Christopher J. Lawrence, MA

Education

• MA, Sociology, California State University, Northridge
• BA, Creative Writing, San Francisco State University

Dissertation Research

Do you think of where you live as a community? To be sure, the term "community" is what linguists call polysemous—that is, having multiple meanings. A community might refer to a place where people live, an ideology or identity held by disparate individuals, or a group of socially interdependent people with shared practices. One venue where community's polysemy is on display is in municipal government, where professionals tasked with developing and managing cities and neighborhoods habitually refer to such places as "communities" while also employing the term in reference to residents who may live within or even outside some circumscribed boundary. Such practice is evident in city staff reports, public meetings among City Council members and Planning and Design Commissioners, and in the rhetoric of local candidates when they are campaigning. 

In short, what is the essence of what these municipal stewards mean by "community"? Should their interlocutors infer that the neighborhood in which they live is a community such that it is rife with bonds and shared commitments among neighbors? Or is "community" simply shorthand for "neighborhood" or "group of homes," regardless of the degree of communing?

If scholars and, more acutely, residents are to believe that neighborhoods are sites of communing, then what is social life like for the residents living in those places? To what extent does it comport with "community" as envisioned by those tasked with neighborhood development and oversight? Moreover, what do residents and city stewards believe a neighborhood needs, and in what ways are these factors meant to facilitate community—if they are meant to at all?

In my dissertation research, I study two neighborhood groups in Sacramento, North Natomas and Oak Park, as cases for answering the questions above. Each neighborhood group, or district, has a unique history that informs its current culture and demographic composition. North Natomas is a planned development that is only three decades old as incorporated territory. Relative to the rest of Sacramento, it is a high-income district, suburban in feel, and multi-ethnic and -racial in terms of population with, notably, 20 percent of its residents identifying as Black. Oak Park, rather, is part of historic Sacramento, and a district once predominated by Black residents in the 1950s after racial covenants and redevelopment prevented them from living in more desirable parts of the city. Today, while touted as a "historically Black neighborhood," Oak Park's Black population hovers around 20 percent. In recent decades, the City of Sacramento and its partners have been determined to clean up blight, bring in desirable retailers and restaurants, and attract professionals through the well-publicized Aggie Square project, the upshot being the district is now higher income, more educated, and less Black.

Focusing on North Natomas and Oak Park, I draw on original survey and interview data with residents to understand how and why neighborhood attachment and satisfaction, social connections and achievement of community within and beyond the neighborhood, and aspirations for community are influenced by factors such as race, class, and even city planning. I also leverage textual datasets of news stories and public meetings about North Natomas and Oak Park to see how local politicians, city officials, business leaders, and residents frame events in these sites, allowing me to juxtapose them to preferences of my interviewees. My results will have implications for the relationship between neighborhood planning and communities of place, the latter of which are gaining in desirability and necessity giving what many scholars have deemed a loneliness epidemic. 

Research and Teaching Areas

City and Community; New Media Studies; Elementary and Intermediate Statistics; Sociological Methods; Programming for Social Scientists

Publications

Lawrence, Christopher J. and Stephanie Lee Mudge. 2019. “Movement to Market, Currency to Property: The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin as an Anti-State Movement, 2009 – 2014.” Socio-Economic Review.

Awards

2018. Leon Mayhew Prize for the Best Qualifying Paper, Sociology, University of California, Davis

2015. Provost’s Fellowship, University of California, Davis

2015. Top Graduating Master’s Degree Student, Sociology, California State University, Northridge