If you are a SSSP member and would like to post an obituary/transition, please contact the Administrative Office at sssp@utk.edu.  Obituaries/Transitions will remain posted for 2 years.

 Glenn A. Goodwin, 1939-2026

Professor Glenn A. Goodwin passed away on March 25, 2026, after a brief illness. Emeriti Professor of Sociology, Pitzer College and University of La Verne, Glenn completed a B.A. in Sociology from S.U.N.Y. Buffalo and recieved his Ph.D. from Tulane University. After taking early retirement from the Claremont Colleges, he was invited to Ohio University and, when he returned to Claremont, joined the University of La Verne faculty. Glenn taught on both the undergraduate and graduate level at a number of Universities in the U.S., as well as in England and the American University in Cairo, Egypt. His major areas of specialization were the history and development of sociological theory, humanistic sociology, sociology through literature, and the sociology of civil liberties.

Glenn’s professional career began during the mid-twentieth-century “crisis” of sociology, with his academic involvement demanding the discipline become more relevant toward addressing the social conflicts of the times. He strongly identified  with the “insurgent” Young Turks calling for the discipline’s aggressive reform from its positivist limits  of “value free”, overly deterministic, and quantitative orientation.

In this vein, Glenn found his lifelong professional home with the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP), under the direction of Alfred McClung Lee. His esteem for Lee as a mentor, colleague, and friend would remain with him throughout his career.  As a regular attendee of meetings for 50 years, participating on numerous committees as well as developing annual meeting sessions, Glenn’s greatest pleasure derived from chairing and participating on the C. Wright Mills Book Award Committee.

In 1976 Glenn became a founding member of the Association for Humanist Sociology, and developed a value-oriented methodological paradigm for humanist sociology; placing primary emphasis upon individual agency, human potential, and the ethical pursuit of meaning and social justice as cornerstones to all sociological inquiry.

The recipient of a number of excellence in teaching awards, Glenn derived his highest professional honor from his calling as a teacher. Throughout his teaching and scholarship, Glenn sought to intertwine the humanist contributions of existentialism and symbolic interactionism with his sociological orientation by understanding society from the perspective of individual-lived experiences, emotions, and creativity. Seeking to awaken in young minds the quest for understanding the world and their purpose in it, he lectured through the lens of the sociological imagination, whereby personal troubles were better understood as public issues, thus enabling one to achieve personal agency over their lives and the social forces which sought to control them.

Above all else, it was through his gentleness, kindness, and open willingness to engage with his students by listening and hearing their points of view without judgement, no matter how divergent they were, that gave him joy as a teacher. His purpose as a teacher was to endeavor to stitch together meaning for his students in a world filled with contradictions and absurdity.

Toward the end of his career, Glenn was confronted with the greatest Sisyphean absurdity of his professional life; the demise of classical sociological theory from undergraduate and graduate programs throughout the nation. No longer are the foundational works of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber deemed significant enough to be universally required study for degrees in Sociology. Nonetheless, his 2006 capstone book,  “Classical Sociological Theory: Rediscovering the Promise of Sociology”, co-authored with friend and colleague, Joseph Scimecca, is still in publication — a testimonial to the endurance of the need for intellectual authenticity and commitment to humanist values.

As a corollary to “that old gadfly of Ancient Athens who said “the unexamined life is not worth living”, for Glenn the secret of human meaning lay in devoting one’s life to asking the questions: what is the secret of human meaning and how does one live a meaningful life? This quest infused his 53 years of professional teaching and scholarship, and activism as a civil liberties and civil rights advocate. Glenn is survived by his wife, and intellectual partner of 49 years, Rose Ash of Claremont, CA.

Posted: 7/29/2026

Kai T. Erikson, 1931-2026
SSSP Past President, 1970-1971, Yale University

Kai T. Erikson, a sociologist who examined the aftermaths of floods, nuclear accidents, hurricanes and chemical spills to illustrate how disasters damage what he called the “tissues of communal life,” inflicting collective trauma that can outlast physical wounds, died on Nov. 10 in Hamden, Conn. He was 94.

His death, at a retirement home, was announced by Yale University, where he taught from 1966 to 2000.

