Whatever Happened to the Emerging Democratic Majority?

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lecture of the Duke University Social Science Research Institute;
the plenary address at the Conference on Multiple Methods in
Educational Research in Washington, D.C.; and a presentation
at the OECD on U.S. educational reform in Stockholm.
IPR Faculty Fellow Leemore Dafny, assistant professor of
management and strategy at Kellogg, presented her work on
the effects of hospital mergers on prices at the Federal Trade
Commission in Washington, D.C. in January.
Psychologist Alice Eagly delivered an invited address at the
June 2006 Interamerican Congress of Psychology in Buenos Aires.
Larry V. Hedges, Board of Trustees Professor of Statistics and
Social Policy and an IPR faculty fellow, was on the faculty of the
National Institutes of Health Summer Institute for Randomized
Clinical Trials Involving Behavioral Interventions.
Sociologist Jeff Manza gave an invited presentation on “The
Bush Presidency and the Future of American Politics” at the
Social Project Institute in Moscow on January 27.
IPR Faculty Fellow James Rosenbaum, president of the
Sociology of Education Section, American Sociological Association,
organized an August conference on No Child Left Behind.
He is professor of human development and social policy.
Law professor Dorothy Roberts gave many presentations
in the past months, including “Genes, Reproduction, and the
Black Community,” Conference on Increasing Minority Awareness
of Genetics Now, Congressional Black Caucus and Johns
Hopkins University in Washington, D.C.; the plenary speech,
“What’s Wrong with the Child Welfare System?,” Child Welfare
League of America’s Biennial Leadership Summit; and the keynote
address, “Toward a Community Approach to Child Welfare
Theory, Policy, and Practice,” Annual Family Group Decision
Making Conference of the American Humane Society.
IPR Faculty Fellow Wesley G. Skogan, professor of political
science, met with two foreign delegations in Chicago to discuss
his evaluation of Chicago’s Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS).
On February 16, he spoke with fi ve mayors and 12 members
of parliament from Holland and on March 8, with 16 police
offi cers and politicians from Northern Ireland. They also
debated CAPS’ signifi cance for their respective countries. On
May 31, he gave the keynote address at the Colloque International
Francophone: La police et les citoyens in Nicolet, Quebec.
IPR Faculty Fellow Bruce D. Spencer, professor of
statistics, presented “Total Survey Error and Randomized Social
Experiments” at the National Institute of Statistical Sciences’
Workshop on Total Survey Error in Washington, D.C. in March.
Recent Grants
Welfare, Children, and Families: A Three-City Study, which
IPR Faculty Fellow Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, professor of
human development and social policy, co-directs, received a
grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human
Development (NICHD) and the Anne E. Casey Foundation as
a subcontract from Johns Hopkins University. The Searle Fund
has also provided funding for the study.
(continued on page 6)
Conquergood Dies at 55
Dwight Conquergood, a
scholar whose ethnographic
research took him to
refugee camps in Thailand
and the Gaza Strip and to
immigrant and gang-infested
Chicago neighborhoods,
died on November 13,
2004 after a long battle with
colon cancer.
Conquergood, 55, was
an associate professor of
performance studies, a
Dwight Conquergood
department he chaired for
six years. As an IPR faculty
member from 1985 to 1999, he began his pioneering
research into street-gang culture.
Shortly after joining the IPR faculty, Conquergood
signed on as a co-investigator of the Albany Park project,
part of a seven-city study funded by the Ford Foundation.
The project sought to understand the changing
relationships among new immigrants and established
residents in a multicultural neighborhood in Chicago.
Before taking on the study, IPR’s then-director
Margaret T. Gordon asked several faculty what each might
do to move the project ahead. “One said he’d look up
relevant literature,” she recalled. “Another agreed to call
some contacts; a third would phone a teacher he knew
in an Albany Park school. Dwight said he would move
into the neighborhood for a couple of years!”
The “Big Red” tenement Conquergood selected was
located in an area known as “Little Beirut,” rampant with
gangs, graffi ti, and civil disorder. He became an active
member of the community, befriending and tutoring gang
members while he studied their culture and daily life. This
research became an IPR monograph, “Life in Big Red:
Struggles and Accommodations in a Chicago Polyethnic
Tenement,” later published in Group Communication in
Context (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994).
Conquergood also produced several award-winning
documentaries, including one on Laotian refugees in
Chicago, which received the Silver Plaque Award at the
Chicago International Film Festival.
He was selected as a Charles Deering McCormick
Professor of Teaching Excellence and was named Illinois
professor of the year in 1993 by the Council for the
Advancement and Support of Education.
Conquergood served six years as director of
Northwestern’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research in
the Arts. After earning his Ph.D. in performance studies
at Northwestern, he joined its faculty in 1978.