Tue, 4 Oct 1994 04:22:08 -0700 for Date: Tue, 4 Oct 1994 07:22:06 -0400 (EDT) From: James Cassell Subject: RE: who is tr young To: Sociology Graduate Student Discussion I picked this bio up from the progressive sociology section of the gopher= =20 server at csf.colorado.edu. There is also a brief history of the Red=20 Feather Inst. Jim ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Jim Cassell jwcassell@UNC.EDU Institute for Research in Social Science Phone: 919-962-0782 University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Fax: 919-962-4777 Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3355 USA Brief R=82sum=82 T. R. Young May 20, 1993 T. R. Young is founder and director of the Red Feather Institute for Advanced Studies in Sociology [1971]. He is editor of the Transforming Sociology Series and author of many articles and books oriented to emancipatory knowledge and participatory science. Young contributes to democratic knowledge processes in politics, economics, medicine, religion, education and the arts. Young has taught social theory, social problems and social psychology at several colleges and universities around the country including Iowa Wesleyan, Rocky Mountain College in Montana, Southwest Missouri State, Colorado State University, the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Michigan at Flint. He held the post of Distinguished Visiting Professor at Texas Women's University in 1991. In 1992-93, he served as Distinguished Visiting Professor at Virginia Tech where he developed a syllabus for very large classes entitled, The Great Flying Chaos Learning Circus, an effort to design an interactively rich course for beginning students in sociology. During the 60s, 70s and 80s, Young was a faculty resource person for student power movements, antiwar activities as well as Civil Rights and the women's movement on campus. Young founded the Martin Luther King Fellowship Fund at Colorado State University the day after King's assassination. It continues to support minority students. Young taught at Makerere University in Uganda in 1971-72 during the difficult days of Idi Amin and was part of an underground network of scholars which smuggled letters and documents to the US media and to members of Congress concerning human rights violations there. Young was appointed an Honorary Research Fellow at Exeter University in 1980 where he visited the major centers of cultural studies there. In 1985, Young participated in the Semester of Sea Program of the University of Pittsburgh, accompanying 350 students around the world to study social problems and stratification of politics, capital and social honor in Pacific Rim countries, Malaysia, India, Turkey, USSR, Yugoslavia and Spain. Young has visited Cuba, Nicaragua and Mexico several times to learn about social problems and social programs there. In 1987, Young was awarded the Distinguished Scholar Award of the Pacific Sociological Society for his work in the political economy and social psychology of sport. Currently, Young is working through the implications of postmodern understandings in the philosophy of science in a four volume set, the first of which is published as The Drama of Social Life (Transaction Books). In recent years, Young has written foundational articles on Chaos theory and nonlinear social dynamics. He carries on a very active schedule of writing, lecturing and engagement in the discipline. His present work is in the sociology of religion grounded in symbolic interaction theory and the human construction of social realities. Young was born in Flint, Michigan, married Dorothy Jean Grace, a childhood friend and has five children from that marriage. Dorothy died in accident in 1981. Young lives and works out of Innisfree Cottage on Lake Isabella in Michigan.