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Home > People > Faculty : Teresa Gowan

Teresa Gowan

Associate Professor
Ph.D. 2003 University of California Berkley
Room 1080 Social Sciences
Phone: 612-626-1863
Email: tgowan@umn.edu

Curriculum Vitae

Interest Areas

Urban Sociology, Ethnography, Poverty and Inequality, Deviance and Social Control.

Current Research

“Addiction Treatment as Neoliberal Poverty Management.” Over the last 30 years we have seen a fundamental shift in American models of inequality and poverty from structural to individual understandings, starting with the reworking of historical fears of a self-reproducing culturally pathological ghetto "underclass" in the late 1970s. Over the same period the mandate of "rehab" has increased in scope until its institutional forms and core narratives have become central to contemporary strategies of poverty management.  Prof. Gowan’s second long-term research project addresses this crucial, yet understudied, area of contemporary American social policy, examining the crucial role of addiction and "rehab" within contemporary understandings of poverty and crime.

With Sarah Whetstone, Zachary Binsfeld, Tanja Andic, and Kristin Haltinner, Prof. Gowan is pursuing long-term ethnographic fieldwork in some local treatment institutions which exemplify the most important contemporary approaches to drug treatment. Their sites include a "therapeutic community" which brings together intensive “behavior modification” and elements from the "12-step" philosophy of AA; a more explicitly faith-based institution focused on spiritual renewal; and a weekly drop-in group following the alternative “harm reduction” model which emphasizes practical, "non-judgmental" health education and outreach.

Selected Publications

Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco. 2010. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

"What's Social Capital Got To Do With It? The Ambiguous (and Overstated) Relationship between Social Capital and Ghetto Underemployment." Forthcoming. Critical Sociology.

Review of Lost in Space: The Criminalization, Globalization, and Urban Ecology of Homelessness, by Randall Amster. 2009. Contemporary Sociology 38(5):417-419.

"New Hobos or Neoromantic Fantasy? Urban Ethnography Beyond the Neoliberal Disconnect." 2009. Qualitative Sociology, 32(3): 231-257.

Research Specialties

Faculty