Rawls received her BA (1976), MA (1979), and PhD (1983) degrees from Boston University, where she studied sociology, philosophy, and classics.
She was particularly inspired by Immanuel Kant, whose notion of a Kingdom of Ends that is grounded in Social Contract had influenced the development of sociology, and by Erving Goffman, and Harold Garfinkel, whose 1975 seminar at Boston University she participated in, and with whom she would later collaborate extensively (see below).
Goffman and Garfinkel both built on the notion that self and meaning depend on a collective commitment to the ground-rules of interaction, an idea related to Kant, which influenced her own argument that equality and reciprocity are necessary preconditions for making sense and self in society.
Anne Rawls was also able to spend time with Hollis Lynch, then director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University, and with some of his students.
This led her to Boston University in the fall of 1974 to study with George Psathas, Jeff Coulter, and then in 1975 with Harold Garfinkel (and Emanuel Schegloff).
Through a cooperative program she was also able to study with Kurt Wolff, Gila Hayim, at Brandeis University and Dieter Henrich at Harvard.
Yearly conferences in ethnomethodology brought students and colleagues from around the world to Boston University (including Harold Garfinkel, Harvey Sacks, Gail Jefferson, Emanuel Schegloff, Christian Heath, Michael Lynch, Anita Pomerantz, David Sudnow, Charles and Marjorie Harness Goodwin, Wes Sharrock, John Heritage, Rod Watson, Douglas Maynard, Paul Drew, Alene Terasaki,[5] John O’Neill, Jim Heap, and Lindsey Churchill).
In an influential 1987 article published in Sociological Theory, Rawls builds on Goffman’s argument that "Interaction order" is the sui generis site where meaning, self, and other social objects are achieved.
[4] Interaction orders consist of tacit, taken for granted rules, practices, and expectations that members of society use to coordinate their actions and make sense together.
Based on a close reading of Durkheim’s (1912) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Rawls argues that Durkheim does in fact have such an epistemology and that because he grounds it in an empirical analysis of the constitutive practices and expectations that make up society, he is able to solve the problems posed by Hume and Kant without falling into the traps of relativism or idealism.
Durkheim’s approach, argues Rawls, supplants Kant’s philosophical epistemology with a sociological one rooted in the concrete empirical details of social life.
According to Rawls' argument, this requires that participants commit to the ground rules of an interaction order, and that Trust Conditions be met.
Where practices are not equally accessible, people cannot cooperate to create social facts – including self – making interaction impossible and threatening the very foundations of society, which regularly has to be 'remade' by its members or it will cease to exist.
Recent publications from the Garfinkel Archive include Parsons’ Primer (2019)[21] (for which Rawls co-authored an introduction with Jason Turowetz), and The History of Gulfport Field 1942 (2019)[22] (co-edited with Michael Lynch).
[24] Since 2016, Rawls has been collaborating on projects involving the archive with faculty at the University of Siegen, where she is one of the principal investigators on a German Research Foundation (DFG)-funded grant "Media of Cooperation" (SFB-1187).
Currently three sub-projects in collaboration with Erhard Schüttpelz, Tristan Thielmann, Carolin Gerlitz, Anne Rawls, Michael Lynch, Christian Meyer, Clemens Knobloch, Patrick Sahle, Jason Chao, Andreas Mertgens, Jörn Preuß, Christian Erbacher, Andrea Ploder, James McElvenny, Philippe Sormani, Clemens Eisenmann, and Jason Turowetz are engaged with a "praxeology of media", investigating the "'Discovery Procedures' of Science and Technology Studies", the "History of audio-visual sequence analysis as a methodology", and "Digital Tools and Environments for Research".
Du Bois’s “Double Consciousness” Thesis Revisited*[26] She argued that a theoretical explanation needs to be offered for why and how two groups of people, both speaking the same language and apparently occupying the same geographical space, could come to differ so significantly in their communicative expectations that they are not able to achieve mutual understanding.
[27] In the summer of 2020, Anne W. Rawls, Kevin Whitehead, and Waverly Duck wrote an introduction, curated and edited a free book: Black Lives Matter: Ethnomethodological and Conversation Analytic Studies of Race and Systemic Racism in Everyday Interaction[28] with Routledge/Taylor and Francis (published October 2020).