Climate Café with Joseph Ewoodzie

Joseph Ewoodzie will give a Climate Café talk about his new book, Getting Something to Eat in Jackson: Race, Class, and Food in The American South, on Wednesday, April 6 at 7pm in the Freeman Room.

Joseph Ewoodzie, Jr. uses qualitative research to examine how marginalized populations in urban locales make sense of inequalities in their everyday lives. He employs ethnographic methods to investigate how these populations interpret their social selves and the boundaries that both constrain and enable them. He aims to understand how we create an "us" and a "them." Ewoodzie tries to understand how we structure our world to benefit the "us" and penalize the "them"—how we ensure the well-being of those who belong and alienate those who do not. He is very interested in how the "them" make do and deal with the consequences not belonging.

His first book, Break Beats in the Bronx: Revisiting Hip Hop’s Early Years, combines historical methods with sociological theorizing about symbolic boundaries to provide an account of the making of hip hop. With the help of previously unused archival material, Ewoodzie shed light on a crucial period (1975-1979) consistently ignored in the historical literature.

In his most recent book, Getting Something to Eat in Jackson: Race, Class, and Food in The American South, Ewoodzie provides a vivid portrait of African American life in today’s urban South, using food to explore the complex interactions of race and class.

Ewoodzie is an Associate Professor of Sociology and the Vann Professor of Racial Justice at Davidson College.