Biography
Tom Wooten is an ethnographer who studies the lives and struggles of people living
in poverty. To be poor in the United States is often to be trapped in a set of institutions
that define the experience of poverty and perpetuate poverty. These institutions include
low-wage employers; class- and race-segregated neighborhoods, schools, and colleges;
exploitative financial services; arbitrary, nosy, and punitive social services; and
the uneven-but-harsh criminal legal system. Tom studies this institutional landscape
of poverty by going along with people as they try to navigate it. In one project,
Tom studies the experience of trying to escape poverty by following a group of young
men through their senior year of high school and their first year of college. In another,
Tom studies the experience of trying to survive targeted violence in urban gun conflicts.
In a third project, with Charlotte Baker, Tom studies the inner workings of the cash
bail system.
Tom’s research has appeared in The American Journal of Sociology and Criminology. His book about the transition to college for low-income students is under contract
with The University of Chicago Press. Prior to his time in sociology, Tom wrote two
books about disasters and disaster recovery. No One Had a Tongue to Speak, with Utpal Sandesara, is a social history of the deadly 1979 Machhu dam disaster
in Gujarat, India. We Shall Not Be Moved is a social history of neighborhood-based recovery efforts in post-Katrina New Orleans.
Education
Ph.D., Harvard University (2022)