Brooke O’ Harra leads a conversation with beat and investigative reporter Benjamin Herold and mother and education organizer Bethany Smith (whose experience in the Penn Hills suburbs is one of the case studies of his recent book Disillusioned). In Disillusioned, Herold investigates how heavily subsidized suburbs have allowed upwardly mobile white families to extract resources from communities only to leave behind the burden of bills on the Black and Brown families that follow them. This conversation will focus on the relationship between journalism and ethnography made evident in the collaboration between Bethany and Benjamin. Bethany wrote the epilogue to the book.

On March 19th, anthropologist and filmmaker Jorge Nuñéz will screen his documentary El Comité: La Toma del Penal García Moreno at 5 pm at The Public Trust (4017 Walnut Street)
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Following the film, we will engage in a conversation with Jorge about Ecuador’s current prison crisis: How did Ecuadorian prisons evolve into spaces of extreme violence and dehumanization? How can we understand the spiral of organized crime violence? How did Ecuador go from being one of the safest countries in Latin America to being one the most violent in the region?

Jorge Núñez is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. He is the cofounder of Kaleidos at the University of Cuenca, and codirector of the Ecuadorian Prison Observatory 593. He is also the lead designer of the digital platform EthnoData. Among other things, Jorge studies cocaine markets and state violence. He has conducted collaborative ethnography with prisoners and their families for twenty years.

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