What to read after In the Field?

In the Field: A Sociologist's Journey, by Renée C. Fox, is a narrative account of her life as a sociologist. It is not a memoir in the conventional sense of the term. Rather, it is an ethnographic autobiography that draws on the vast amount of notes and documents that chronicle the span of her career and the places to which her perpetual field research has carried her.

Fox's accounts of the firsthand research that she has conducted include studies of an “experiment perilous” hospital community formed by patients and physicians on a metabolic research ward; the professional education and socialization of medical students; social, cultural, and historical factors affecting medical research and research careers in a European society; organ transplantation, dialysis, and the development and implantation of an artificial heart; bioethics as a sociological phenomenon; and of the moral dilemmas associated with their medical humanitarian and human rights witnessing and advocacy action that Doctors Without Borders encounters.

Integrating her research and this book are the recurrent themes that infuse her work— training for uncertainty; the allocation of scarce material and non-material resources; the relationship between self and others, the individual and the community, detachment and concern, and the particular and the universal; the “double effects” of human action—especially the harm that can result from intended good; and the questions of meaning posed by illness and accident, pain and suffering, and by death. It is Fox's commitment as a teacher and mentor of generations of students, in the United States and wherever she has traveled, with whom she has shared the experiences and lessons of her life “in the field,” that lies at the heart of this book. This volume will inspire new generations of social researchers.