Kevin Fox Gotham

Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, School of Liberal Arts (SLA)
Professor of Sociology
102 Newcomb Hall
Tulane University
New Orleans, LA  70118
Phone: (504) 862-3004
Fax: (504) 865-5544
Email: kgotham@tulane.edu

Areas of Research and Teaching Specialty:
Urban Sociology

Sociology of Culture
Social Theory
Race and Ethnicity
Stratification and Inequality
Political Sociology
Comparative-Historical Sociology
Social Control and Criminology

Last updated: 09/10/2008

Education Record:
Ph.D., Sociology, University of Kansas, 1997
M.A., Sociology, University of Kansas, 1992
B.A., Sociology, University of Kansas, 1990

Professional Appointments

2008-present, Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, School of Liberal Arts (SLA), Tulane University

2008-present, Professor of Sociology, Tulane University

2006-2008, Program Director, National Science Foundation (NSF), Sociology, Political Science, and Law and Social Science (LSS) Programs

2003-2008, Associate Professor of Sociology, Tulane University

2004, Visiting Professor, L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris, France

1997-2003, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Tulane University

See my curriculum vitae for a comprehensive list of professional appointments, publications, awards and honors, presentations, committee memberships, courses taught, and so on.

My research and teaching interests encompass the areas of social theory, urban sociology, historical sociology, economic sociology, sociology of culture, political sociology, and sociology of law and public policy. In all of my published work I have used a diverse blend of methods (quantitative analyses, ethnographic field work, and qualitative interviews) as well as theoretical perspectives. In my publications, I examine the segregative effect of federal housing programs, the racially discriminatory aspects of post World War II urban planning, and the negative effect of neighborhood racial composition on mortgage lending (e.g., redlining).  I have also investigated racial conflicts over federal efforts to locate low-income housing in suburban areas, the role of community identity in the emergence of a local anti-expressway movement (click here for the article), the negative consequences of the market-centered orientation of federal housing policy, and the impact of real estate blockbusting on neighborhood racial transition (click here for an article). I have also published a series of articles with colleagues that examine the links between the built environment of public housing and the symbolic meanings that people attach to spaces in the city (click here for access to an article; see here and here for related articles). Other research I have been involved in explores the impact of city revitalization efforts and pro-growth strategies on metropolitan development and neighborhood socio-economic stability. Some of this later research informs my edited volume on urban redevelopment, Critical Perspectives on Urban Redevelopment (Elsevier Press, 2001), as well as articles published in refereed journals. See my introduction and conclusion.

My book, Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development: The Kansas City Experience, 1900-2000, (SUNY Press, 2002) explores the interlocking nature of racial discrimination and class factors in the origin and development of racial residential segregation since the turn of the century.  Traditional urban perspectives emphasize the role of consumer demand and market dynamics as the motors of metropolitan development and the subsequent segregation of classes, races, ethnic groups, and land-uses.  In my book, I reexamine these assumptions from a critical political economy perspective that places racial stratification at the heart of the analysis of metropolitan development.  I emphasize the importance of analyzing housing as a system of social stratification and provide a novel account of the role of the real estate industry and federal housing policy in the development of racial residential segregation and uneven development, focusing on a case study of Kansas City.  Drawing on extensive primary research, I investigate, for instance, how the leading actors within the emerging real estate industry cultivated and promulgated a segregationist ideology that linked the residential presence of blacks with neighborhood deterioration and other negative consequences.  Turning to the origin of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), I show how race and racial discrimination became institutionalized as a central component of the modern mortgage system that profoundly affected postwar suburbanization.  Later chapters focus on the segregative effect of urban renewal, school administrative actions, real estate blockbusting, and mortgage redlining.  Throughout the book, I show how real estate activities and federal housing policy have traditionally reflected an ideology of privatism that celebrates the supremacy of the "free" market and reinforces sentiments favoring social exclusion and isolation.  In the final chapter, I draw attention to the fact that while race is no longer an explicit real estate selling tool, it has become an unspoken but understood element of other seemingly non-racial factors - exclusionary zoning, gated neighborhoods, property values, and school quality - that work together to perpetuate racially segregated settlement spaces.  Click here for more information about my book. Check out related articles:

“Urban Space, Restrictive Covenants, and the Origin of Racial Residential Segregation in a U.S. City, 1900-1950.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 24(3): 616-33. September 2000.

