With profound sadness we announce the passing of Dr. Harry F. Wolcott on October 31, 2012.  Harry had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease and more recently, from esophageal cancer.

A student of George Spindler at Stanford University, Harry graduated with his Ph.D. in 1964 and immediately began his professorial career in the College of Education at the University of Oregon, where he remained until he retired in 1999 as Professor Emeritus of Anthropology (http://pages.uoregon.edu/anthro/people/faculty/emeritus-faculty/#wolcott).  A prolific ethnographer of education, he was active in publishing until 2010, when his Ethnography Lessons: A Primer was released by Left Coast Press, and he continued to appear in public presentations until 2011.

Harry was in on the “ground floor” of the emerging field of educational anthropology, serving as the Council on Anthropology and Education’s fourth president (1972-73), and, with Elizabeth Eddy, sharing the inaugural George and Louise Spindler Award (1989).  Harry launched his editorship of Anthropology and Education Quarterly (1983-85) with his own lead article, the first in the “Sneaky Kid” trilogy.  Over the years he provided the methodological backbone for our discipline, seamlessly interweaving the applied and the theoretical, raising tough – even courageous – questions of validity in ethnographic research, innovating new forms of research such as autoethnography, and bringing the arts into mainline anthropology. Through his writings, mentorship, and personal encounters he was one of the most influential scholars in the field of educational anthropology.

Harry’s students remember him as “a demanding but extremely helpful dissertation advisor,” a “wonderful colleague and friend, highly intelligent and very funny,” a “generous dinner host,” a “life-time doktorvater who read and critiqued his former students’ book manuscripts and journal article drafts many years after they completed their work with him,” a “true mentor and friend” who drew students from around the world, and “a wonderful scholar, teacher, doctoral supervisor, and friend.”  He was an educator in every sense of the word: Who but Harry could wrangle a year of intensive field work documenting the role of African beer gardens in Bulawayo society, and then use the published results to inspire his students on the distinction between etic and emic research perspectives?

Harry will be honored at a session of this year’s AAA Meeting scheduled for 4-5:45 pm Wednesday, November 14 (Hilton Franciscan D).  The session will engage the corpus of Harry’s work and, in lieu of his planned discussant commentary, will provide an opportunity for those in attendance to remember him and to reflect on his many contributions to the field.  In addition, plans are under way to establish a new CAE award in Harry’s name for exemplary contributions to “Genuine Ethnography in Education” (as defined by Harry).

According to Harry’s wishes, there will be no funeral or service.  His obituary will appear in The Eugene Register Guard on Sunday, November 4.  Harry is survived by his long-time partner, Norman Delue, and a legion of former students and colleagues.  Cards may be sent to his home address: 85711 S. Willamette St., Eugene, OR 97405.

Harry will be greatly missed in the field of anthropology and education.  He leaves an unforgettable legacy in his scholarship, his students, and all those whose lives he touched and changed for the better.

Respectfully submitted,

Ray Barnhardt
Heewon Chang
Teresa L. McCarty

We are delighted to announce our third cohort of CAE Early Career Presidential Fellows. This year the committee selected six fellows from a large pool of outstanding emerging scholars. We look forward to working closely with this group at the November meetings, along with our previous cohorts and encourage you to meet them.

Amy Brown
Earning a Ph.D. in social anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin in 2011, Amy Brown’s work looks at large and persistent questions around education equity asking how increasing privatization of public education affects teaching and learning practices. In particular, she has examined how the reliance on private sector funding has shaped constructions of gender, class and race as well as distribution of power and resources. She writes: “Through exploring more creative ways to collaborate with the communities we study, as well as more creative and interdisciplinary ways to gather and present data, school ethnographers can create a broader audience for research and social critique and can trouble the barrier between researcher and subject.”

Juliette de Wolfe
A doctoral student in anthropology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, Juliette de Wolfe has focused her research on the daily experiences of parents with children who have been diagnosed with autism. After finishing her dissertation, Juliette intends to initiate public discussion about ability and disability, with an exploration of the multiple meanings of these words and labels that illuminate how people are treated in communities and by the media. As she explains, “I have found anthropology immeasurably helpful for engaging with such issues and have recently made a commitment to see that conversations about these issues have a place in the CAE.”

Reva Jaffe-Walter
Earning her doctorate in Urban Education at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, Reva Jaffe-Walter recently conducted ethnographic research in Denmark and the United States that is focused on the national discourses and policies of immigrant youth in each country. In Denmark she documented the experiences of first and second generation Muslim youth, illuminating the conflicting discourses in the schools and society. Her work exposes how educators’ discourses and practices that are intended to promote integration and mobility for Muslim immigrants can encourage them to withdraw further from society. She concludes: “My work points to the importance of teacher education initiatives and teacher learning structures within schools that provide teachers with the skills and professional supports to support the academic and emotional needs of immigrant youth and emergent bilinguals. It also reveals how, in the absence of this knowledge, teachers default to blaming students and immigrant families and perpetuating deficit discourses.”

Ariana Mangual Figueroa
Earning her doctorate in education at the University of California, Berkeley, Ariana Mangual Figueroa is currently an assistant professor at Rutgers University. Her work focuses on mixed-status Mexican families, including parents and older children who are undocumented migrants along with younger children who are U.S.-born citizens. Through a close examination of talk and daily practices, she illustrates the differential opportunities available to these groups based on migratory status. In addition, she is interested to explore and write about the difficulties associated with conducting research in vulnerable populations. Among other goals, she is “interested in deepening
[her] analysis of the intersections between the state immigration and education policy and the everyday interactions that take place between parents, teachers, and students.”

Silvia Nogueron-Liu
After graduating from Arizona State University, Silvia Nogueron-Liu became an assistant professor at the University of Georgia. In her work, she documents how recent technology users from immigrant communities understand digital communication and social media, including how they use these tools in their daily lives. Among other topics, she has also explored the ways that language ideologies and family language policies shape how immigrant mothers and children make choices about their technology use. As she explains, “Our positionality as researchers and ethnographers shifts as we become co-instructors practitioners and guides in digital media projects with minority students. Our reflections in fieldwork require new ways of thinking about ethics, representation, publishing, and authoring.”

Dolma Roder
A recent graduate from Arizona State University, Dolma Roder locates her work in Bhutan where she examines gender relations in state-sponsored schools. She was curious to understand why Bhutan, a country known for its gender equity, has so few women in politics and public life. While the dominant narrative was that women were choosing not to participate in these contexts, she uncovered the ways in which discourses of women’s “limitations” shaped their decisions as did the constant teasing and harassment they experienced. In sum, her work “challenges powerful assumption within international developmental policy and practice that uncritically see education as both unequivocally beneficial and empowering, particular for women in the developing world.”