Forrest Stuart

At CASBS, Forrest Stuart will be working on The Peacemakers, a book that examines a nascent model of community-based public safety in American cities. The project draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork with Urban Alchemy, a San Francisco-based organization that employs formerly incarcerated people as “streetcorner mediators.” Through immersive observation and in-depth interviews, the book shows how these practitioners build relationships, defuse conflicts, and create safety without relying on coercion or violence. The Peacemakers develops the concept of “social debt” to explain how small, voluntary acts of care generate obligations that can be leveraged to shape behavior and stabilize public space. The project asks a broader question that animates much of Stuart’s recent work—namely, what actually works to produce safety in marginalized communities, and how can we study those solutions with the same rigor typically applied to social problems?

Stuart is a professor of sociology at Stanford University, director of the Stanford Ethnography Lab, and faculty director of the Program on Urban Studies. His research focuses on urban inequality, policing, and the social organization of public space, with an emphasis on how people navigate and reshape systems of control. He is the author of Down, Out, and Under Arrest (University of Chicago Press, 2018) and Ballad of the Bullet (Princeton University Press, 2020).