Sharon Zukin

Sharon Zukin is a professor of sociology who specializes in modern urban life. She teaches at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. As of 2014, she was also a distinguished fellow in the Advanced Research Collaborative at the CUNY Graduate Center and chair of the Consumers and Consumption Section of the American Sociological Association. Zukin was a visiting professor at the University of Amsterdam in 2010–11.

Zukin’s academic training was focused on political sociology. She had not taken any specific courses in urban sociology before being hired to teach the subject to undergraduates at Brooklyn College. In an interview, she describes how she first immersed herself in urban sociology literature to aid her teaching, and was later inspired to carry out field research by reading a newspaper article about manufacturers who were being forced out of their loft space in Lower Manhattan.

I said, I could help them - I’m a sociologist. Their landlord should not throw them out of their space. So I went to down to see them and did a little survey about their situation. I wound up advocating in support of their cause with the local community board and the city government, and eventually that turned into the research I did for my first urban book, Loft Living. And that’s really how I became an urban sociologist - by doing research.

Other early influences include Walter Benjamin's 1931 essay, Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century and anthropologist Sidney Mintz's 1986 book, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History.

Zukin’s research interests and analytical framework place her in the broad category of Neo-Marxist social thinkers. She began teaching urban sociology just as the “new urban sociology” was emerging, partly in response to a series of urban riots (many of which involved African-Americans reacting to police brutality or other manifestations of systemic racism) that took place in U.S. cities in the late 1960s. Widespread urban unrest in the U.S. and Europe prompted worried governments and granting agencies to increase the funding available for urban research. Sociologist Manuel Castells and geographer David Harvey were two of the theorists influential in the development of the new urban sociology.

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