Research Agenda: A Sociology of Property
Debbie’s research agenda is to strengthen and broaden a foundation for a contemporary sociology of property. Sociologists study how housing and land are developed and distributed, often unequally. As the world struggles with speculative land grabs, dramatic climate change, and expanding economic inequalities, research of these subjects is ever more crucial. We have long demonstrated how the inequalities associated with housing, neighborhoods, and land development are often marked not only by class and race, but also by location: consider how exploding urban gentrification contrasts with suburban and rural impoverishment in the US. But we have often failed to understand the legal underpinnings of these inequalities and challenges to them.
Debbie builds contemporary conversations among sociologists about land and housing as property. In doing so, she is re-invigorating the interests of classical sociologists and social theorists (including Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, W.E.B. DuBois, Thorstein Veblen, and Alexis de Tocqueville; as well as Karl Polanyi.) Unfortunately, in recent generations, sociologists have largely left the study of property to other disciplines, including law, economics, anthropology, history, and geography. It is important for sociologists to study how private property matters today because conventional ways of thinking about property derive from earlier – and very different – arrangements between citizens, land, and law. It is thus critical we update our sociological theories about property.
Current Research Project: Fractured Property in the Country
Debbie is currently speaking and writing about property rights for oil-and-gas extraction. She spent a year doing intensive research in the American Northern Plains’ Bakken oil play, which has exploded with fracking and now produces about 10 percent of the nation’s oil. She observed and interviewed property brokers employed by the energy industry; farmers, ranchers and other property owners; and lawyers who help both sides.
Her book manuscript, A Fractured Nation, is under contract with Oxford University Press. The book will continue Debbie’s critique of libertarian ideals about property. The book shares stories about how American farmers, ranchers, oilmen and lawyers, act on and talk about their own property rights, and through those stories, Debbie constructs alternatives to libertarian notions of private property as individual control. She portrays property as a source of diverse value commitments (not just money or individualized sentiment) and as a motivation for community (not just individual) action and identities. Throughout the book, she shows how the historical fracturing and consolidation of property rights creates durable social inequalities and opportunities for contestation.
The research is supported by a research grant from the National Science Foundation Law and Social Sciences Program.
Past Research Project: Eminent Domain in the City
Debbie’s book, Private Property and Public Power: Eminent Domain in Philadelphia (Oxford University Press, 2014), provides the first comprehensive study of a city’s eminent-domain acquisitions. The book explores which properties the city pursues for private redevelopment and how citizens and officials evaluate those decisions. In moments of conflict, those opposing eminent domain think of property-security as the right to possess and control (“what’s mine is mine and what’s your is yours”). But most of the time, people faced with real-life dilemmas had different ideas about how government should protect property. In the book, Debbie develops an idea of property as investment – including emotional, financial, temporal, and cognitive investment. Citizens and government-officials seem to generally agree that governments (not just individual owners and renters) are responsible for protecting that investment, and Debbie suggests that thinking of property as communal investment, rather than individual control, offers progressive possibilities: It draws attention to the socially produced, changing value of land and buildings and demands a respect for multiple kinds of value.
Co-Winner of the 2016 Zelizer Book Award from the Economic Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association.
Winner of the 2015 Hart Socio-Legal Prize for Early Career Academics from the Socio-Legal Studies Association.
“Narrating and Naming Positive Agents: Storytelling by Philadelphia Postwar Political Elite” (2008) Poetics. 36(1) 72-93.
In this article, Debbie analyzes how Philadelphia elites – including Ed Bacon – later remembered and talked about their involvement in leading urban renewal of the 1950s and 1960s. She argues that when elites tell stories about past actions, they use particular names or generalized pronouns such as “we” and “they” that can cement group identities, and their powers.
“The Participant’s Dilemma: Bringing Conflict and Representation Back In” (2010) International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 34(3) 496-511.
Debbie argues here that grassroots leaders cooperating with urban planning efforts risk harming resident confidence in government. These community leaders inhabit difficult and potentially untenable positions, unless they are permitted to publicly contest the same planning bodies to which they belong. This article draws on an analysis of a Philadelphia redevelopment project planned for a primarily Puerto-Rican neighborhood designated as a federal Empowerment Zone.
“Race as a Set of Symbolic Resources: Mobilization in the Politics of Eminent Domain” (2015) in Race and Real Estate. Eds. Adrienne Brown, Kim Lane Scheppele, and Valerie Smith, Oxford University Press, pp. 125-144.
Debbie explores how residents of a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Philadelphia mobilized political power when government initiated redevelopment and threatened to use eminent domain to force them out. The chapter argues that race became a source of power, not only for discrimination against these residents, but also for resistance.
“Political Moments with Long-term Consequences” (2012) in Remaking Urban Citizenship: Organizations, Institutions, and a Right to the City. Volume 10 in Comparative Urban and Community Research. Eds. Michael Peter Smith and Michael McQuarrie. Transaction Publishers, pp. 203-220.
Debbie analyzes a neighborhood’s mobilization in reaction to city government’s eminent-domain plans. In this piece, Debbie argues that social-movement scholars need to recognize how short-term, problem-specific organizing may not connect with larger issues or organizations but may nevertheless create long-term redistributions of power.
“The Rights behind Eminent Domain Fights: A Little Property and a Lot of Home” (2010) in Property Rights and Neo-liberalism: Cultural Demands and Legal Actions. Eds. Laura Hatcher and Wayne McIntosh, Ashgate Press, pp. 75-93.
Debbie exposes on of the reasons for the widespread popular alignment with libertarian ideals, as both libertarian activists and most of the American public opposed the US Supreme Court’s approval for eminent domain in Kelo v. City of New London Connecticut (2005). In this chapter, Debbie shows how public debates and even the Supreme Court justices have been confused by a conflation of homes, or even houses, with all private property. In reality, in law and custom homes deserve special protection over all other kinds of urban real estate, including commercial buildings, as well as vacant lots and buildings.