Professor Erikson worked in the academic shadow of his father, the renowned psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, a Sigmund Freud disciple whose psychosocial development theory described a series of internal psychological crises that individuals face throughout their lives.

Aiming his own analytical lens outward, Professor Erikson probed the social and cultural trauma that is visually imperceptible after natural and man-made disasters, traveling so frequently to far-flung calamities that The Times of London called him “Professor Catastrophe From America.”

“Collective trauma works its way slowly into the awareness of those who suffer from it, so it does not have the quality of suddenness usually associated with ‘trauma,’” he wrote in “The Sociologist’s Eye: Reflections on Social Life” (2017). “But it is a form of shock all the same, a gradual recognition that the community no longer exists as a source of support or solace.”

Professor Erikson became interested in disasters by accident.

In 1973, he received a call out of the blue from a lawyer representing residents of Buffalo Creek, W.Va., a coal mining community where a dam had failed, unleashing 132 million gallons of thick black liquid that gushed through a narrow mountain hollow in waves 20 feet high. More than 100 people died. Thousands were left homeless.

The lawyer asked Professor Erikson if he knew a graduate student who might be willing to spend a semester studying the aftermath. “I told him over the phone that I could make a more informed recommendation if I saw the site myself,” Professor Erikson wrote.

After a few hours looking around Buffalo Creek, he took the job.

“I had never seen or even imagined anything remotely like that — desolate, dark, a scene of such heavy, muted pain that I have a hard time finding words to capture it decades later,” he wrote. “I was drawn to the place as if by a compulsion.”

Professor Erikson spent more than a year interviewing survivors, reviewing legal depositions, attending community meetings and observing daily life as residents struggled to rebuild their homes and their way of living.

He detailed their struggles in “Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood” (1976), a mix of social science, narrative journalism and oral history. It was a finalist for the National Book Award in the contemporary thought category.

“Social scientists will, I hope, take note of the vitality and creativity of which their discipline is capable,” the author and political activist Michael Harrington wrote in The New York Times Book Review. “Nonacademic readers will encounter an exciting, enriching book.” He called it “a triumph of contemporary understanding.”

In the book, Professor Erikson let Buffalo Creek residents speak in their own voices, rather than paraphrasing them in academic jargon.

“The flood in its own way destroyed my past in the mental sense,” one said. “I knew everybody in the area. That’s where I lived, and that’s what I called home. And I can’t go back there anymore. I can’t even think of it. I have no past.”

To Professor Erikson, the physical damage and psychological displacement amounted to a “loss of flesh” — an acute trauma that becomes an ongoing state of mind, with permanent feelings of despair, anguish and emptiness.

“When the people of Buffalo Creek stood there and watched their possessions crash down the hollow, they were watching a part of themselves die,” he wrote. “To lose a home or the sum of one’s belongings is to lose evidence as to who one is and where one belongs in the world.”

Over the next 40 years, Professor Erikson traveled the world to embed himself in the aftermath of catastrophic events — a mercury spill in Ontario, the nuclear reactor accident in Three Mile Island, Pa., the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska the flooded streets of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and other tragedies.

Professor Erikson’s instinct to immerse himself in the places he wrote about was a throwback to the early days of sociology, when research was grounded in lived experience rather than the quantitative statistics and technical theory that pervades the field today.

“He was concerned with broad problems and big ideas, and he wrote about them beautifully,” Jeffrey Alexander, a sociologist at Yale, said in an interview. “You learn a lot about social order when it is very abruptly and visibly destroyed. You understand what really ties society together.”

Professor Erikson often testified in court on behalf of victims.

“Legend has it that his powerful presence and voice became so well-known and feared by opposing counsel that once, when he was seen to enter a courtroom for the defense unannounced, the other side immediately settled,” Yale said in announcing his death.

Kai Theodor Homburger was born on Feb. 12, 1931, in Vienna, Austria, to Erik and Joan (Serson) Homburger.

After the family immigrated to the United States in the early 1930s, Kai was reportedly taunted at school and called “Hamburger” by other students. His parents decided to change their last name.

