Sociologists Turn Memoir Into a Tool for Teaching Race and Gender

By Elena Vasquez

Two sociology professors have published memoirs with NYU Press, and both argue the genre belongs in the university classroom. Tiffany Gayle Chenault, Professor of Sociology at Salem State University, is the author of Black Woman Runner: A Memoir. Georgiann Davis, Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico, wrote Five Star White Trash: A Memoir of Fraud and Family. Both books are available from NYU Press.

The two scholars discussed their work in a conversation with interviewer Jenny Rossberg, addressing how personal narrative can carry sociological argument. Their claims rest on lived data. Chenault ran a half marathon in all 50 states after her mother's death, collecting accounts of racism from other Black runners along the way. Davis was born with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome — an intersex condition her doctors concealed from her, and her mother hid for years.

Why are academics writing memoirs?

Chenault's route into accessible writing ran through hired help. "It's called a developmental editor!" she said, describing the two editors who coached her out of academic prose. Graduate school, she said, trains sociologists to write only for other academics, "which is kind of a disservice to the discipline, if we're studying inequality, social justice, and change."

Davis credits an unlikely background. She dropped out of middle school and did not learn to write at a higher level until graduate school. Years of reading TIME Magazine and popular press, she said, taught her to write "in a way that everyone can understand."

Both professors now assign memoirs in their courses. Chenault teaches Jaquira Díaz's Ordinary Girls; Davis points to Kiese Laymon's Heavy and Michelle Zauner's Crying in H Mart as models. The takeaway in plain words: students engage with vulnerability and positionality in ways that journal articles rarely allow.

Is the academy catching up?

Resistance remains. "The academy is still slow to embrace memoir," Chenault said. "A lot of scholars think it's too simplistic, or not rigorously researched."

The signal is nonetheless measurable. At this year's American Sociological Association conference, Chenault attended a panel discussion on integrating narratives into sociological research. "The room was absolutely packed," she said.

Davis frames the stakes as disciplinary bedrock. "The sociological imagination is at the core of the discipline; it's about connecting personal troubles with public issues," she said.

What do the memoirs document?

Davis's Five Star White Trash records a chain of medical and family secrets. Doctors removed her undescended testes in childhood without telling her why; her parents were advised to enroll her, at 14, in bariatric surgery. Revealing her intersex experience in her first book, Contesting Intersex, was "really freeing," she said — a shift from silence to what she now calls saying "what I ate for breakfast."

Chenault's book documents grief and medical racism. Diagnosed with breast cancer during COVID-19, she discovered how much her mother had hidden about her own cancer treatment. "Being an educated Black woman who understands the racism within the medical system, I felt like I had to be on the offensive," she said. She ran several races between cancer treatments, and realized she was upholding the same "Strong Black Woman" trope her mother had modeled.

Her 50-state running project doubled as fieldwork. "I'm a sociologist, and I got data in all fifty states, so I know it's not just a one-off person having a bad day," she said. "There are patterns here."

How do they handle race and voice?

Davis lets humor surface even in accounts of medical, criminal and familial abuse. She recalls a community college English teacher near Chicago who mentored her out of a remedial class — and asks, in the book, whether that teacher "ever approach her Black students with this kind of mentorship." Writing it down, she said, "really helped me understand what white privilege means."

Chenault balances danger with joy, from awareness of what happened to Ahmaud Arbery to comic asides about running through bear country. "Part of writing a book like Black Woman Runner means showing resistance, which for me, is joy," she said.

Both authors share one practical warning for memoirists tackling trauma: get support. Davis's first piece of advice is "go to therapy," and she describes sleepless nights and depression through repeated rewrites of painful scenes.

Their larger bet is that memoir can do what jargon cannot — move readers to question what they would not question before. As more panels fill and more professors assign the genre, the two books mark a measurable shift in how sociology argues its case.