George Karandinos
Peter K. New Award Winner, 2010
George Karandinos received his BA from the University of Pennsylvania, Health and Societies department in 2010. He is continuing research begun as an undergraduate around issues of urban poverty, violence, the illicit drug economy and police brutality as a resident ethnographer in a socioeconomically depressed predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood in North Philadelphia. His research interests include social inequality, health disparities, violence, urban poverty, incarceration, medical anthropology and health care as a human right. George’s eventual goal is to enter an MD/PhD program in Medical Anthropology and pursue a combined clinical-research career. His winning paper, entitled “You ridin’?: The Moral Economy of Violence in North Philadelphia” explores the way street violence circulates as a resource, producing and reinforcing durable relationships of mutual obligations and reproducing violence in the inner-city context of imposed ghettoization, public service breakdown and historical and continuing socioeconomic and ethnic marginalization. The paper draws on Maussian exchange theory, Bourdieu’s theory of habitus and field and an expansion of E.P. Thompson’s moral economy concept.
