John Kitsuse

As I try to pinpoint how John Kitsuse became an unending inspiration, I keep reflecting my sense that John seemed to find the sociological career, not so much as something to become but as a vehicle for expressing who he was. He was a careful, sensitive man, and, while his publications mounted up to an impressive body of work, he was the rare sociologist whose contributions were significant in quality far more than what they measured in quantity. I don't recall any fluff in my reading of his work, and everything I absorbed from John, both from his writings and from the times I shared with him, penetrated deeply. Even his sense of humor was sociological. If Goffman wrote about the dramaturgy of social life, John Kitsuse enacted it. People were always laying identities on others, a matter he noted with gestures and prosody that readily put people's expres sions in 'scare' quotation marks. No doubt this came from disturbing experiences of finding himself to be taken to be a kind of person he did not recognize or embrace. I never pushed to find out what those experiences were; I assumed some were results of the racism he lived in his early years while others were more idiosyncratic. Maybe, were he not my senior, I would have asked him about the relationship between his intellectual sensibility and his biography, but I don't think so. I loved the delicate balance of his personality and would have hated to do anything to risk upsetting it even slightly. Some memory flashes

Aesthetics · Art history · Biography · Dramaturgy · Literature · Psychoanalysis · Reading (process · Sensibility · Sociology · Academic Research and Education Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology

• Five Ways to Improve Constructionist Craft in Social Problems Inquiries

  Open Access•Peter R Ibarra•The American Sociologist•2019

  Add to list