Please remember in your prayers Meg Wilkes Karraker, professor emerita of sociology and founding director of the Luann Dummer Center for Women. She died Nov. 26.
Visitation was on Friday, Nov. 30 at 10 a.m., followed by service at 11 a.m., both at Nokomis Heights Lutheran Church, 5300 10th Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN, 55417.
Karraker started at St. Thomas in 1990 and was a Family Business Center Fellow, where she taught courses on global gender, marriages and families, adolescence, sociological theories, and both the introductory and capstone courses in sociology. Her scholarly interests in the common good led her to examine family business values, family social problems, global “digital” families, service learning with people living homeless, and community strategies to relieve world suffering.
Meg Wilkes Karraker
She is the author of Diversity and the Common Good: Civil Society, Religion, and Catholic Sisters in a Small City (Lexington, 2013) and Global Families (2/e, Sage, 2013), co-author of Families with Futures: Family Studies into the 21st Century (2/e, Routledge, 2012), and editor of The Other People: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Migration (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). With a University Scholar Grant for 2014-2017 she has embarked on a three year study, “Middle Class in Middle America: Families, Neighbors, and a Good Society.”
Karraker was President Emerita of Alpha Kappa Delta (AKD, the international sociology honor society) and a former Executive Officer of Sociologists for Women in Society. She was also a member of the American Sociological Association's Department Resources Group, which consults with sociology faculty and programs around the country. Her other memberships included the Midwest Sociological Society, the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, and Sociologists for Women in Society.
Karraker was honored as the Aquinas Scholars Professor of the Year in 2005 and the Midwest Sociological Society’s Jane Addams Award for service to girls and women in 2012. In 2014 she received the John Ireland Presidential Award for Outstanding Achievement as a Teacher/Scholar.
