Douglas Harper

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. He earned a B.A. from Macalester College in 1970 and a Ph.D. in sociology from Brandeis University. While doing research for his Ph.D. 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.

Harper later co-authored books on post-colonial culture in Hong Kong, Italian food culture, and the semiotics of Italian fascism, in which he researched images as method of cross-cultural communication. In 2014, he studied the sociology of public space in the Italian piazza and in the de-industrialized regions of the American Rust Belt.