“Separate And Unequal: The Housing Act of 1968 and HUD’s Section 235 Program.” Sociological Forum. 15(1): 13-37. March 2000.

“A City Without Slums: Urban Renewal, Public Housing, and Downtown Revitalization in Kansas City, Missouri.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology. 60(1): 285-316. January 2001 (also reprinted in City and Country. Edited by Laurence S. Moss. 2001. Blackwell (pp. 285-316)).

“Missed Opportunities, Enduring Legacies: School Segregation and Desegregation in Kansas City, Missouri.” American Studies. 43 (2): 5-41. Summer 2002.

I have three current and future research agendas:

1. Mortgage Markets and the Globalization of Real Estate

One research agenda centers on the globalization of the U.S. real estate industry and, in particular, the institutional and political changes that have occurred in the financing of real estate over the last few decades.  Theoretically, I am interested in explaining how a spatially fixed commodity like real estate is transformed into a liquid security that buyers and sellers in different places can understand and exchange. Empirically, I examine the impact of state laws, charters, and regulations in the expansion of the secondary mortgage market, the creation of the commercial mortgage-backed securities market, and the development of real estate investment trusts (REITs). Overall, my analysis highlights how the state activity shapes the development of global real estate flows and networks of activity through the creation and control of liquid resources. These concerns are highlighted in my award winning American Journal of Sociology (AJS) article, “The Secondary Circuit of Capital Reconsidered: Globalization and the U.S. Real Estate Sector” (July 2006). In other papers, I investigate the origin and demise of the New Deal housing system, examine the impact of deregulation initiatives in the 1970s and later, and analyze the development of new housing policies and financing mechanisms since the 1980s. The production and financing of real estate and housing connect to wider economic and social processes, including transformations in the political economy of capitalism, state regulatory policy, and the political power of interest groups. Broadly, my research examines the multi-decade restructuring of the U.S. housing finance system, and the causes and consequences of the subprime mortgage crisis.

2. Urban Spectacle and the Political Economy of Tourism

Race, Culture, and Tourism in New Orleans

Another major research agenda focuses on the historical development of tourism and its impact on cities in the United States and around the world. I have three sub-areas areas of research on tourism. First, my recently released book illuminates the interlocking nature of conflicts over race, culture, and authenticity in New Orleans and traces historically how tourism practices have displayed and articulated these conflicts (see my recently completed book, Authentic New Orleans: Race, Culture, and Tourism in the Big Easy (New York University (NYU) Press, 2007). Check it out: http://www.nyupress.org/books/Authentic_New_Orleans-products_id-5146.html. My historical narrative spans almost two centuries and is built from archival sources, government documents, ethnographic data, and qualitative interviews. My book begins in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina amid the whirlwind of speculation about the rebuilding of the city and the dread of outsiders wiping New Orleans clean of the charm and authenticity that made it famous. I then examine the origins of Carnival and the Mardi Gras celebration in the nineteenth century, the planning and staging of the 1884 World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, and investigate other image-building campaigns and promotional strategies to disseminate a palatable image of New Orleans on a national scale. In other chapters, I discuss conflicts over the commercialization of heritage and cultural difference, efforts to promote Mardi Gras as a tourist attraction, and tourism development in the French Quarter. As I show, tourism practices have often been intertwined with notions of race and class. Today, the uncertainty and devastation unleashed by Hurricane Katrina has reinvigorated old debates and stimulated new arguments about the meanings and definitions of local culture and what is “authentic” about New Orleans. New conflicts and struggles are emerging between local groups and neighborhoods over what constitutes authenticity, who should define what authenticity means, and how should authenticity be expressed. My goal is to explore how the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina is leading to new interpretations of New Orleans and the marketing of urban “rebuilding” and “resiliency” as expedients to attracting visitors and reconstituting the city as a place for consuming culture. See the following articles about Mardi Gras, festivals, and the gentrification of the French Quarter:

