Forrest Stuart

Forrest Daniel Stuart is an American sociologist, author, and academic. Stuart is Professor of Sociology at Stanford University, and the Director of the Stanford Ethnography Lab and serves as Faculty Director for Stanford’s Program on Urban Studies. He is known for his work in urban sociology, crime, deviance, law, and ethnographic methods. Stuart was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2020. He won the Michael J. Hindelang Award in 2019

Early life and education Growing up in San Bernardino during the 1980s and 1990s, one of the most impoverished cities in the United States at the time, Stuart said that his environment significantly shaped his academic interests later on. He credited courses in political theory at the University of California, Santa Cruz with helping him connect local issues of violence and poverty to broader social and policy decisions.

Ballad of the Bullet His book Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy, published in 2020, studied how young, marginalized men in Chicago's South Side engaged with social media to craft images of hyperviolent gang life. Stuart focused on their motivations for producing "drill music" videos, the commodification of urban poverty, and the pursuit of fame through online notoriety. The book covered the risks and rewards these men experienced as they attempted to leverage the internet's attention economy for upward mobility and personal validation. Reviewers applauded its detailed fieldwork on the "digital street" and commended its insights into how online content sometimes de-escalated conflicts, even as it also intensified threats and surveillance. The book received the CITAMS Book Award, an Honorable Mention for the Outstanding Book Award, and was a finalist for the PROSE Award in Cultural Anthropology & Sociology.

MacArthur fellow In 2020, Stuart was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, a recognition often referred to as a "genius grant." The honor, which includes a $625,000 award, acknowledged his innovative research methods and potential for making significant contributions in his field. The fellowship supported his continued work examining community-based approaches to social inequality and urban violence, with an emphasis on immersive, humanistic inquiry and collaboration with those most affected by the issues he studies.

Research and contributions In interviews, Stuart has emphasized that even minor police encounters can have extensive ripple effects within marginalized communities, influencing daily behavior and family relationships. He studies these impacts through ethnographic methods, arguing that "scars of police contact" endure long after an officer departs, shaping how residents navigate their neighborhoods and interact with others.

Awards and honors MacArthur Fellowship (2020)

Selected publications Books Down, Out, and Under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row (2016) Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy (2020)

Articles Stuart, Forrest. "Code of the tweet: Urban gang violence in the social media age." Social Problems 67, no. 2 (2020): 191-207. White, Kailey, Forrest Stuart, and Shannon L. Morrissey. "Whose lives matter? Race, space, and the devaluation of homicide victims in minority communities." Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 7, no. 3 (2021): 333-349. Herbert, Steve, Katherine Beckett, and Forrest Stuart. "Policing social marginality: Contrasting approaches." Law & Social Inquiry 43, no. 4 (2018): 1491-1513. Miller, Reuben Jonathan, and Forrest Stuart. "Carceral citizenship: Race, rights and responsibility in the age of mass supervision." Theoretical Criminology 21, no. 4 (2017): 532-548. Stuart, Forrest. "Becoming “copwise”: Policing, culture, and the collateral consequences of street-level criminalization." Law & society review 50, no. 2 (2016): 279-313. Stuart, Forrest, Amada Armenta, and Melissa Osborne. "Legal control of marginal groups." Annual Review of Law and Social Science 11, no. 1 (2015): 235-254. Stuart, Forrest. "From’Rabble Management’to’Recovery Management’: Policing Homelessness in Marginal Urban Space." Urban Studies 51, no. 9 (2014): 1909-1925. Stuart, Forrest. "Constructing police abuse after Rodney King: How skid row residents and the Los Angeles Police Department contest video evidence." Law & Social Inquiry 36, no. 2 (2011): 327-353.

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