Douglas Harper
American sociologist
Douglas A. Harper (born 1948) is an American sociologist and photographer. He is the holder of the Rev. Joseph A. Lauritis, C.S.Sp. Endowed Chair in Teaching with Technology at Duquesne University, a chair funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.
Biography
Harper was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States. He earned a B.A. from Macalester College in 1970 and a PhD in sociology from Brandeis University. While doing research for his PhD dissertation about railroad tramps, he rode freight trains for 20,000 miles (32,000 km) in the western United States.
Career
After graduation, Harper wrote a book, Good Company, about railroad tramps.
Harper made extensive use of photo elicitation interviews in his 1987 book, Working Knowledge, a sociological treatment of the rural bricoleur in America. His 2001 publication, Changing Works, applied the same method to the historical reconstruction of cultural memory.
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This entry incorporates text from “Douglas Harper” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.