Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot: A Pioneer in Spotlighting the Third Quarter

In this episode of 4-Quarter Lives, the first of three on the topic of The New Q3, we are re-publishing Avivah Wittenberg-Cox’s conversation with Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot from 2022. A sociologist and Harvard Professor of Education, with a teaching and writing career spanning five decades, Sara was one of the first academics to examine and focus on the third quarter of life. Her book The Third Chapter: Risk, Passion, and Adventure in the Twenty-Five Years After 50 uses interviews and story-telling to explore how people respond to this time of new opportunity and activity – or not.

Making a Contribution – before and after 50

Across her distinguished career, Sara has studied educational culture and ecology, and the relationship between human development and social change. She has written 11 books ranging from an examination of the relationship between families and schools, and parents and teachers, to a study of the quality of respect in human behavior and experience. More recent books include ‘Exit: The Endings that Set Us Free’ and ‘Growing Each Other Up: When Our Children Become our Teachers.’

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot has been a fellow at the Bunting Institute and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She is a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Prize, was awarded Harvard’s George Ledlie Prize for research that makes the “most valuable contribution to science” and “the benefit of mankind” and has been the recipient of 28 honorary degrees from colleges and universities in the USA and Canada. Since 1998 she has been the Emily Hargroves Fisher Endowed Chair at Harvard University. Upon her retirement, this will become the Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot Chair, making Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot the first African-American woman in Harvard’s history to have an endowed professorship named in her honor.

Useful Links

For Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot’s full profile, click here.

In the course of the conversation, Sara mentions three of her many books:

* The Third Chapter: Risk, Passion, and Adventure in the Twenty-Five Years After 50

* Exit: The Endings that Set Us Free

* Growing Each Other Up: When Our Children Become our Teachers

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