Pedagogy, Culture & Society

Re/working the sociological imagination for education, activism, and anti-racist futures

Call for Papers:

For sociologists of education, pedagogy, culture and society are inextricably entangled phenomena whose interconnections are illuminated by a sociological imagination – a concept and term coined in 1959 by sociologist C. Wright Mills to describe how sociology offers “vivid awareness of the relationship between personal experience and the wider society” (p. 6). Within the sociology of education, this concept can be used theoretically and pedagogically to open student awareness to the ways in which phenomena like poverty or privilege, far from explained through recourse to individual merit or pathology, surface through entanglements between individuals, their cultural contexts, histories, material, and other elements. As a disciplinary area, sociology thus offers critical meta-awareness that takes us beyond limited understandings of social life, unsettling the taken-for-granted and prompting action through challenging the status quo. A sociological lens can therefore ignite an affective charge that brings bodies together, pushes them apart, floodlights inequalities, and kindles a desire for change that impels us to speak, struggle, resist, or take individual and collective risks. As Reay (2020) asserts, “when I entered the academic field of sociology of education in the early 1990s it generated passion, outrage and a sense of alienation in me in equal measure, and it still does” (p. 818).

Since Mills’ time, sociologists of various stripes – as well as scholars in anthropology, political science, women’s studies, Black/Blak, Indigenous, post-colonial and other fields – have expanded our thinking to decentre human exceptionalism and raise important questions concerning intersectionality, power, and the dispersal of human agency. Vallee (2024) says, these theoretical advancements build on vital ground: postmodernists shattered grand narratives that only ever served those in power (Richardson, 2001); poststructuralists subverted our faith in texts and the centrality of the author (Lather, 2007); and decolonial theorists have and continue to argue, “that many subjugated social groups around the world have not yet been recognized as human; hence, they justly protest at the scholarly privilege of those who can even pronounce a posthumanist age” (Vallee, 2024, p. 215). For those of us in the sociology of education, this work is thus about equity, self-critique, and justice – a call to speak, write, and teach with civic courage as public intellectuals in ways that interrogate how the personal enmeshes with/in the political and pedagogical, and how the everyday entangles with the systemic, structural, and social. We take heed of Bourdieu and Grass’ (2000) warning that “the most important forms of domination are not only economic but also intellectual and pedagogical” (p. 26). Our work as intellectuals who are negatively racialised and/or do critical race research thus moves us to question ongoing extraction from First Nations lands and communities, learn from and with minoritised voices and viewpoints, challenge the myopia of racism and xenophobia, and equip our students with tools and dispositions to do the same. Moreover, in the face of current world challenges reified along coloured lines – i.e., proliferating mis- and disinformation, post-truth populisms, resurgent white masculinity, race riots, hardening borders, genocide, neo-Nazism, and the rise of the Far and Religious Right – equipping new generations with such antiracist skills has never mattered more.

At a time when the politics of truth and meaning continues to be so fiercely contested, we contend that it is vital that the sociology of education takes a renewed look at the ways it confronts important social problems to do with ‘race’. We hold that sociology, broadly speaking, should make visible the operations of power, address culture as a force for both domination and empowerment, recognise that everyday life has a politics and a pedagogy, and help people understand the world in critical and imaginative ways. Revisiting what Solis-Gadea (2005) argued ten years ago, the “sociological imagination is an analytical tool used to lay bare the intricacies of complex societies […] helping its bearer to take responsible positions vis-a-vis the problems of the time” (p. 114). And while many of us continue to appreciate the significance and utility of a sociological imagination for these very reasons – especially within the context of Education given the exponential reach that schooling has on youth worldwide – we may also find ourselves precariously employed, at risk when attempting to question hegemonies, or struggling to engage tertiary students in even a bare minimum of sociological – let alone antiracist –  thought and practice within institutions that have grown epistemically hostile to this work. It is crucial that our public antiracist intellectualism does not operate in siloes – in an increasingly interconnected yet divided world, we contend that such work needs to traverse boundaries, not only to locate our work vis-à-vis broader disciplinary and geographic perspectives, but to also generate affective racial solidarities in ways that matter.

We know how much this work matters. Yet, we also question: how can we do it better, more strategically, and more collaboratively? Is it time to (re)new the sociological imagination vis-à-vis its implications for antiracism within education as a public intellectual imperative for reinvigorating the social function of schooling and reclaiming intellectual (and pedagogical) ground? Or, alternatively, if the sociological imagination is conceived as problematically anchored in and for the project of modernity that arguably underpins and cuts across the world’s widening racialised social divisions, are there theoretical alternatives on the horizon that we can draw on to rekindle energy and hope?

This Special Issue invites contributions from within and beyond the sociology of education to illuminate how (or if not, why not) a sociological imagination is being leveraged by scholars, practitioners, teachers, and activists here and now, near and far, to confront ‘the [racial and colonial] problems of our time’. We are particularly interested in work that takes seriously the sociological imagination as an antiracist praxis, one that makes visible how personal troubles are inextricably linked to historically produced structures of white supremacy, settler colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, and other intersecting matrices of domination (Bonilla Silva, 2018). This is an opportunity to bring our passions and struggles together, and we are particularly interested in the diversity of ways educators – as public intellectuals – enmesh critical languages that name and challenge racism, coloniality, and epistemic violence, with the grammar of hope and possibility – one grounded not in naïve optimism but in ethical commitment, collective struggle, and the unfinished project of liberation.