As promised last month, Ethnography.com is having a reset. Not only will we post more, we will have more people doing it. Most importantly, we will have Julie Garza-Withers posting and editing to her heart’s content.
As you can see from her biography (already posted), Julie comes to us via working class rural southern California. She somehow avoided the career track at Del Taco (a California fast-food joint), or a full career waitressing at a diner, before landing in Barnes and Noble in Chico, California, where she developed further her affinity for books.
From Barnes and Noble, Julie made the short hop over to California State University, Chico, where she found her way to the Sociology Department in 1999 or so. After finishing her BA, she wandered across the hall to the Social Science Department where she earned a MA. Her Master’s work involved ethnographic work watching workplace conflict between women.
Since then, Julie has had a career in teaching sociology at Butte College, and Chico State. She continues to develop interests in the culture of the working class, and its intersections with race, gender, and other forms of social stratification, and expects to blog about such issues frequently. She was also involved in the production of the movie “If These Halls Could Talk,” by Director Lee Mun Wah, and does diversity workshops with Stir Fry Seminars.
Julie also has web-design skills, which I do not have. I have been told repeatedly that Ethnography.com looks very 2005. This is old enough to look dorky, but not old enough to be classic. So Julie will be helping to redesign the web-site in coming weeks.
As always, we are looking for anyone interested in ethnography, anthropology, sociology, etc. If you are interested, please contact either Julie or myself!
Tony Waters is czar and editor of Ethnography.com. He came to us from the Sociology department at California State University at Chico where he has been a professor since 1996. In 2016 though he suddenly found himself with a new gig at Payap University in northern Thailand where he is on the faculty of the Peace Studies Department. He has also been a guest professor in Germany, and Tanzania. In the past, his main interests have been international development and refugees in Thailand, Tanzania, and California. This reflects a former career in the Peace Corps (Thailand), and refugee camps (Thailand and Tanzania). His books include: Crime and Immigrant Youth (1999), Bureaucratizing the Good Samaritan (2001), The Persistence of Subsistence Agriculture: Life Beneath of the Marketplace (2007), When Killing is a Crime (2007), and Schooling, Bureaucracy, and Childhood: Bureaucratizing the Child (2012). His hobby is trying to learn strange languages–and the mistakes that that implies. Tony is a prolific academic, you can read more of his work at academia.edu.or purchase one (or more!) of his books from Amazon.com.