Laurence Ralph is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is currently working on an ethnography entitled Half Dead: Violence and Mobility in a Chicago Street Gang. The book explores the networks of commerce, criminality, and affiliation that congeal in the figure of the disabled gang affiliate. Disabled gang members, he argues, are one of several kinds of urban residents who are especially susceptible to “injury,” a concept he uses to theorize several related genres of debility. Laurence recently defended his dissertation in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. His doctoral thesis addressed how disabled gang members influence urban life as living emblems of the routine violence that shapes participation in gang collectivities. Laurence earned a Master of Arts degree in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2006, and a Bachelor of Science degree from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2004 where he majored in History, Technology and Society. He has been awarded a number of fellowships, including: the University of Michigan, Du Bois-Mandela-Rodney Postdoctoral Fellowship (2010-2011), the University of Notre Dame, Erskine Peters Dissertation Fellowship (2009-2010), the University of Chicago, Mellon Dissertation Year Fellowship (2009-2010), the University of Rochester, Frederick Douglass Institute Pre-Doctoral Fellowship (2009-2010), the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant in Cultural Anthropology and Law and Social Science (2007-2008), the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Award (2005-2007), The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies (2004-2005), and the University of Chicago, Trustees Fellowship (2004-2009). Laurence’s work has been published in The Anthropology Exchange (2006), Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power (2010) and will be published in forthcoming issues of Transition, Social Text, and Anthropological Theory.