As the inaugural project of the Urban Ethnography Lab at the University of Texas, the Other Side of Austin project was born as a collaborative, interdisciplinary effort to examine the lived experiences of social suffering in Austin, Texas. Drawing on ethnographic participant observation and life history interviews over time, each contributor researched and wrote a chapter for this collective enterprise in an effort to better understand the challenges of living in a city with a booming “creative class.” Our intention was to write a book that would not be limited to Austinites, but that could speak to the manifold ways in which inequality and social exclusion are lived and experienced in the United States.
After many years of reading, writing, revising, and endless meetings, the project evolved into a book, which was published by the University of Texas Press in 2015. To read more about the makings of the book, my co-authors Caitlyn Collins, Katherine Jensen, and Javier Auyero wrote a wonderful piece, “A Proposal for Public Sociology as Localized Intervention and Collective Enterprise,” which was published in Qualitative Sociology.