Why Sociology?

I asked my students to begin their semester-long blogging project by sharing what draws them to sociology and how they might use it in the future. I figured I'd answer the same question. The short story is that when I was introduced to the sociological perspective by my wonderful Introduction to Sociology teacher, I had an "aha" moment. The topic was food insecurity and public versus private responses to food insecurity. I was someone who had been hungry on occasion and who understood well what it meant to be worried about my ability to provide food for myself and my children. I had also had dealt with public institutions such as the Dept. of Social Services and private organizations such as food banks. So in this Intro class, I learned about how the federal poverty line, which is used to determine who is eligible for assistance. I learned about public policy regarding food insecurity (or the lack thereof), and I learned about the constraints and limitations of the private charity system which has tried to fill in the gaps left by our public policy response to food insecurity (we read Sweet Charity, which remains on my bookshelf to this day). This structural perspective enabled me to begin to understand my experiences as an individual when I had applied for assistance with food at both public and private institutions.

And that is the definition of sociology - the ability to move from thinking about personal experience as an individual problem to seeing that personal experience within a larger social system. C. Wright Mills, who coined the term, "the sociological imagination," to describe how sociologists view the world, defined it as the ability to distinguish between personal troubles and public issues. While it is certainly the case that individuals have agency, that is, they make choices that affect their everyday lives and their life chances, they don't do that within a vacuum. We exist within a larger social system that influences what choices we have and how we behave. Therefore, the benefits of the sociological perspective are that by examining the social system, we can see where inequalities are created and maintained - such as ways that public policies fail to provide adequate solutions for food insecurity - and can suggest alternative policies.

The final blog post... for now...

So our summer session comes to a close this week. Six weeks, 19 lectures, some of them in a very hot environment - we made it through our fast and very surface level survey of what sociologists study and how they go about it. We've used the sociological imagination to briefly examine how we construct our social realities, the construction of categories that are then the basis on which power, privilege, and prestige are systematically distributed, the ways that the intersections of race, class, and gender at which we each exist structure how we experience health and illness, education, and family, and how the ways that we have constructed those institutions impact our abilities to experience the good things in life, and finally, how we simultaneously reproduce and resist the social inequalities that divide and discriminate.

Most of you will not go on to become sociology majors - and that's okay because I think that it is useful for individuals in all fields to have sociological imaginations, to be able to look at the everyday world through a sociological lens. [I do hope I piqued some interest and that at least a few of you will choose to take some sociology classes that explore these ideas in more depth.] A well-honed sociological imagination that connects history and biography, the personal and the social, will enable us to find solutions to the inequities we face in our daily lives.

So, for your last blog post, I'd like you to return to the idea of the sociological imagination. How did using a sociological perspective provide a different way of looking at a problem or an institution or a social phenomena? Be specific. Hint: You might return to the social phenomena that you discussed in your first post as something that you'd like to "make strange." Has your analysis changed? How? If you wish to pick a problem, institution, or social phenomena that you didn't discuss in your first post, that's fine, but be specific and concrete with your examples and analysis.

And then finally, reflect on what using a sociological imagination "looks" like for you. When we began the course, you defined it - but what is it to use a sociological imagination in practice? Is there something you will take from this class for your future classes?

It was truly a pleasure to serve as your instructor this Session. I wish you lots of luck in your future endeavors and I hope that, no matter what life path you follow, you continue to develop your sociological imaginations and become engaged, critical, and reflexive citizens.
Anna