. Finally, if they find evidence of diverging racial and economic views, they will analyze what these mean in terms of political efficacy and impact.