History, Biography and Motivation in Pandemic Times

MCL Backstory

By Corey Abramson

In fall of 2020, I explained to a group of new sociology graduate students “what I do.” In these annual conversations, I often focus on my work as an ethnographer – a social scientist who observes people interacting in the real-world settings where life unfolds.

In the past, when asked to speak to students, I’d spoken about my time in senior centers and apartment complexes examining how inequalities shape what it means to grow old in the US. I shared stories about training in mixed-martial-arts gyms; explaining what it was like hanging out at competitions to understand why middle-class professionals risked their health in cage-fights. I’d shared stories about being in clinic with terminal cancer patients, or watching workers at adult day care centers, or drinking seltzer water in bars, or observing doctors backstage in hospitals.

I’d invariably mention my work developing methods for visualizing text data or my pet-peeves in survey-measurement and modeling, which motivated parts of a stats paper on prejudice in healthcare. I’d reinforce a modern sociological truism – that not all questions can be answered with a single method—whether statistics or fieldwork. I still believe this.

But, in the historically un-routine early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, going through the routine without getting to the deeper why felt hollow. For me, “why” involves interrogating the connection between history, biography and motivation.

Historically, when I spoke into my webcam, COVID was rampaging across the globe. Vaccines were not public. Hospitals were overwhelmed with people – with biographies, families, hopes – intubated and dying. There were fights about mask mandates in local schools.  Social justice movements and white nationalists were locked in pitched battles, for what felt like our collective soul.

The pandemic had also placed ethnography itself in doubt, at least temporarily. The commonly proposed professional alternatives – write stats papers, scrape web forums, or cue up mechanical turk for a survey experiment – felt like an existential loss. What these suggestions overlook is that being an ethnographer is a core scholarly identity. Many are drawn to sociology with hopes of writing a dissertation, a monograph, that might contribute something unique to understanding the social world through original field-data. I was.

Giving a formulaic ‘love of the game’ speech felt out of sync with reality. I was terrified, my students were terrified, our ‘imagined futures’ radically altered. Nobody knew what was next. But we could reflect on how we had arrived at the present. So, I changed plans. I explained a bit of my past. Why I was drawn to fieldwork – not on the philosophical and epistemic levels we talk about in methodological works – but as a human being with a biography.

I explained that although I am on the science-side of social-science, my hope has always been to use evidence to contribute to a more equitable world. Ethnography has a unique strength in this regard. To paraphrase Herbert Gans, field-research allows us to directly observe the real world in a way no other method can.

I pointed out that I’ve been in academia long enough to mimic its class-styles, but I shared that I grew up in a neighborhood that is a lot closer to the places urban ethnographers write about than the places academics usually live. Two-decades in, I sometimes still feel out of place.

I rarely talk about this reality. It can be read as self-absorbed. It can be misinterpreted as a story about ‘bootstrapping,’ rather than of luck and privilege and mentors who believed in me. It is less interesting, and less actionable, than what I study. Biographies however, shape motivation. Motivations shape how we make choices. When a pandemic forces us to confront new choices, an awareness of history and reflecting on biography and motivation can help guide us. I chose to study health, and am drawn to field-methods, in part because of my biography.

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Many quantitative social science researchers would describe where I grew up as an “impoverished multi-ethnic neighborhood in a large MSA.” This is correct, but their perspective obscures a lot when presented in isolation from grounded realities.

Some aspects of neighborhood life mirror the imaginary. As a kid growing up in the 90s, everyone knew the house on my street that functioned as a point of illicit drug sales. Everyone knew the local gang relaxed at a clubhouse on the other end of the block. I vividly recall being evacuated by LAPD in the middle of the night when SWAT stormed the house next door. But, I also recall practicing my second grade presentation in the dark at 2am with other neighbors dislocated by SWAT. “Make eye contact,” they told me; solid advice. My home was always part of a vibrant social world, with its own tempo and order, even when things were bad, like in the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict.

My father was a laborer, who worked multiple jobs to support his family from age 13. He eventually carved out a stable living moving barrels of steel around toxic industrial parks, in desert exurbs like Lancaster and Palmdale. His life, under the relentless California sun, was a case study in the social determinants of illness. He died in his fifties from cancer. 

Dad learned that cancer would kill him when a Kaiser emergency room resident said, “you are the guy with stage IV cancer, right?” Dad didn’t know what stage IV meant, but he caught the word cancer. He was in the ER because his back hurt too much to get into the truck. In our neighborhood, people often avoided doctors until the situation got desperate. An attending physician later explained that Dad’s spine looked like driftwood from all the tumors. Dad wasn’t dumb, even if he felt doctors talked down to him.

My mother survived him and still works as a deli waitress. The labor and stress of her job wears down her arthritic body.

The physicality, indignities, and tax on our bodies are part of life in the lower classes. Life is eroded by the grind of labor. All bodies wear down, but it happens faster in poverty, faster for the historically marginalized, and fastest when disadvantages combine. The idea that health is a peripheral aspect of inequality – not really social and not really central to sociology – has always felt wrong to me, given both my life and my work. I appreciate that these issues have increasingly attracted scholarly and policy attention – some professional cover for long-delayed insights from my early life. I also recognize it is a privilege to think, speak, and write for a living, even though academia is far from perfect.

Reading classic urban ethnographies as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley was like looking through a window on my early life. Sociology has always tolerated (and sometimes revered) field-methods alongside more quantitative work. I love statistics and computation. I’ve always enjoyed working with large data-sets, learning new programing languages, and deploying AI. I think the growing range of tools for seeing patterns in big data is fascinating, if also fraught. But, my love doesn’t blind me to the fact that I’ve yet to see a statistical model that captures the grounded reality, the mechanisms, the sequences of life, that I’ve observed in my neighborhood and in my fieldwork. So, I’ve always felt using and developing field-research to be more of a calling than a simple tool. I try to write analytically and objectively, in so far as that is possible. That choice too reflects motivations, biography, and a hope –that social science insights might improve our ability to understand and address inequities in health – the most fundamental resource we have.

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To paraphrase both bell hooks and Émile Durkheim – two thinkers whose divergent works students still read in theory classes – scholars have a responsibility to speak and enact the truth. To be honest about what we do, and why, so the world might learn from the insights (and errors) of social science. A lot of young people get this these days, which gives me some hope we may, because understanding the connections between health and inequality will remain central beyond pandemic times.