The Geoffrey and Sue Grant Papers document the professional, scholarly, and international activities of sociologist Geoffrey W. Grant and educator Sue Grant, with a primary focus on crime, justice, social institutions, and daily life in China, as well as academic exchange connected to South Dakota State University. The collection includes correspondence, research files, draft manuscripts, delegation materials, printed reports, photographs, and digital media dating from 1982 to 2018.
The papers document Grant’s participation in Eisenhower Foundation sponsored crime prevention and criminal justice delegations to China and Southeast Asia during the 1980s. These materials include correspondence, briefing materials, journals, schedules, reports, and detailed descriptions of daily institutional visits. Records reflect meetings with officials, judges, lawyers, interpreters, and participants, as well as site visits to ministries, courts, prisons, juvenile reformatories, psychiatric hospitals, legal education programs, workplaces, and neighborhood organizations. Additional materials document China exchange programs, research on social control in the People’s Republic of China, and contextual information concerning the Department of Rural Sociology at South Dakota State University.
The collection includes printouts of email correspondence from 2001 written by Geoffrey and Sue Grant to friends in the United States while they were living in Kunming, China. These emails recount their experiences and observations of daily life in Kunming and at Yunnan Normal University. Also included are a compact disc containing hundreds of photographs taken in Kunming, Beijing, and Tibet, and a draft introduction by Ronald J. Troyer of Drake University for the book Social Control in the People’s Republic of China, published in 1989. Additional printed materials relate to the United States Department of Transportation, the South Dakota Department of Transportation, and the South Dakota Local Transportation Assistance Program.
Photographic materials document daily life in China, particularly during the Grants’ residence in Kunming in 2001 when Geoffrey Grant served as a faculty exchange professor at Yunnan Normal University. The photographs depict street scenes, markets, food preparation, transportation, workplaces, classrooms, parks, family life, and social interactions. The collection also includes approximately forty nine oversize color photographs measuring nineteen by thirteen inches that document daily life in China, with labeled images indicating Kunming in 2001.
This collection documents the international scholarly exchange, comparative criminal justice research, and sociological observation during a period of expanding academic and institutional engagement between the United States and China. The collection provides detailed firsthand evidence of criminal justice systems, social control practices, and everyday life in China during the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. The papers also document South Dakota State University faculty participation in international exchange programs and support research in sociology, criminology, legal studies, international relations, and modern Chinese social history.
