Anne Warfield Rawls (born November 20, 1950) is an American sociologist, social theorist and ethnomethodologist. She is Professor of Sociology at Bentley University, Professor for Interaction, Work and Information at the University of Siegen, Germany and Director of the Harold Garfinkel Archive, Newburyport, MA. Rawls has been teaching courses on social theory, social interaction, ethnomethodology and systemic Racism for over forty years. She has also written extensively on Émile Durkheim and Harold Garfinkel, explaining their argument that equality is needed to ground practices in democratic publics, and showing how inequality interferes with the cooperation and reflexivity necessary to successfully engage in complex practices.
Education and career
Rawls received her BA (1976), MA (1979), and PhD (1983) degrees from Boston University, where she studied sociology, philosophy, and classics. While still an undergraduate, she began developing original ideas about grounding a theory of ethics in interactionist sociology. She was particularly inspired by Immanuel Kant, whose notion of a Kingdom of Ends that is grounded in Social Contract had influenced the development of sociology, and by Erving Goffman, and Harold Garfinkel, whose 1975 seminar at Boston University she participated in, and with whom she would later collaborate extensively (see below). Goffman and Garfinkel both built on the notion that self and meaning depend on a collective commitment to the ground-rules of interaction, an idea related to Kant, which influenced her own argument that equality and reciprocity are necessary preconditions for making sense and self in society.
Anne Rawls' study of interaction orders of Race (see below) began in 1971 when she went to night school at Harvard University through an extension program founded by the Lowell family that was open to members of the greater Cambridge community and often taught by Harvard faculty. Taking advantage of this opportunity, Rawls was able to take courses with Ephraim Isaac (now at Princeton), who taught African religions and philosophy, and with Martin Kilson, Harvard’s first African American professor of government, who taught the history of Black politics in the US. Anne Rawls was also able to spend time with Hollis Lynch, then director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University, and with some of his students.
In 1973, at Wheelock College in Boston, Frances Chaput Waksler (a Boston University PhD, and student of George Psathas) introduced Rawls to sociology and the work of Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel, which led her to see how questions of race and justice could be approached through an interactionist sociology. This led her to Boston University in the fall of 1974 to study with George Psathas, Jeff Coulter, and then in 1975 with Harold Garfinkel (and Emanuel Schegloff). Harvey Sacks and Anita Pomerantz also taught at Boston University during this period.
Pursuing degrees in both philosophy and sociology, Rawls took courses in the Philosophy Department at BU with Alasdair MacIntyre, Thomas A. McCarthy, Bernard Elevitch, Erazim Kohák, and John Findlay. Through a cooperative program she was also able to study with Kurt Wolff, Gila Hayim, at Brandeis University and Dieter Henrich at Harvard. She also studied classical and medieval Latin with Emily Albu (pursuing research on women in the classical and medieval period). Yearly conferences in ethnomethodology brought students and colleagues from around the world to Boston University (including Harold Garfinkel, Harvey Sacks, Gail Jefferson, Emanuel Schegloff, Christian Heath, Michael Lynch, Anita Pomerantz, David Sudnow, Charles and Marjorie Harness Goodwin, Wes Sharrock, John Heritage, Rod Watson, Douglas Maynard, Paul Drew, Alene Terasaki, John O’Neill, Jim Heap, and Lindsey Churchill). It was these meetings, and Garfinkel's presence at them in 1975, that eventually led to Rawls' collaborative relationship with Harold Garfinkel.
Rawls received an MA in Philosophy in 1976 and a PhD in Sociology in 1983. Her thesis, titled “Constitutive justice: An interactionist contribution to the understanding of social order and human value,” argues that social order is inseparable from social justice, and that a viable theory of ethics must be grounded in the constitutive requirements of interaction, which is where all social facts, including the self, are ultimately produced. Taking a social contract approach to social order, she argues that self is produced in society, and so cannot serve as its foundation. Instead, interaction and its ground-rules must be the primary unit of analysis.