Why Terrible Things Happen in “Perfect” Places
	Katherine S. Newman
	Author “Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings”
Rampage school shootings have become a terrifying fixture in the United States today. Although very rare in an absolute sense, their frequency appears to be increasing and the severity of the damage growing as well. Based on two years of research at the behest of the National Academy of Sciences, Katherine Newman will discuss the reasons why these shootings tend to happen in the places where we least expect them to occur and why an immense amount of evidence that something terrible is going to happen fails to register with adults who might be able to intervene. Newman explores the ways in which communities blind themselves to the meaning of troubling behavior in their midst and the counterintuitive consequences of living in places where social capital (interpersonal trust) is high. She explains why kids who hear threats of shootings generally fail to come forward in time, but shift their reporting behavior in the aftermath of highly publicized shootings take place. Finally, Newman considers what lessons we can learn from sociological research on the "social structure" of school shootings.
Katherine S. Newman is the Malcolm Forbes Class of 1941 Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs and the Director of the Institute for International and Regional Studies at Princeton University. Formerly the Dean of Social Science at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Urban Studies in the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Newman is the author of eight books on topics ranging from urban poverty to middle class economic insecurity to school violence. Her most recent book (in collaboration with Victor Chen) is The Missing Class (Beacon Press, 2007), an analysis of the condition of the near poor in American society. Newman has won a number of awards, including the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Prize and the Hillman Book Award, and appears frequently on public radio and television.