About

Forrest Stuart is a Professor of Sociology at Stanford University. His professional profile indicates a focus on sociological research, with an affiliation to the Stanford Ethnography Lab. His work involves ethnographic methods and sociological inquiry, contributing to academic understanding within his field. Further details about his specific research interests, background, or key contributions are not provided in the available page text.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Criminology
• Law
• Economic growth
• Political economy
• Gender studies
• Medicine
• Demographic economics
• Epistemology
• Economics
• Demography

Selected publications

• “What Do I Do with All of These Data?”: A New Pragmatist Framework for Coding and Analysis

  Qualitative Sociology · 2026-04-10

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract In qualitative research, few tasks are more foundational—and more frustrating—than coding and analysis. The process of deciding which data to focus on, how to code it, and when to move from descriptive labels to analytical claims can feel like a leap in the dark. Drawing on the pragmatist tradition of examining social action as creative problem solving, this article introduces a structured but flexible framework—the goal-obstacle-strategy-implications (GOSI) model—for making that leap more navigable. Reclaiming grounded theory’s commitment to theory generation, GOSI encourages researchers to analyze how people pursue provisional goals, confront obstacles, experiment with strategies, and generate consequences in context. The framework provides a practical and portable method for identifying patterned variation across cases, surfacing how structural constraints and social positions shape action over time. By foregrounding action as situated, adaptive, and recursive, GOSI moves analysis beyond surface description toward grounded, process-based explanation. It also formalizes a comparative logic for theoretical sampling, helping researchers iteratively refine emerging concepts while collecting data. More than a coding technique, GOSI offers a methodological reorientation—one that clarifies the micro-macro link, makes space and social location analytically visible, and supports asset-based accounts of agency under constraint. It also contributes to ongoing debates about how qualitative scholars can theorize structure without reducing people to passive reflections of it. In doing so, the framework revives grounded theory’s original ambitions while offering new tools for meeting the challenges of contemporary fieldwork.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• What Is Gang Culture?

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2024-01-23 · 2 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract Over the last century of gang scholarship, it is difficult to find a more ubiquitous yet underdefined term than “gang culture.” What, precisely, have researchers meant when they deployed this term, and how might contemporary studies reconcile these past conceptions to productive effect? Toward improving the theoretical, analytical, and methodological precision of ongoing gang scholarship, the chapter contends that researchers have historically adopted three primary conceptualizations of gang culture: (1) culture-as-values, (2) culture-as-toolkit, and (3) culture-as-products. Each conception generates divergent frameworks for understanding what gang culture “is,” as well as its causal influence on the attitudes, behaviors, and social organization of gangs and gang-associated individuals. As this chapter argues, these divergent conceptualizations carry implications not just for scholarship, but also for policy and community interventions. By embracing the latter two conceptions, researchers can move toward asset-based approaches that reduce the harms of overly punitive responses to gangs.

  PublisherDOI

• Where do neighbourhood reputations come from? Analysing Chicago community areas using a systematic neighbourhood reputation score, 1985–2020

  Urban Studies · 2024-12-10 · 5 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  A longstanding maxim of urban research is that neighbourhood reputations matter. The subjective narratives and stereotypes about a neighbourhood influence a range of consequential processes, outcomes and inequalities. Yet, there remains considerable ambiguity regarding the primary drivers of the neighbourhood status hierarchy. What are the primary factors responsible for neighbourhood reputations? How and why do reputations change over time? Unfortunately, efforts to answer such questions have been hampered by methodological limitations, most notably the lack of a universal measure allowing comparisons between every neighbourhood in a given city. In an effort to address this shortcoming, this article offers a novel computational approach for generating a systematic measure, which we refer to as a ‘neighbourhood reputation score’. Leveraging a sentiment analysis method to examine every newspaper article published by the Chicago Tribune mentioning at least one of Chicago’s 77 community areas across five decades, we find that neighbourhood reputation scores are negatively associated with the proportion of Black residents in a neighbourhood. Although the strength of the relationship between ethno-racial composition and reputation increases over time, neighbourhoods in Chicago did not experience sufficient compositional shifts to assess whether demographic changes lead to reputational changes. These findings represent the most systematic evidence to date in support of the theory that ethno-racial stigma is the most influential driver of the neighbourhood status hierarchy.

