March
29, 2002
"Big
Ideas Are Important": A Look at Eleanor R. Townsley
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Photo: Paul Schnaittacher
Eleanor
R. Townsley recently was awarded tenure.
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On
March 9, Mount Holyoke’s board of trustees approved recommendations
to award tenure and promotion, effective July 1, to three faculty
members: Mary A. Renda, history; Joseph Smith, art; and Eleanor
R. Townsley, sociology. This week, and in coming issues, CSJ features
the soon-to-be tenured professors.
It’s actually
much cooler than it sounds!" says Eleanor Townsley, assistant
professor of sociology. Seated beneath a pair of aboriginal art
prints that hang in her Merrill Hall office, Townsley, a native
of Australia, explains that her research considers the role of
the intellectual in society. But when it comes to elaborating
on her work for a general audience, the otherwise voluble professor
falls momentarily silent. Grappling with a way to sum it up, Townsley
says, "I look at concrete groups of intellectuals in particular
times and places and the choices and decisions that they made.
How do ideas affect social change? How do ideas affect courses
of action? Big ideas are important. Fundamental understandings
are very consequential in social life."
Townsley offers, by
way of example, a trope, or figure of speech. "One of the
standard examples I have used for many years is from the Gulf
War, when George Bush Sr. talked about the 'rape of Kuwait.’
It was very common usage at the time, a standard formulation of
what was going on in the Middle East. So, I ask my students what
the sex of Kuwait is, and the U.S., and the genders of all the
main players. The statement, or the trope, immediately references
a rape narrative and a rescue. It sets up baseline expectations
for the resolution of that narrative. It tells you who the heroes
and villains are. With that very basic phrase you can do an entire
analysis. Why? Because people are already embedded in a set of
narrative structures that they learned when they were very young.
The students understand immediately once they do this analysis
what the effects are, at least in a preliminary way. To get people
to ask, Is this a definition of the situation that I really accept?—to
have students ask that routinely when they’re presented with
a situation—is, I think, a useful thing."
Advisees Allyssa Whitbeck
’02 and Jenny Simon ’02 say they’ve profited from
Townsley’s insistence on critical reflection. Whitbeck, who
calls Townsley a "role model," says the professor’s
vision is "long-term. Her concern is not with a particular
exam or paper, rather how critical- thinking skills will benefit
students throughout their lives." Simon notes that Townsley
"has a way of sparking her students’ interest in a topic
and encouraging them to think further and develop their own argument
and perspective. She really inspires us to find out who we are,
what we are genuinely interested in, and to go after our dreams."
A comparative-historical
sociologist, Townsley focuses her research on social science professionalization
in the United States during the 1960s. Townsley points out the
immense power wielded by professions. Witness, for example, the
influence on society of medical doctors, who, she notes, "control
medicine and the production of new medical practitioners."
Among academics, the organization of professions decides, among
other things, "who controls the collection of data and its
analysis," says Townsley—a factor that holds particular
significance for the number-crunching field of sociology.
Another major research
interest for Townsley has involved a collaboration with Gil Eyal
at the University of California at Berkeley and Ivan Szelenyi
at Yale—a process that Townsley calls "one of the great
delights" of her academic life. Their research, which looks
at the role of the intelligentsia in transitions from socialism
in Eastern Europe, has produced a book, Making Capitalism without
Capitalists: The New Ruling Elites in Eastern Europe (1998).
The volume, which has been translated and published in Romania
and is slated for publication in Korea and China, has garnered
strong reactions—both positive and negative—from radicals
as well as conservatives, promising, says Townsley, "an extended
conversation" that has already resulted in a response by
the authors of Making Capitalism, published last year in
the American Journal of Sociology.
Entering her sixth
year at Mount Holyoke, Townsley views tenure as "a dividing
line after which I get to ask once again: What’s the work
of my life?" One of her post-tenure challenges is, as she
sees it, is "to build on the connection between my research
and teaching." That link has already begun to take shape
in a community-based learning course, Practicing Sociology (Sociology
224), which Townsley created in conjunction with Mount Holyoke’s
archives and special collections. Sociology 224 students have
mined oral histories of Mount Holyoke faculty members created
during the 1970s and interviewed panels of retired MCH faculty
and staff and their partners. The course, says Townsley, who also
teaches gender issues, "partners my interest in intellectuals
and intellectual life—in this particularly interesting institutional
case of Mount Holyoke—with what it meant to be a woman and
an intellectual."
Wherever her own intellectual
curiosity ranges, Townsley, as Jenny Simon notes, "is passionate
about the subjects she teaches," which, as it turns out,
really are much cooler than they sound.
Townsley earned a
bachelor’s degree from Australia’s University of Queensland
and a doctorate from the University of California at Los Angeles.
She is the coauthor, with Gil Eyal and Ivan Szelenyi, of Making
Capitalism without Capitalists (1998). Her essay, "'The
Sixties' Trope" appeared recently in Theory, Culture &
Society (Vol. 17, No. 6).
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