Leon Anderson

Leon Anderson is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Ohio University and Utah State University. He is best known for scholarship on qualitative research, homelessness, social deviance, and autoethnography. Before pursuing a Ph.D. in sociology, Leon worked with Alaska Native youth and wrote for the Anchorage Daily News, receiving Alaska State Press Club awards for stories on the king crab fishery in the Aleutian Islands and tundra firefighting above the Arctic Circle. Leon and his mentor, David Snow, published their award-winning study of homelessness, Down on Their Luck, in 1993. In 2006 they teamed up again for a major revision of John and Lyn Lofland’s classic qualitative methods text, Analyzing Social Settings. That year Leon also published an influential article “Analytic Autoethnography,” that has been cited in books and articles over 3,000 times. His most recent book, Deviance: Social Constructions and Blurred Boundaries, came out in 2017. Leon’s writings have been published in numerous languages, including a Portuguese translation of Down on Their Luck and Polish translation of Analyzing Social Settings. While continuing to write on deviance and qualitative research, Leon is currently completing a memoir on the summer of 1968 when he hopped freight trains from Seattle to Chicago to protest at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. He lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio, with his wife Kate and their border collie, Velcro.