Kai was studying sociology at Reed College in Portland when his father’s best-known book, “Childhood and Society,” was published in 1950. After graduating in 1953, he received his master’s degree and doctorate from the University of Chicago.

With an interest in field work, he spent several months immersing himself in a Polish community in South Chicago.

“That experience of the ‘feel of the streets’ made a deep impression on me, and it played a far greater role than I realized at the time in influencing my sense of what ‘social life’ really is and how one might go about studying it,” he wrote in “The Sociologist’s Eye.”

Before turning to disasters, he wrote “Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance” (1966), examining how deviant behavior “can sometimes be a valuable resource in society, providing a point of contrast, necessary for the maintenance of a coherent social order.”

Professor Erikson married Joanna Slivka in 1961. She survives him, along with their sons, Keith and Christopher Erikson; a sister, Sue Erikson Bloland; and four grandchildren.

At Yale, Professor Erikson was to his admirers a lot like the inspirational teacher played by Robin Williams in the 1989 movie “Dead Poets Society” — though he wasn’t given to spouting poetry while standing on desks.

His former student, the author and political satirist Christopher Buckley, remembered him in an interview as the “Pied Piper.”

“We started a cult of Kai Erikson without him really knowing it,” Mr. Buckley said, recalling how he and his roommates, the future New York Times journalists Michiko Kakutani and John Tierney, went so far as to tape his discarded cigarette butts to their refrigerator.

They even staged a festival in his honor on their front lawn.

“It was just a funny concept that Kai Erikson was a god,” Mr. Buckley said, “and yet he was also this humble professor.”

Read the obituary on New York Times and In Memoriam published in Yale News.

Posted: 03/31/2026

James D. Orcutt, 1943-2026
SSSP Past President, 1994-1995, and Editor of Social Problems, 1984-1987, Florida State University

James (Jim) D. Orcutt, age 82, died peacefully at home in Tallahassee on February 25, 2026, after a long illness. His wife and devoted caregiver, Annette, was at his side, along with his brother-in-law, Ray, and sister-in-law, Pat. Jim was raised in Des Moines, Iowa, and was predeceased by his parents, Albert and Doris Orcutt, and siblings David Orcutt and Phyllis Bergeson. He is survived by his sister, Kate Capps; wife, Annette Schwabe; daughter, Michelle Orcutt; stepson, Derek Schwabe-Warf (Dori Ballai); sisters- and brothers-in-law; and many nieces, nephews, and friends. After completing his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in sociology from the University of Iowa Jim served as a psychiatric operations specialist in the army. He earned a PhD from the University of Minnesota and began his research and teaching career in the Sociology Department at Florida State University in 1972 and retired as Professor Emeritus in 2007.

Jim was an accomplished scholar, a devoted instructor, an effective administrator, and a generous colleague. He wrote two books and scores of journal articles in his specialty areas of deviance and drug and alcohol problems. He served as department chair, engaged in extensive university service, taught multiple undergraduate and graduate courses in his specialty areas and received departmental and university teaching awards. He also served as a grant reviewer for several organizations. Jim was a beautiful writer, and his willingness to pass on editing tips and intellectual critiques was much appreciated by his colleagues. His election to the presidency of the Society for the Study of Social Problems and his appointment as editor of the journal Social Problems signify the high regard in which the profession held him and his dedication to advancing the field of sociology.

Jim was a loving and warm spouse, brother, father, and friend. He was an accomplished musician and had a wonderful sense of humor, a deep curiosity about the world and other people, and a strong sense of justice. He will be dearly missed by so many, but we are grateful for his beautiful presence in our lives.

Jim will continue to serve students through the Florida Anatomical Donation program, which supports medical training and research to facilitate advancements in health. Donations to honor Jim may be made to the FSU Department of Sociology, Big Bend Hospice, Epilepsy Agency of the Big Bend, RBG Fund, Refuge House, or https://riseinternational.org.

Breanna Green of Bevis Funeral Home (850-385-2193 or www.bevisfh.com) is assisting the family with their arrangements.

Posted: 03/9/2026

 Brett Lesley Cumberbatch, 1983-2025

We are saddened to share the passing of one of our members. Click here to read his obituary.
Posted: 03/17/2025

 

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