Chapter 7: My Learning Journey: Seven Turning Points in My Life as a Gender-and-Race Scholar

My old friend, Bill Kahn, once said to me many years ago, “All learning takes place in the context of relationships.” My quest to study gender and, later, race, as well as my research, attests to the wisdom of that statement. Over the course of my 40-plus-year learning journey, I have encountered a series of turning points, each punctuated by relationships with one or more key people who invested in me and taught me to see the social world—and myself—in new ways. At each turn, I had the opportunity to learn from and with amazing people, and that learning has profoundly shaped how I think about these topics as well as how I study and teach about them.