How do the specific circumstances in which we write affect what we write? How does what we write affect who we become? How can we maintain professsional and personal integrity in today's university? In a series of traditional and experimental writings, a culmination of ten years of works-in-progress, Laurel Richardson records an intellectual journey, displacing boundaries and creating new ways of reading and writing. Applying the sociological imagination to the writing process, she connects her life to her work. Deeply engaging, movingly written with grace, elegance, and clarity, the book stimulates readers to situate their own writing in personal, social, and political contexts.
Book: An American Daughter’s Story is a collection of linked stories written chronologically from 1980–2015. They create a multifaceted narrative of how the public and the private, the past and present, the local and global, intersect. With earnest reflection, modesty and humor, Laurel Richardson introduces the reader to her Ohio neighborhoods, friends, family, writers and therapy dogs. She ages, retires and frets over her droopy eyebrow. Her town’s local stores close; police bust heroin dealers; September 11th happens; universities corporatize; poetry venues transform. All this and much more as Richardson honors the complexity and vibrancy of America, and her life within it. Richardson’s renowned book, Fields of Play (1997) is about constructing a life inside the academy; Seven Minutes from Home is about constructing a life outside the academy. This extraordinary example of literary sociology can be read for pleasure, adopted in book clubs, or used in courses in American Studies, communication, creative writing, narrative, qualitative research, sociology, cultural studies and women’s studies. An appendix offers discussion questions, research projects and creative writing exercises. “A tour de force, the penultimate statement from gifted writer Laurel Richardson. Here an American daughter’s story comes home.” – Norman Denzin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign “The stories are riveting; you will not be able to stop reading.” – Carolyn Ellis, University of South Florida “An exemplar for how good social science should be written.” – Jessica Smartt Gullion, Texas Woman’s University “A love letter to a culture and a life well-lived.” – Anne Harris, Monash University “Highly recommended for courses in sociology, women’s studies and creative writing.” – Mary Margaret Fonow, Arizona State University Laurel Richardson, Professor Emeritus at The Ohio State University, has received a Life-Time Achievement Award in Qualitative Research, a Cooley Book Award, and two Affirmative-Action awards. She writes daily. She is most proud of her therapy dogs’ work with special-needs children.
Betty Frankel Kirschner succumbed to emphysema one day in June. She had been a long-term professor at Kent State University, founding member of the feminist caucus in sociology, a political activist, a chain smoker. Close friend Laurel Richardson, a key figure in literary turn in ethnographic writing, kept a daybook, relating their conversations and interactions over Betty’s last few months. Rich in memory, emotion, dreams, and life-and-death decisions, the daybook chronicles the ups and down of a terminally ill woman and the impact that illness has on friends, colleagues, and family alike. Richardson also grapples with the ethics of writing deeply personal narratives. Part memoir, part sociological analysis, part eulogy to a departed friend, Richardson opens a poignant window into living an academic life, and ending it.
For renowned sociologist and writer Laurel Richardson, a broken foot led to a month as a patient in an extended care facility. In this compelling description of her lived experience in one of these institutions, she addresses key questions of health delivery and behavior: nurses who can be angelic or cruel, institutional policies often structured to maximize income over care, and patients whose behavior often does not mirror the severity of their condition. She points to inequality of treatment of patients of different ethnicities, genders, and classes, and to an underclass of health workers—often poor immigrants—whose own personal and familial problems mirror those of their patients. Enfolded in a captivating narrative of life in the facility, Richardson’s book is a revealing literary autoethnography designed for social scientists, health care professionals, and students alike.
A Story of a Marriage Through Dementia and Beyond is the extraordinary, unflinching account from sociologist Laurel Richardson of her love and caregiving through the last period of her husband Ernest Lockridge's life - from his transient amnesia to his death from Lewy Body Dementia. Focusing on the lived experience of the caregiver through the loved one’s journey from mild cognitive impairment to death, the book gives the reader the experience of what the medical diagnoses mean and what has led up to the loss. It shows the complex, nuanced lives of a couple both living with the worst effects of a disease like Lewy Body Dementia, while maintaining, sometimes with hope and laughter, their loving connection nourished through a 40-year marriage. Dementia is a ‘silver tsunami’ - the third leading cause of death amongst senior populations. Richardson’s beautifully written book gives on-the-ground emotional support to those already in service as caregivers and helps prepare others for such service. Hospices, book clubs, and medical and allied professionals will find this book extraordinarily valuable. Weaving in autoethnographic and sociological methods and scholarship, as well as a list of reading and further resources for caregivers and scholars, this book will also appeal to courses in a wide range of disciplines and fields, including health communication, nursing and allied health, courses covering death and dying, end-of-life, and illness care, and, of course, scholars pursuing autoethnography, creative non-fiction, and qualitative methods.
On her death bed, Laurel Richardson’s older sister whispers a deep family secret about Laurel’s birth. The secret upends Laurel’s life. In this outstanding example of literary sociology, the reader joins Laurel’s search for identity, wholeness, and forgiveness.
An exploration of strategies for writing up the same research in different ways - preparing the writer for approaching and addressing diverse audiences.
This book examines university teaching from several perspectives: What male and female professors do in the classroom, their perceptions and feelings about teaching, and how students respond. Data were gathered by observing professors in their classrooms, doing selected unstructured interviews, and soliciting evaluations/feedback from their students. This triangulation of data provides a richness of information and insight into the process of university teaching. In addition to providing useful feedback to professors and administrators, this study integrates several social psychological approaches to gender with more recent feminist formulations. The findings support recently developed perspectives which argue that gender is a constantly created social phenomenon, not one cast securely in the concrete of social structure.
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