“Tourism From Above and Below: Globalization, Localization, and New Orleans’s Mardi Gras.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 29(2). June 2005.

“Theorizing Urban Spectacles: Festivals, Tourism, and the Transformation of Urban Space.” City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action. 9(2). July 2005.

“Tourism Gentrification: The Case of New Orleans’s Vieux Carre (French Quarter).” Urban Studies. 42(7): 1099-1121. June 2005.

“Marketing Mardi Gras: Commodification, Spectacle, and the Political Economy of Tourism in New Orleans.” Urban Studies. 39(10): 1735-56. September 2002.

“Destination New Orleans: Commodification, Rationalization, and the Rise of Urban Tourism.” Journal of Consumer Culture. 7(3). November 2007.

“Contrasts of Carnival: Mardi Gras Between the Modern and Postmodern.” Illuminating Social Life (4^th edition). Edited by Peter Kivisto. Pine Forge Press. 2007.

The Last U.S. World’s Fair: The 1984 Louisiana Exposition and the Politics of Urban Spectacle

Second, I am currently involved in research that examines the contradictory meanings and effects of the 1984 Louisiana World Exposition held in New Orleans, the last World’s Fair staged in the United States. As the only U.S. world’s fair to declare bankruptcy, the 1984 Louisiana Exposition foreshadowed an emerging era of intensified community skepticism toward elite pronouncements of the beneficial aspects of mega-events and other tourism-oriented urban redevelopment strategies in U.S. cities. As a site of struggle and contestation, the 1984 Exposition was bound up with the promotion of an African American identity that fed into local mobilizations to subvert the stigma of blackness and claim new bases of cultural authenticity. Against accounts that view spectacles as instruments of hegemonic power, my research advances of a conception of spectacles as arenas of contestation that embody contradictory tendencies and articulate conflictual and opposing meanings of urban space and reality. Rather than obscuring and camouflaging urban problems, spectacles like world’s fairs express the politics of inclusion and exclusion to the extent that they put on display social inequalities and antagonisms.

Convention and Visitors Bureaus (CVBs) as Agents and Networks of Cultural Production

My past work on New Orleans is part of a broader focus on the historical development of the tourism sector and its impact on cities and local culture. While New Orleans has been the focal point of my study, I have also begun historical and comparative analysis of other cities that will continue over the next five years or so. In studying the evolution of the modern tourism sector, I aim to tell the story of how Convention and Visitors Bureaus (CVBs) built local cultures, cultural networks, and local traditions. CVBs both shape their surroundings and are shaped by them; therefore, my treatment of CVBs in the United States probes both how forces in American society supported and constrained CVBs, and how the growing number and variety of CVBs promoted community-building and cultural invention.  My basic agenda follows a longstanding assumption in the sociology of organizations that formal organizations are the basic building blocks of local culture and modern societies. They wield tremendous power and distribute innumerable benefits. All interests – economic, political, and cultural – are pursued through organizations. Therefore, to understand the development and evolution of local culture and modern cities, we must understand organizations. CVBs are particularly powerful organizations. As information providers, CVBs transmit facts, opinions, entertainment, and cultural material about cities. As industry builders, CVBs unite diverse businesses - hotels and motels, restaurants, airlines, travel agencies, and so - into a loosely organized network where actors can interact, identify goals, and engage in strategic planning. In the last half century, CVBs have played major roles in rationalizing convention and visitor services by establishing formal rules and procedures for long-range planning and coordination of convention meetings, the solicitation of bid proposals, and provision of logistical assistance to airlines, hotels, and other tourism organizations. I propose to investigate how CVBs evolved over the twentieth century not only in terms of numbers and size, but also in terms of variety, location, and influence. I seek to make three contributions: (1) trace the evolving diversity of CVBs and reveal the interplay between forces driving variation and forces driving similarity; (2) connect the evolution of CVBs to their historical context, thus making the study of organizations more sensitive to time and place; and (3) demonstrate how CVBs shape cities and local culture, thus redirecting the attention of organizational scholars to culture, power, and inequality.

