I’m Embarrassed to Be a Sociology Major
You can also view this article at https://write.as/non-monetized-together/im-embarrassed-to-be-a-sociology-major
Now that I’m finally about to graduate university, I can look back and say it was a mostly positive experience. Nevertheless, it has led me to lose faith in academic sociology. I am also majoring in sociology, which is an uncomfortable fact for me to accept. Don’t get me wrong, sociology is interesting, and I’m looking forward to finding work somewhere in the field, but I really don’t want to associate with the academic side of it.
I’ve came to the conclusion that it is just another way for the well-to-do to impose their power on everyone else by depicting their social platform as science. Yes, even the so-called radical socialist academics. I’m sure there are many researchers who don’t intend to participate in that, but they are caught in the institutional apparatus. As someone who has no business fighting in either side of the class conflict, I just want to push that to the side and move on with my life.
The researchers will sometimes study ordinary people, but will never cite them in literature reviews, even people that are the researchers’ academic “specialty.” And worse, the academy does not believe citizen experts are credible. Instead, the academics only cite each other when writing literature reviews. The purpose of a literature review is to present the existing knowledge on the paper’s topics, informing and guiding the author’s research design in the process. By only citing other scholars, academic sociologists create an elitist echo chamber that silences voices from outside their little club. As a result, attending university narrowed my perspective instead of broadening it.
For example, in Donileen R Loeske’s class textbook Methodological Thinking: Basic Principles of Social Research Design, she says “[l]iterature reviews are like GPS coordinates in that they give the location of the study in the scholarly literature. For researchers, the process of reviewing the literature answers critical questions: Why is the study needed? Where does it fit in the scholarly literature? What already is known about the proposed study topic? How do the proposed study questions fit with what already is known?” This is an example of a scholar admitting that even though literature reviews are responsible for informing the knowledge that academic papers are built off, academic literature reviews restrict themselves to other scholarly knowledge.
Loeske’s views on literature reviews are echoed by Rebekah P Massengill in her handbook Writing Sociology: A Guide For Junior Papers and Senior Theses. She states in the introduction that “sociological research must be informed by a scholarly literature” (3). This point is reiterated throughout Chapter 3: The Literature Review, where she describes scholarly research as “absolutely essential in the early stages of your research” before going on to claim that Princeton University’s electronic catalogues and databases are “better than what anyone can get for free on the internet. The scholarly journal articles you will want to access for your literature review, for example, will rarely be available in full text version on the web. You can, however, access them easily (and for free!) from any computer on campus — and if you’re away from campus there are ways to access them as well” (14).
I have asked my sociology professor Nancy Mandell if an academic paper could get published if it cited sources outside the academy. She said no, universities are not interested in publishing that. She also said that they won’t publish articles that encourage the reader to come up with their own interpretations of the research.
Sociology really isn’t all that complicated. Anybody could learn it. What differentiates academic sociologists from everyone else is that they can use specialized terms and can get away with being a smartass about it. It has nothing to do with the value or intelligence one brings to the field.
I’m in a position in my life where politics, social services, and the economy are mostly afterthoughts. But since I sat through a bunch of lectures and read through some papers, I’m considered a better authority on these subjects than somebody who has to directly deal with them daily.
Non-Monetized Together aims to fill in this gap of knowledge formed by academic sociology. By encouraging an active comments section, it is not just a blog, but an online community, a virtual classroom, and an opportunity for readers to volunteer their stories. I wanted to build a space where people of all walks of life can build off each other’s knowledge, create their own theories, and prove that they can be intellectuals too.
Just remember, we are all equals here.
