Last Writes: A Daybook for a Dying Friend
Laurel Richardson
2007. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Writing Lives Series, Volume 3. 184 pgs. ISBN: 1598741872.**
"Last Writes is a beautiful, comforting, and unflinchingly honest portrayal of the intricacies of long term friendship between two women, one dying, both giving and taking care. Laurel Richardson once again has opened a new space for autoethno- graphic and intimate scholarship as she invites readers into her inner, relational, and sociological experience of friendship, dying, and personal writing. I will use this in my classes—qualitative methods, autoethnography, emotions, communicating grief and loss—and give copies to all my friends. This story is a literary and socio- logical gift to us all."
--Carolyn Ellis, University of South Florida
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.
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Travels with Ernest: Crossing the Literary-Ethnographic Divide
Laurel Richardson and Ernest Lockridge
2004. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, a Division of Rowman and Littlefield. 256 pgs. ISBN: 0759105979.*
"In Travels With Ernest the authors break down societal barriers of alienation by sharing their conversations, thoughts, experiences. The Travels may function as a sociology text book--after all, sociologists RECORD--but it's also the actual story of two people who love each other and share their work and their lives.--I treasure this book."
--Liz James, Liz James Artscene
Travels with Ernest builds on the shared geographical travels (Death Valley, Shenandoah, Ireland, Copenhagen, Russia, Beirut, Sedona, St. Pete Beach, Bermuda) of Laurel Richardson, sociologist, and Ernest Lockridge, novelist. "We experience the same sites, but refract them through different professional eyes, genders, sensibilities, biographies, and spiritual and emotional longings. We each independently write a personal narrative essay, inspired by the travel; we read each other's narrative; we engage in wide-ranging (taped/transcribed) conversations across disciplinary lines. We talk about writing--ethics, authorship, collaboration, witnessing, fact/fiction, audiences, relationships and the intersection of observation and imagination. And we talk about our relationship, our blended family, our biographies, and the larger world around us. The 'travels' in the title, thus, are physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual."
The book both shows and discusses. What do you do with your material? How can it be crafted in different ways? How do you write yourself into your text without becoming the center? How can one incorporate autoethnography into cultural studies? How can you collaborate across disciplines? Gender? Sensibilities? How can you honor/retain independence of vision? What constitutes 'witnessing'? How do you write about cultures in a poststructural world? What about memory? Audience? Discourses? The Return of the Author?
Travels with Ernest, moreover, can be read as a postmodern love-story--the story of two people who love each other, their work, and their travels--of a two-career academic marriage whose partners have found a way to embed their work into their lives.
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Feminist Frontiers, Sixth Edition
Laurel Richardson, Verta Taylor, and Nancy Whittier
2003. New York, NY: McGraw Hill. 560 pgs. ISBN:0072824239.*
"The most widely used anthology of feminist writings and the first to incorporate issues of sexual orientation and sexual diversity, Feminist Frontiers has stood the test of time. With readings that cut across disciplines and generational lines, Feminist Frontiers presents the full diversity of women's issues and experiences, exploring their similarities as well as their differences. Feminist Frontiers offers analyses of the causes and consequences of gender inequality and introduces students to feminist theory and methodology. A sociological analysis opens each of the four Parts and eleven Sections of the book. Boxed inserts, with news articles, humor, and other writings from the popular press, complement the readings."Amazon.com Reviews
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Fields of Play: Constructing an Academic Life
Laurel Richardson
1997. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 272 pgs. ISBN:0813523796.*
Winner of the Charles H. Cooley Award for Best Book, 1998
Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction
A culmination of ten years of work-in-progress; in a series of traditional and experimental writings----the book records an intellectual journey--displacing boundaries and creating new ways of reading and writing. Applying the sociological imagination to the writing process, the book connects one's life to one's work.
The book asks: 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 professional and personal integrity in today's university?
"A dazzling display of erudition and creativity..."Deirdre Bair, National Book Award Winner
"This book is electrifying. I could hardly put it down…it is beautiful, profound, magnificently terrifying in its power, and deeply, deeply connecting..."Bronwyn Davies, Professor of Education, University of Western Sydney
"Deeply engaging, movingly written with grace, elegance, and clarity, the book stimulates readers to situate their own writing in personal, social, and political contexts."Amazon.com Reviews
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Gender and University Teaching: A Negotiated Difference
Anne Statham, Laurel Richardson, Judith A. Cook
1991. Suny Series in Gender and Society. Albany, NY: State University of New York. 202 pgs. ISBN:0791407047.
What do professors say about teaching? What do they actually do in their classrooms? And how do students evaluate them? Does gender affect one's teaching style and students' evaluations? This book has been a valuable aid to new professors and those going up for tenure review as well as to administrators and legal-assistants as it provides statistical and interview data which support the hypothesis that women's roles in the professorate are more complex than men's.
The book also provides a carefully constructed study of how gender is a constantly created social phenomenon--a negotiation through sentiments and behaviors.
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Writing Strategies: Reaching Diverse Audiences
Laurel Richardson
1990. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Press. 72 pgs. ISBN:0803935226.*
More than a decade since it was first published, Writing Strategies continues to be a best selling text--useful for graduate students and early career professors in a variety of fields. The book considers different rhetorical ways of crafting writing so that work can be published in various venues at various stages in the research process.
"Richardson uses her own experiences to explore strategies for writing up the same research in different ways. By showing the reader the stylistic and intellectual imperatives and conventions of different writing media, she prepares the writer for approaching and successfully addressing diverse audiences. Set in a framework which highlights the importance of a self-conscious approach to ethnographic writing, Richardson's book will be useful not only to ethnographers, but to researchers and teachers of language and writing, and to all social scientists trying to present their material in different ways."Amazon.com Reviews
"...[The book] explicates the fragile line form data to concept to text and back. [As such, Writing Strategies] is a good place to begin and end [one's project]."Peter K. Manning
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The New Other Woman: Contemporary Single Women in Affairs With Married Men
Laurel Richardson
1985. New York, NY: The Free Press. 192 pgs. ISBN:0029268915.*
Combining sociological research with personal stories, the book explains why single women become involved with married men, how their liaisons progress, and what happens when the end.
"A masterpiece--written in a lean yet colorful style, supported by bibliographic references and interview materials, and informed by feminist consciousness."Choice
"This is an examination of affairs between single women and married men, a phenomenon that, the author states, has increased because there are fewer desirable, eligible men available for single women over 25. PW noted that "sociologist Richardson presents the pros and cons objectively, with interviews with real-life Other Women."Publishers' Weekly
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