I received my doctorate in sociology from Ohio State. My first professional position was in the medical school of the University of Missouri. Propelled by the urge to do hands-on fieldwork I moved to Chicago where I worked as a nursing assistant. Then I wrote Making Gray Gold: Narratives of Nursing Home Care, hoping to portray nursing homes from the standpoint of nursing assistants and residents. Of late, as in the last 20 years, I've been obsessed with the prospect of a constitutionally embedded Right to Health Care. This quest has taken me, ethnographically, into the realm of being uninsured (and writing from that standpoint), and into many countries, especially Canada where I lived for several years under the Canada Health Act. This research is now emerging as a book called Running for Coverage: Searching for the Right to Health Care, forthcoming from Routledge in the Aging and Society Series. I am retired and live in Colorado.
Keywords: ethnography, institutional ethnography, U.S. and Canadian Health Services, care work, capitalism, writing for the social sciences