Prize-winning sociologist Lloyd H. Rogler, a founder of cultural psychiatry, gives us an intimately revealing, brilliantly narrated account of fieldwork from San Juan, Puerto Rico to inner-city New Haven. Using his decades of field experience and creative fiction he explores the daily reality of his "informants"—the Barrio Professors—and uncovers the clash between scientific models and local experience over schizophrenia, the political workings of community, and the power of serendipity. Rogler's multi-layered exploration of the relationship between researcher and community, as well as his candid assessment of field strategies, make the book useful also for methods courses. Barrio Professors is engrossing enough for the general public and an excellent text for courses in ethnic studies, sociology, qualitative methods, psychiatry, public health, anthropology, and social work.
Biography
Lloyd H. Rogler Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Lloyd H. Rogler began his research career studying how families living in the economically impoverished neighborhoods of San Juan coped with schizophrenia. Since then, his research and theoretical formulations have helped to achieve legitimacy for the field of cultural psychiatry. He started his career in 1957 after receiving a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Iowa, and has had academic appointments at the University of Puerto Rico, Yale University, and Case Western Reserve University. He has also taught at Columbia University and at the New York/Bellevue Center, and has lectured at Harvard and at the Medical College and Graduate School of Medical Sciences of Cornell University. He has served on national and local public service organizations, such as the National Advisory Mental Health Council of the National Institute of Mental Health (1972–76), and in New York City’s Mayor’s Commission on Science and Technology (1984–86). In 1974, he was selected to be Fordham University’s Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities, a Chair founded and endowed by the Regents of the State of New York. After appointment to the same Chair as Professor Emeritus in 2002, he continued a busy schedule of writing, teaching, lecturing, and consulting.Rogler’s work has earned him major awards in each of the disciplines in which he has published—sociology, psychiatry, and psychology. Among his numerous awards are the University of Iowa’s Distinguished Alumni Award given to him in 1981; the John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, conferred upon him in 1990; the American Psychiatric Association’s Simon Bolivar Award in 1996; and the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Career Award for the Practice of Sociology awarded to him in 2002. Columbia University health economists in 2006 designated him a “Superstar” in medical research because of the numerous citations to his publications
