Robert Garot received his PhD from UCLA in 2003. Specializing in the dilemmas of the poor and those who funnel their access to needed goods and services, he conducted fieldwork at a federal housing office and an inner-city alternative school. Most recently, he has published on the subject of gang identity as performance, has shown how young people in an inner-city alternative school respond to, defy, and invoke the dress code as a means of molding identity, and explored how young people in the inner-city maintain honor while avoiding violence. He has explored how housing officials' discretionary decisions are influenced by applicants' anger and tears, and how such workers' biases arise from their suspicions of applicants. From 2006 to 2009, he will be examining the psychiatric diagnoses of immigrants in Tuscany.