Profile Draft

Professor Laura Barraclough has seen a lot in her life, but before she moved to Michigan almost two years ago, she’d never seen a “Deer Crossing” sign.

“My husband had her and her partner out to our place for dinner soon after they arrived, and they talked about coming out there and on the way out—we live in the country kind of in some woods—and on the way out they saw one of those “deer crossing” signs, you know, and they were talking about how they didn’t know what to do about it—like does that mean they should slow down because, like, a deer is going to go across the road; does that mean they need to wait for deer to cross?—they weren’t sure what to do with this deer crossing sign,” says Department Chair and Professor of Anthropology and Sociology Kiran Cunningham.

The California-native hadn’t even wanted to come to Michigan. Though she longed to leave her teaching position at a college for nontraditional students and the job description for an urban sociologist at Kalamazoo College seemed written specifically for her, she underwent each step of the application process without any intention of actually taking the job.

“At every stage of the interview process it was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll do the phone interview, but I’m not going to move to Michigan,’ you know? ‘Yeah, I’ll go on the campus interview, but I want to stay in L.A.’—that was the whole thing, and I think that actually helped me to relax and do well on my interview,” said the thirty-one-year-old Barraclough. “So the day after I returned from my interview from here, I got the phone call with the offer, and then I was like ‘Oh, crap, now I really have to, like, take this seriously.’ Because I hated my current job, here’s the perfect job in a place that I would not ever have considered.”

With the help of her three-year partner Emerson, though, she decided to take the leap, and found herself loving the seasonal beauty of Michigan in her next visit to look for housing in June. Though she admits to initially feeling out of place at the small, private liberal arts institution—where she grew up, everyone went to large universities—and being so nervous in her first quarter that she couldn’t eat before teaching, it isn’t obvious from her teaching now.

She maintains a quieter, more relaxed reign over her students than some professors, but is clearly in charge nonetheless. On one Wednesday afternoon, she wears a white blouse and jeans as she looks at her students from behind black-rimmed glasses and gestures with her typed notes in her left hand and chalk in her right. Her black earrings, which dangle so far they almost touch her shoulders, sway a little as she begins by outlining the differences between race and ethnicity on the chalkboard for her Urban Sociology class. It’s less than 20 minutes into her interactive lecture when she realizes that most of the students haven’t completed the reading, and she decides to continue for a few minutes in spite of that, before she stops again upon completing a section.

“I don’t know how much further to go because I don’t know if I’ll just be talking to myself up here,” she says. “Cortez and Manning also have critiques of labor market segmentation, and theory, but, if we haven’t all, if we’re not all on the same ground about what that is, um, and what the critiques are, I’m not sure, I mean, how should we should we handle this, that we’re in uneven state here with the reading? I know you all are really busy, but now, how do we use this time? What would you like to do?”

Six seconds of silence pass before she speaks again, outlining what her original plan was and how it isn’t going to work now, and then asks them again what they would like to do. Twelve seconds pass then before a suggestion is made, and Barraclough continues her lecture briefly before attempting the revised version of her plan. Five minutes in, she rejects it as well, and tells the students to go home, do the reading before Friday, and they will pick up with the subject then.

“It’s something I have to do with almost every class every quarter—there’s always a day where nobody has read, and so I was actually surprised that five people had read,” she says later. “I always just have to, you know, abandon whatever I had planned, and I usually end up letting the class go early, because there’s just nothing you can do.”

That flexibility, though, isn’t needed often. On another day, she lectures about gender and urban areas for about 40 minutes before splitting the class into groups of four or five and handing them envelopes containing the same scenario. Each group reads about a recently-divorced woman with two children and a very low income, and they are then asked to come up with a “plan” for the woman, including a new job, new housing, and a childcare situation; Barraclough encourages them to be creative in their ideas. The options are presented to the students on note cards, and they talk in groups for about fifteen minutes before engaging in a whole class discussion and presenting their thoughts. One group states that they weren’t able to come up with a scenario, but that they understand the take-home message about the impossibility of the woman’s situation.

“She cares deeply about students, and works with them, and really wants to take them to a new place in their thinking, and this critical place of understanding the world,” says Cunningham. “She’s got a lot of passion that she operates out of that I think is infectious, and students come away from her classes just wanting to know more.”

Barraclough herself grew up in a state of confusion about the world: at home, her father and friends frequently made racist and politically incorrect remarks, but at school, her best friends were Mexican, Peruvian, and Korean. She knew that something was wrong, but it wasn’t until she went to college that she really began to understand the contradictory messages.

“I took this class called Ethnic Diversity in the City by Professor George Lipson, who’s my mentor to this day, and he just laid it all out, you know?” she says. “In ten short weeks he explained to me and everybody else why my parents were this way, and how this persists, and it was the piece I’d be looking for—both the p-i-e-ce and the p-e-a. So that has driven me to this day, that one class. It’s why I’m an urban sociologist, it’s why I study the stuff I do, because I feel like there’s probably a lot of students who are having similar experiences like I was.”

She pauses. “And I don’t know if that’s true,” she laughs, “but I feel like if they’re out there, I want to make this available, you know?”

Though she’s comfortable in Kalamazoo now, there are still moments when she’s surprised that she’s here.

“To some extent, I still walk around this campus and think, “What? This is…what? Red brick?’ You know, like, this is supposed to be concrete, and cheap paint—whatever paint the UC people had free that year, you know?” she says. “It continues to be a culture shock.”