  PublisherDOI

• Displacement frames: How residents perceive, explain and respond to un-homing in Black San Francisco

  Urban Studies · 2022-11-28 · 10 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  Few urban phenomena command as much attention as displacement. Scholars continue to refine conceptualisations of displacement to more effectively capture its diversity in forms, scales and temporalities. Recent research advocates a more inclusive conceptualisation, attuned to the processes of ‘un-homing’ – that is, the more subtle, ‘non-catastrophic’ forms of ‘slow violence’ that rupture residents’ phenomenological attachments to place and home. Advocates of the un-homing approach call on researchers to develop the data and analytical frameworks necessary for capturing the perceptions and lived experiences of displacement from the perspective of longtime residents. This article develops one such analytical framework, which we refer to as displacement frames. Building on the conceptual tools of cultural sociology, displacement frames are the evaluative schema through which residents make sense of, and act towards, the slow violence and micro-events of un-homing. Drawing on 32 interviews with long-time Black residents in San Francisco’s rapidly gentrifying Bayview Hunters Point neighbourhood, we identify three primary displacement frames: (1) displacement-by-design, (2) displacement-as-predation and (3) displacing-the-problem. As a product of residents’ historical experiences, networks and housing tenure, these frames simplify complex (and often ambiguous) experiences into a coherent narrative about the primary causes, conditions and consequences of displacement. In turn, displacement frames influence how and to what extent residents attempt to resist, prevent or perhaps even accept and support local displacement.

  PublisherDOI

• How Social Media Use Mitigates Urban Violence: Communication Visibility and Third-Party Intervention Processes in Digital Urban Contexts

  Qualitative Sociology · 2022-08-02 · 15 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Beyond harm reduction policing

  2022-11-24 · 2 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  In this chapter, the authors evaluate the current state of the drug war in the United States and describe emerging interest in community-based alternative responses. Their contention regarding the former is that although the drug war has attenuated somewhat, the degree to which the criminal legal system is used to respond to drug use and drug markets remains quite high when judged by historical standards. The authors briefly describe recent trends in drug arrests and prison admissions to flesh this out; these data also show some important geographic shifts in the war on drugs. The remainder of the chapter describes the emergence of an alternative diversion framework rooted in harm reduction principles (i.e. Let Everyone Advance With Dignity [LEAD]) in Seattle that now serves as an alternative model in nearly 100 jurisdictions across the country. It also provides an account of how this framework was adapted in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic to continue to reduce the harm associated with drug use, drug markets, and unmanaged addiction.

  PublisherDOI

• Addressing urban disorder without police: How Seattle's<scp>LEAD</scp>program responds to<scp>behavioral‐health‐related</scp>disruptions, resolves business complaints, and reconfigures the field of public safety

  Law & Policy · 2021-10-01 · 13 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Since the late twentieth century, as part of a broad effort to maximize the profitability of commercial spaces and address the complaints of business interests, cities have increasingly criminalized the presence and behavior of populations perceived as disorderly. The resulting police interactions produce a range of deleterious outcomes, particularly for individuals contending with mental health and substance use disorders, homelessness, and other behavioral health concerns. Against this backdrop, we provide a case study of Let Everyone Advance with Dignity (LEAD), a novel public safety intervention developed in Seattle, Washington. LEAD diverts businesses' disorder complaints from police and 911 toward program personnel who provide long‐term harm reduction services and resources. LEAD's non‐punitive approach has demonstrated success in reducing the harms of criminalization, improving individual outcomes, satisfying business grievances, and, more broadly, disrupting the defining logic and practices of neoliberal urbanism. LEAD's successes carry theoretical implications, demonstrating the need for nonpolice alternatives to reconfigure the organizational field of public safety by intervening into the longstanding coalition between businesses and police. The LEAD model also offers insights about the concrete steps necessary to ensure public safety and community vitality without police involvement.