3. Post-disaster Recovery and Rebuilding in New York and New Orleans

At present, I am working with Miriam Greenberg (Assist. Prof., Sociology, University of California, Santa Cruz) on a comparative historical analysis of the political, economic, and cultural effects of the recovery and rebuilding process in New York and New Orleans following the 9/11 disaster and devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina. During the 1970s and 1980s, both cities experienced major fiscal crises, retrenchment in social services, and increasing poverty and disinvestment. By the 1990s, both cities were seeking to attract a new economy of finance, real estate, and tourism investment. Over the last decade or so, the two cities have embraced a strategy of tax cuts, private-sector led regeneration, market deregulation, and intensive city branding to enhance their image as places of entertainment and tourism. Our goal is to identify similarities and differences in the organization and influence of public-private coalitions, urban branding strategies, and federal-local connections in the recovery and rebuilding phases of both cities. The path-dependent nature of urban restructuring, the two cities’ vulnerability to disasters, divergences in the depth and longevity of the post-disaster crises, and the unequal impacts of these crises are the major topics of our analysis. In one paper we are working on, we analyze the form, trajectory, and problems of reconstruction in the two cities with special emphasis on the implementation of the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, the Liberty Zone and the Gulf Opportunity Zone, and tax-exempt private activity bonds to finance and promote reinvestment. Drawing on a variety of data sources, we show that New York and New Orleans have become important laboratories for entrepreneurial city and state governments seeking to use post-disaster rebuilding as an opportunity to push through far reaching neoliberal policy reforms. The emphasis on using market-centered approaches for urban recovery and rebuilding in New York and New Orleans should be seen not as coherent or sustainable responses to urban disaster but rather as deeply contradictory restructuring strategies that are intensifying the problems they seek to remedy. I also have focused on the spectacular nature of urban disasters and the problems and difficulties of post-Katrina tourism rebuilding in New Orleans. These concerns are alluded to in the following papers:

“(Re)Branding the Big Easy: Tourism Rebuilding in Post-Katrina New Orleans” in Urban Affairs Review (July 2007)

“Fast Spectacle: Reflections on Hurricane Katrina and the Contradictions of Spectacle” in Fast Capitalism (Fall 2007; Vol. 2, No. 20).

“Critical Theory and Katrina: Disaster, Spectacle, and Immanent Critique.” City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action. 11(1): 81-99. April 2007.

Courses Taught
Soc. 710. Intermediate Social Theory (see Fall 2004 syllabus )(see Fall 2003 syllabus )
Soc. 630. Urban Policy and Planning (see Spring 2005 syllabus, Spring 2003 syllabus, Spring 2002 syllabus )
Soc. 610. Urban Organization (see Spring 2000 syllabus )
Soc. 322. Social Theory (see Fall 2008 syllabus, Spring 2005 syllabus, Fall 2004 syllabus, Spring 2003 syllabus, Spring 2002 syllabus )
Soc. 206 Urban Sociology (see Fall 2002 syllabus, Fall 2001 syllabus )


Some of my favorite web sites include:

American Sociological Association
CorpWatch
Critical Theory website
International Sociological Association
Community and Urban Sociology
Comparative and Historical Sociology
Urban Affairs Association
Situationist International
Society for the Study of Social Problems