Stephen Harold Riggins

Stephen Harold Riggins was born in 1946 in Loogootee, Indiana to parents Harold and Eithel Riggins. Riggins completed his Bachelor of Arts Degree in Sociology in 1968, and his Masters of Arts in Sociology in 1971, both from Indiana University. He obtained his PhD in Sociology in 1980 from the University of Toronto. His thesis was entitled “Institutional Change in Nineteenth-Century French Music.” Dr. Riggins has taught courses at Sociology departments of various universities, including the University of Toronto from 1981 to 1982 and 1989 to 1990, at Laurentian University from 1982 to 1985 and at the University of Alberta in Edmonton from 1986 to 1989. In 1990 he accepted a teaching position in the Department of Sociology at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador as an Assistant Professor. He became a full Professor and then Head of the Department of Sociology in 2005. Dr. Riggins retired from teaching in 2015.

Stephen Riggins is a member of various professional associations, including the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association, Canadian Society for Asian Studies, American Sociological Association, Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, and the Indiana Historical Society. He has participated as an organizer and participant in various conferences including the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association’s annual meetings. His teaching interests include mass communication and public opinion, sociology of the arts and popular culture, and sociology of families and deviance. His research interests include ethnicity and mass media, symbolic interactionism, contemporary French cultural policy and democratization of culture.

Dr. Riggins has published numerous articles, as well as books, including Ethnic Minority Media: An International Perspective (1992), The Socialness of Things: Essays on the Socio-semiotics of Objects (1994), The Language and Politics of Exclusion: Others in Discourse (1997), The Pleasures of Time: Two Men, A Life (2003), Creating a University: The Newfoundland Experience (2019, with Roberta Buchanan) and Canadian Sociologists in the First Person (2021, with Neil McLaughlin). He has been with his partner, Paul Bouissac, for over 50 years and presently divides his time between St. John’s and Toronto.