At a time when an emphasis on productivity in higher education threatens to undermine well-crafted research, these highly reflexive essays capture the sometimes profound intellectual effects that may accompany disrupted scholarship. They reveal that over long periods of time relationships with people studied invariably change, sometimes in dramatic ways. They illustrate how world events such as 9/11 and economic cycles impact individual biographies.

Some researchers describe how disruptions prompted them to expand the boundaries of their discipline and invent concepts that could more accurately describe phenomena that previously had no name and no scholarly history. Sometimes scholars themselves caused the disruption as they circled back to work they had considered "done" and allowed the possibility of rethinking earlier findings.

Anita Ilta Garey is Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Studies and of Sociology at the University of Connecticut. Her book Weaving Work and Motherhood received the William J. Goode Award from the Family Section of the American Sociology Association. She has co-edited three other books, including (with Margaret K. Nelson) Who's Watching?: Daily Practices of Surveillance among Contemporary Families, also from Vanderbilt University Press.

Margaret K. Nelson is A. Barton Hepburn Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Middlebury College. She is the author and editor of several books including, most recently, Parenting Out of Control: Anxious Parents in Uncertain Times.

Rosanna Hertz is the Classes of 1919-1950 Reunion Professor of Sociology and Women's and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. Her latest book is Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice: How Women Are Choosing Parenthood without Marriage and Creating the New American Family. With Barry Glassner, she co-edited Our Studies, Ourselves: Sociologists' Lives and Work.