ABSTRACT
A major tenet of my work for more than three decades is that the life experiences and values – as well as the historical and cultural context – influence the questions, findings, and interpretations of social scientists and educators. My research and scholarship is a case study of the influence of life story, socialization, and context on research and scholarship. I was born the year that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States officially entered the Second World War. A mantra of the United States during the war was that it was fighting to save democracy abroad. Yet the racial and socialclass apartheid into which I was socialized and into which I came on age in the 1950s and 1960s was a stark contradiction of the nation’s mantra about fighting for democracy.
