Dorothy Edith Smith
Entering Cohort: 1955
Emeritus Professor, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.
Send Email to Dorothy Smith
My years at Berkeley were in many ways the unhappiest of my life, but I learned a lot inside and outside the formalities of academic instruction: I learned a kind of sociology (including survey methods and mathematical sociology) that I was fundamentally at odds with though I didn?t realize this until later; I learned George Herbet Mead from Tamotsu Shibutani?s brilliant course; I learned a lot I could have done without about North American sexism (I?ve always been grateful to John Clausen who did not share the pervasive sexism of other departmental faculty of the time); I learned a great deal from the Free Speech and Anti-Vietnam War movements on campus though I did not participate very actively because I was not an American citizen and didn?t want to be deported as an English friend of mine had been; I learned a radically different conception of poetry from once hearing Alan Ginsberg recite at Sather Gate; I discovered by accident in the university bookstore a copy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty?s The phenomenology of perception that furthered the intellectual transformation that originated with Shibutani?s course. I resolved when I taught my first undergraduate course in sociology that I had to find a different way of doing sociology. These experiences at Berkeley were foundational to the step I took as I became active in the women?s movement (three or four years after I left) to start writing a sociology that would know how to begin in the actualities of people?s lives.
Dissertation: Power and the Front Line: Social Controls in a State Mental Hospital