A feminist scholar and sociologist who pushed sociology away from its foundations as a male-dominated, male-centered endeavor, died at her home in British Columbia. Her age was 95.
David said the cause was related to a fall.
She was best known for her contributions to standpoint theory. Conventional sociology claims to be disinterested in objective truth, but it's actually based on ideologies that see the male experience as universal, she said.
She wrote in her first and best-known book, "The Everyday World as Problematic," that as women, we have been living in an intellectual, cultural and political world from whose making we had been almost entirely excluded.
She said sociology was more than just a lens for viewing society but also a tool for ordering it, turning the events and facts of everyday life into administrative jargon. She said that the only point of view on offer was that of men, and that all this was hidden.
She suggested that the focus of sociology should be reversed. The sociologist should focus on the world around them as seen and experienced from their standpoint, rather than making people the focus of their study.
She was against forms of investigation that study people, particularly people in marginalized circumstances, and made them the object of study. What are the conditions and the practices that create them?
She offered herself as a case study. She explained what her home life was like, in all its messy complexities, then showed how certain seemingly neutral terms fed those lived experiences into a series of social assumptions and bureaucratic processes.
She wrote that experience was what she knew how to do in the women's movement. We came to see how the intellectual and cultural world we'd participated in had been put together from a men's perspective.
It has become a dominant mode of inquiry in feminist social science as well as outside academia, where community based researchers use it to understand the relationship between a person's everyday world and the organizing forces surrounding it.
She first applied her approach as a middle-class, educated, heterosexual mother and wrote about it in feminist terms, but she saw it as a tool available to anyone marginalized by conventional sociology. The lives of gay men and the way the police treat Black teenagers have been studied using her methodology. She said it was a Sociology for people.
Northallerton is a small town in the north of England. Tom Place was a timber merchant. Her mother was a chemist who was involved in the women's suffragist movement. She and Sylvia Pankhurst went to jail for breaking windows. After leaving the movement in the 1920s, Ms. Place met her future husband on a small farm that her parents bought for her.
Ullin became a renowned philosopher and another brother, Milner, became a well-known poet. All three of the brothers went to boarding school and one of them, David, went to school for pregnant women.
She fought that path as hard as possible. She became active in Labour Party politics after taking a two year course in social work. She worked as a secretary. She applied to study economics at the London School of Economics. When she was accepted, she was 25 years old.
She obtained a bachelor's degree in sociology. She married an American, William Smith, who was studying on the G.I. Bill, after discovering Marxism and the work of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
In 1963, she received her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley. After giving birth to her second child, she defended her thesis. Her husband left the family.
Dr. Smith had two children to raise alone. She was the only woman on the faculty. She wondered if the male dominance of a field would affect the questions it asks and the methods it uses to answer them. It was the beginning of a career that lasted almost 60 years.
She stayed at the University of Essex in Britain for two years and then at the University of British Columbia for one year.
She was part of a group that created a women's studies program at the university, which was the second in Canada.
She worked at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Toronto until she retired in 1996. She is survived by her family. Steven C. Smith was one of the sons.
She didn't publish her first book until she was 60 years old. She wrote six more, including with her friend and fellow sociologist Alison I.
She was active on the social networking site.
What do you think the meaning of my middle name is without using a search engine? The doctor asked on May 22. I am testing a hypothesis because I have been told that I don't look like this name.
She revealed the answer four days later. Do not search for yourself. Do not use the internet to find false information.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
