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This is an ethnography carried out along the rough edges, cracks, and crevices in Rochester, New York, one of the United States’ ten most segregated cities. A ‘report back’ from ongoing fieldwork with various residents and local organizations explores a series of actors and events that illuminate everyday life within the context of stark race and class inequality. Deep mapping, facet methodology, relational ethnography, just visiting, and the multi-project site are methods for engaging ethically in these fraught ethnographic interstices.

Kathryn A. Mariner is the Wilmot Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. Her research examines how individuals from marginalized groups build kinship, intimacy, and community against a backdrop of structural inequality in the urban United States. Her book, Contingent Kinship: The Flows and Futures of Adoption in the United States (2019), explores the visual, temporal, economic, and affective politics of transracial adoption. Her work has appeared in Ethnos, Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropologist, and Public Culture. She is currently researching urban hypersegregation and placemaking in Rochester, New York.