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In the latest essay in our “Understanding Gun Violence” series, Laurence Ralph turns our attention to how shooting victims, and their communities, live with the consequences of gun violence in inner cities. Ralph brings the series to a focus on the “normalization—or taken-for-granted quality—of urban violence,” especially via guns. Through the story of a disabled resident of Chicago who, in the wake of his participation in gangs, takes on the mission of reducing recourse to guns in his neighborhood, the essay provides a lens onto the oft-neglected dimensions of race, poverty, and what the author calls the “crippling currency of obligation” among gang members.

“Sociolinguistic Frontiers” was inspired by a September 2018 Itemsessay by Monica Heller that reflected on the history, influence, and limits of the SSRC’s Committee on Sociolinguistics in the 1960s and 1970s, based in part on her research in the SSRC archives. The essay argued that the Committee, a product of its time and place during the Cold War and the growth of US global power, privileged some key topics, questions, and approaches to the relationship between language and culture while downplaying others. Notably, less attention was paid to questions of power and conflict than might have been the case for a discipline focused on social variation in communicative form and practice.

With Prof. Heller on board to help curate this new series with the Items editorial team, we are publishing a series of essays in “Sociolinguistic Frontiers” by a variety of scholars of different generations and areas of interest. In this series, they reflect on the trajectory of the field of sociolinguistics from the end of Committee’s work to today, drawing on new research approaches and questions not addressed by the Committee or not even conceived at the time, as well as ongoing debates within the field. These essays reflect on the present state and possible futures of sociolinguistics both in the United States and beyond.

How does contemporary capitalism, and the inequalities it produces, intersect with race? How does race, and the process of racialization, itself shape economic processes and the nature of work? And, how does the entanglement of racialization and capitalism affect politics and power dynamics—in the United States, but also globally? This Items series, a second collaboration with the multi-institutional Race and Capitalism project, includes contributions from an interdisciplinary group of scholars to address the relationship between racial and economic inequality, the potentials and limits of resistance and reform efforts to redress inequalities, historical and contemporary transformations in the relationship between race and capitalism, and theoretical perspectives that best make sense of the current moment.

Michael Dawson of the University of Chicago, codirector of the Race and Capitalism project, joins the Items editors in curating this discussion.