  PublisherDOI

• Policing gentrification or policing displacement? Testing the relationship between order maintenance policing and neighbourhood change in Los Angeles

  Urban Studies · 2021 · 41 citations

  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  Urban scholars increasingly contend that local police departments play a central role in facilitating neighbourhood change. Recent critics warn that ‘order maintenance’ policing and other low-level law enforcement tactics are deployed in gentrifying areas to displace ‘disorderly’ populations. Despite influential qualitative case studies, there remains scant quantitative research testing this relationship, and few studies that evaluate the link between policing, displacement and gentrification. We address this lacuna, drawing on new citation data from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and employing a measure of neighbourhood change that focuses on the displacement of low-income residents. Examining policing patterns in 978 US Census tracts in Los Angeles over four years, our analysis reveals that tracts experiencing gentrification – defined as the simultaneous increase in non-poor residents and decrease in the number of people in poverty – experience a greater number of citations compared with other tract types. Similar patterns emerge in our analysis of citations that explicitly target homelessness and extreme poverty. In post-hoc analyses, we found that Census tracts characterised by a decrease in the number of people in poverty experienced greater numbers of total police citations and of citations targeting homeless individuals, compared with other tract types. These findings carry important theoretical implications for understanding the divergent manifestations of, and potential mechanisms driving, order maintenance policing. Methodologically, we contend that police citations provide a more precise measure of order maintenance policing compared with previous studies, and that classifying neighbourhoods in terms of relative displacement of residents in poverty provides much-needed interpretive clarity.

  PublisherDOI

• Urban Ethnography

  2021-02-23 · 1 citations

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  If ethnography is the study of people as they negotiate their everyday lives, then urban ethnography is the study of how urban residents and other inhabitants make sense of their daily social worlds, navigate surrounding communities, and manage the broader forces that structure the urban experience. Methodologically, it privileges deep, immersive fieldwork alongside research participants. Substantively, it focuses on interactions and institutions that define urban space, whether those are public streets, neighborhood organizations, or community events. Urban ethnographies have traditionally thought of “communities” geographically, examining how the central topics of poverty, crime, culture, and peer group formation play out in delimited spaces such as neighborhoods, wards, and districts. Theoretically, it has historically tended to draw on social-constructionist and interactionist orientations, conceiving of the urban life as something “built up,” so to speak, from repeated and ritualized encounters. As one of the longest-standing and iconic subfields of sociology, anthropology, and other humanistic social sciences, urban ethnography remains one of the most influential modes of understanding social life in cities. True to form as one of the most conflictual and controversial subfields, an increasing number of scholars are pushing back on convention, insisting on the need to embrace theoretical orientations that are more critical and structurally focused, and to more adequately consider the global forces and relational dynamics that exist beyond, but fatefully impinge upon, bounded field sites. As urban ethnography’s readership has grown, so too have methodological critiques regarding replicability, as well as concerns about potential exploitation and voyeurism among its practitioners and readership.

  PublisherDOI

• Investing in Alternatives: Three Logics of Criminal System Replacement

  eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2021-01-01 · 9 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  What logics underlie the call to “defund the police,” and how do those logics matter in policy debate? In the wake of widespread protests after the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other victims of police violence during the summer of 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement’s call to “defund the police” captured the national imagination. Several municipal governments promised to cut funding and contracts for their respective police departments, with mixed results. Because we expect police defunding and reinvestment to remain a central movement demand, this Article explores the demand’s discursive and normative terrain. It does so by describing and critically engaging three logics of criminal system alternatives that we have observed in activists’ demands and organizing efforts. Specifically, we theorize investments in social welfare, safety production, and racial reparation as deeply connected but distinct logics that might guide decisions about where and how money should be spent as part of defund initiatives, and we discuss some implications of each for transformational change within and beyond policing.

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Katherine Beckett

  University of Washington

  4 shared

• Reuben Jonathan Miller

  American Bar Foundation

  3 shared

• Caylin Louis Moore

  Stanford University

  3 shared

• Charles R. Collins

  University of Washington Bothell

  2 shared

• Monica C. Bell

  2 shared

• Steve Herbert

  2 shared

• Andreas Glaeser

  1 shared

• Ava Benezra

  University of Chicago

  1 shared

Labs

• Ethnography LabPI

  Not provided

Awards & honors

• Robert E. Park Book Award from the American Sociological Ass…
• Michael J. Hindelang Book Award from the American Society of…
• Gordon J. Lang Book Prize from the University of Chicago Pre…
• MacArthur ‘genius’ grant (2020)
• Awards from the American Sociological Association’s Communic…