Steve Bialostok: Playing to the End
Anthropologist Steve Bialostok discusses his five-year ethnography of elderly Black men, dominoes, and placemaking in a Denver neighborhood facing gentrification.
Why we picked this
Five years of fieldwork compressed into a single evening — Bialostok's study of elderly Black men gathering over dominoes is really a study of how communities hold themselves together under pressure.
What happens when a neighborhood that has anchored Black life in Denver for generations starts to disappear? Dr. Steve Bialostok spent five years finding out, embedding himself in the social world of elderly Black men in a historically Black community undergoing rapid gentrification. The result is Playing to the End: Elder Black Men, Placemaking, and Dominoes in Denver — an ethnography that uses the rituals of a card table as a lens for understanding belonging, memory, and cultural resistance.
Bialostok is an educational and linguistic anthropologist whose research focuses on discourse, social theory, and inequality. At Tattered Cover, he’ll be joined by Keith Ball, Director of Recreation for Denver Parks and Recreation, for a conversation about what this kind of grassroots placemaking reveals about cities, aging, and the costs of displacement.
This is the kind of local ethnography that rarely gets a public audience — a meticulous, human-scale study of something happening right here in Denver, told by a researcher who was present for it.