Rick
Fantasia's childhood was passed on the meanish streets of northern
Manhattan and his adolescence in an impossibly rural village in
upstate New York . As a community college student he proudly served
in an anti-war movement that included Vietnam veterans, manual
workers, and high school dropouts, providing him with a rich,
but unsentimental education. Spending a year in Paris in a program
for foreign students at the Sorbonne, Fantasia lived in a perfectly
squalid studio apartment in a lively North African neighborhood
in the north of the city, where he discovered the best jazz clubs,
attended lectures by the likes of Genet, Baldwin, and Abbie Hoffman,
and took extramural courses in "intermediate street warfare,"
"tracking Sartre," and "dining in Paris on under two dollars a
day". He learned more about U.S. society while in Paris than he
ever could have learned at home. Roaming widely across the 1970's
as an itinerant student (through several academic institutions),
as a worker (in a steel foundry, a hospital, in a tire factory
and in a paper mill) and as an organizer (both designated and
self-declared), he moved to ever more refined venues, from Paris
to Vancouver, to Boston, to East Orange, New Jersey, to Buffalo,
New York. He was a participant in the National Teacher Corps,
a Federal program to prepare those from "disadvantaged backgrounds"
to teach in "disadvantaged schools", while completing
a B.S. degree at Upsala College , a venerable, century-old, fully-accredited
institution that has since disappeared, leaving no forwarding
address. While working as a counselor to adolescents labeled "juvenile
delinquents" in Niagara Falls , he earned a master's degree
in social science at the State University of New York at Buffalo
with a concentration in sociology and history.
Fantasia moved to Northampton in 1978 B.G. (Before Gentrification)
to attend graduate school at the University of Massachusetts and
was awarded a Ph.D. in Sociology in 1982. He has been teaching
at Smith since the fall of that year. Awarded a Leverhulme Visiting
Fellowship at the University of Sussex in England for 1985-86,
he spent his time writing a book and presenting lectures at various
universities as well as to coal miners in Yorkshire and in Wales
(where he was made an honorary member of the Onllwyn Miner's Lodge,
a venerated local branch of the National Union of Mineworkers).
He spent most of his Saturday nights that year attending fringe
theatre performances across London , and afterward joining the
picketlines of locked-out newspaper workers at Rupert Murdoch's
printing plant in East London .
At Smith College , where he is Professor of Sociology, Fantasia
regularly teaches "Class and Society," "Urban Sociology," a seminar
on "Workers' Movements" and various courses in the sociology of
culture and the arts. The reading lists for his courses tend to
be punctuated by the various works of the late French sociologist,
Pierre Bourdieu, with whom Fantasia was privileged to have been
associated and from whom he relearned the practice of sociology.
His research interests concern questions of labor and of culture,
as well as with their interpenetration, both in the U.S. and in
France . For over a decade he has been conducting research on
the "social life" of American mass culture in France , with particular
attention to the consequences of neo-liberalism for the French
gastronomic field. In recent years he has presented lectures on
his work to audiences at Yale, UC Berkeley, the University of
Southern California, MIT, the University of Chicago, Harvard, Northwestern,
UCLA, the University of Geneva, Middlebury College, the Ecole
Normale Superieure and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales in Paris, the Open University in England, the University
of Connecticut, Princeton University, the University of Massachusetts,
SUNY Stony Brook, "The Center for Working Class Studies"
at Youngstown State University, and the Culinary Institute of
America.
Rick Fantasia's publications include the book, CULTURES OF SOLIDARITY
(Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1988), which won
three different awards from the American Sociological Association.
He co-authored HOMELESSNESS: A Sourcebook, (NY: Facts on File,
Inc., 1994); and co-edited BRINGING CLASS BACK IN: Historical
and Contemporary Perspectives, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991).
His most recent book (co-authored with K.Voss) is entitled HARD
WORK: Remaking the American Labor Movement ( Berkeley : The University
of California Press, 2004), and is an enlarged edition of a book
published in France as DES SYNDICATS DOMESTIQUÉS: Répression
patronale et résistance syndicale aux États-Unis
( Paris : Editions Raisons d'Agir, 2003). He is currently working
to complete a book with the tentative title of THE MAGIC OF AMERICANISM:
French Gastronomy in the Age of Neo-Liberalism.
Fantasia's most recent published articles and chapters have concerned
the sociological practice of Pierre Bourdieu; on labor as a social
movement; on U.S. corporate behavior, on class reproduction in
American higher education; and on the low intensity war against
labor waged under the cover of the war against terrorism. Several
of these pieces were published in Le Monde Diplomatique ,
which he considers the best paper in the world and to which he
has been a frequent contributor. His article on repression and
work in the United States (published in the French journal ACTES
de la recherche en sciences sociales in 2001) was awarded the
prize for "best article on labor for articles published in 2001,
2002, and 2003" by the Labor and Labor Movements Section of the
American Sociological Association. In 2004 he was elected to the
Sociological Research Association, an honor society; and in 2006
he was elected Chair of Labor and Labor Movements Section of the
American Sociological Association for 2006-07.
For the 2008-09 academic year, Fantasia is on sabbatical leave as the Director of the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute, an innovative center for collaborative and interdisciplinary research at Smith College. In addition to his work at Smith College,
he is on the Board of the Northampton Arts Council and the Serious Play! theater ensemble. He is the co-parent of two remarkable daughters, Camille (16) and Adele (12).
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