Jason Turowetz, Lecturer, University of California-Santa Barbara
Anne Warfield Rawls brings decades of pathbreaking scholarship, teaching, service, and mentorship to her role as co-editor of Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. As professor of sociology at Bentley University; professor of interaction, work, and information at the University of Siegen (Germany), and director of the Harold Garfinkel Archive in Newburyport, MA, she has made major scholarly contributions in the areas of race and ethnicity, social theory, sociology of science and knowledge, and ethnomethodology.
She has trained several generations of scholars in the interactionist tradition of Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel. In 2024, Rawls received the Garfinkel-Sacks Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis. Rawls has coordinated significant international research collaborations centered on the Garfinkel Archive, including dozens of projects supported by a multimillion-euro grant from the German Research Foundation. With her years of innovative scholarship and institutional leadership, Rawls joins her long-time collaborator and fellow co-editor Waverly Duck (University of California-Santa Barbara) in pursuit of a bold, exciting vision for the journal.
Rawls’s scholarship is rooted in the interaction order tradition, into which she has played a central role in its formulation and elaboration. A new article written in collaboration with Derek Coates (University of California-Berkeley) and Duck showcases their work on interaction orders of sightedness and race and will be published in a special issue of Symbolic Interaction in 2026. Rawls has been a key figure in contemporary scholarship on Durkheim, including her influential book, Epistemology and Practice: Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Cambridge University Press 2008), and on Goffman, whose arguments about self and interaction order she has advanced and developed in her own work. She was also a close collaborator of Harold Garfinkel, editing and introducing his long-awaited book, Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism (Rowman and Littlefield 2002). Rawls also edited and introduced Garfinkel’s previously unpublished early-career writings in Seeing Sociologically: The Routine Grounds of Social Action (Routledge 2006), Toward a Sociological Theory of Information (Routledge 2008), and Harold Garfinkel: Parsons’ Primer (Springer 2019), with Jason Turowetz (University of California-Santa Barbara). In doing so, she brought attention to Garfinkel’s important contributions to the sociology of race, grounding them in the Durkheimian social fact lineage, with its emphasis on social justice. At the same time, she developed an original interpretation of Du Bois’s double consciousness argument, which she incorporated into an interactionist theory of race that laid the groundwork for her multi-award-winning book Tacit Racism (University of Chicago Press 2020), coauthored with Duck. In that book, Rawls and Duck synthesize the ideas of Du Bois, Goffman, Garfinkel, and Durkheim in an original argument about interaction orders of race, sets of practices, and tacit expectations that encode distinct forms of racial commonsense that can come into conflict when members of different communities interact, resulting in the reproduction of race-based inequality.
Editorial Experience and Service to the Discipline
Rawls’s extensive editorial experience includes serving as associate editor for three peer-reviewed journals: Journal of Classical Sociology, Qualitative Sociology, and Journal of Social Theory and Research. She is also co-editor, with Duck and Kevin Whitehead (University of California-Santa Barbara) of Black Lives Matter: Ethnomethodological and Conversation Analytic Studies of Race and Racism in Everyday Interaction (Routledge 2020) and has served as a guest editor for several journal special issues, including a 2016 issue of Journal of Classical Sociology, “New Durkheim Scholarship: Morality, Symbolism, Personhood, and the Sacred.” She was also managing editor of the Philosophical Forum under editor Marx Wartofsky, while she was a graduate student at Boston University.
Rawls was founding co-chair of ASA’s Section on Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, a role she later reprised, 2018–2020. She has also served as session and workshop organizer within and outside of the Association, and on ASA Section committees for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, Theory, and the History of Sociology and Social Thought. At Bentley University, she has played a key role in launching a new major (BA) in diversity, equity, and inclusion, among the first of its kind in the United States. She also teaches Capitalism and Slavery in addition to Race and Racism.
Vision for the Journal
Rawls’s vision for the journal complements that of co-editor Duck. She is committed to making the journal an inclusive space for scholars working across the discipline and those in neighboring fields who could enter into mutual beneficial dialogue with sociologists of race and ethnicity. With her extensive experience working across disciplinary lines, evidenced by projects with the University of Siegen involving, in addition to sociologists, specialists in media studies, anthropology, philosophy, computer science, medicine, education, and engineering, she is well-positioned to widen the journal’s scope and reach.
Rawls is also committed to making the journal a home for scholars with diverse methodological backgrounds and sensibilities. In keeping with the journal’s tradition of publishing rigorous, theoretically informed scholarship of all stripes, she encourages contributions from researchers whose work sheds light on the reproduction of racial inequality in everyday and institutional settings, at the local, national, and international levels.