Expertise

Urban Sociology, Inequality, Work, Race & Ethnicity, Gender & Sexuality, Ethnography, Qualitative Methods

Biography

My research uses qualitative and ethnographic methods to examine everyday experiences of precarity. I focus heavily on the everyday the everyday interactions through which people manage and navigate conditions of uncertainty, particularly in the urban context. I am also interested in the ways such strategies can mitigate, alleviate, and at time exacerbate those conditions. Additionally, I am interested the way ethnographic research takes shape across time and space, and the way such an embodied practice plays out in the research process.

In my teaching, I am interested in enhancing experiential and community engaged learning as a way to cultivate available resources and assets and build lasting and beneficial relationships between the university and surrounding community.

Curriculum Vitae

Selected Publications

• Orrico, Laura A. Forthcoming. Making Precarity Work: Life on the Edge of Venice Beach. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Orrico, Laura A. 2017. “Let People be People: Everyday Substance Use in a Public Work Site.” Qualitative Sociology 40(3): 311-330.
• Orrico, Laura A. 2015. "Working the Boardwalk: Trust in a Public Marketplace." Social Psychology Quarterly 78(3): 228-245.
• Orrico, Laura A. 2015. “Doing Intimacy in a Public Market: How the Gendered Experience of Ethnography Reveals Situated Social Dynamics.” Qualitative Research 15(4): 473-488.
• Timmermans, Stefan, Laura A. Orrico, and Jasmine Smith. 2014. “Spillover Effects of an Uninsured Population.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 55(3): 360–374. 

Courses Taught

 

• Urban Sociology
• History and Significance of Race in America
• Research Design and Methods
• Philadelphia as a Social Laboratory
• Qualitative Data Analysis