Introduction: Teaching and Learning a Humanistic Sociology

Abstract

There’s a poem in this place—a poem in America

a poet in every American

who rewrites this nation, who tells

a story worthy of being told on this minnow of an earth

to breathe hope into a palimpsest of time—

a poet in every American

who sees that our poem penned

doesn’t mean our poem’s end.

—From In This Place (An American Lyric), by sociologist and inaugural poet, Amanda Gorman (2017)

If we agree that the conceptual and methodological frameworks of the social sciences reflect a critical interest in the changing world and the need for academically rigorous and relevant sensemaking; and if we agree that teaching and learning sociology are practices of agile engagement with the world inside and outside of the classroom—often at the cost of shifting perspectives in response to and conversation with our shifting society; then the very process of conceptualizing and bringing to life this special issue of Teaching Sociology, “Teaching and Learning a Humanistic Sociology,” should be seen as an illustration of the unprecedented acceleration of these conceptual features. In fact, sociology’s humanistic approaches and concerns have gained radical relevance and proliferated new questions and concerns since we first started our work on this special issue in 2021. With an awareness of the historical aspect of this special issue, we thus begin our introduction with reflections on our initial intellectual intentions—and their gradual shift—in our call for and collation of our colleagues’ inspiring insights.

Our Iterative Conceptualization(s) of “Teaching and Learning a Humanistic Sociology”

It is hard to imagine a world without the humanities. One reason for this is that our childhood socialization—our very introduction to social relationships and human culture—is grounded in the languages, storytelling, arts, crafts, question-based narratives, music, and dance forms that constitute the field. In fact, it is through this field that we not only come to understand but also construct social life. The COVID-19 pandemic laid this truth, among others, bare: Society relies on humanistic methods to circulate ideas, norms, and values; establish common realities; and draw together otherwise dispersed and disconnected human beings. Data alone cannot alter the way people think, feel, or behave, and facts can be easily lost or distorted. Yet despite their salience, the humanities are objects of contemporary critique and disinvestment (Hayot 2021). This state of affairs, which predates the pandemic, is perhaps most clearly reflected in the departmental closures that constitute the “crisis in the humanities” across institutions of higher education in the United States (Cherney 2020; Heller 2023). Notably, running alongside this crisis is the prioritization of STEM education in the same institutions (Shamir 2020). At a time when the world’s most pressing problems—problems related but not limited to climate change, racial (in)justice, socioeconomic disparities, immigration and citizenship, social movements and change, wars and genocides, and the democratic process and the rise of authoritarian politics—require the integration of humanistic and scientific perspectives, colleges and universities have responded with shutdowns and silos.

It is in this context that we initially conceptualized our special issue for Teaching Sociology. Recognizing sociology’s interpretive and positivistic methods and concerns, we sought to explore how our colleagues integrate and advance humanistic and scientific perspectives in the sociology classroom. With curiosity, we asked: How do sociology faculty expose students to our versatile and diverse means of inquiry? When and how do we engage the procedures and practices of the humanities in our sociology classrooms and coursework? By what means do we invite collaboration and create opportunities for students’ interdisciplinarity while also upholding the rigor of the sociological perspective? In return, we anticipated contributions that explored the institutional challenges that sociologists face in teaching a humanistic sociology, specifically, the pressure to overidentify with a STEM approach and problems associated with the traditional division of humanities and STEM preparation programs, departments, funding, and publication outlets. We also expected contributions that outlined and assessed pedagogical approaches that, in teaching a humanistic sociology, made active and creative use of films, novels, digital archives, museum and gallery exhibits, works of art, and poetry. Additionally, we looked forward to contributions that explored cross-disciplinary collaborations, particularly projects and assignments that married traditional social science with the critical concerns and inventive, public-facing forms of the (increasingly digital) humanities.

While our initial conceptualization of this special issue privileged the materials and methods of the humanities, rapidly accelerating contextual concerns and, eventually, our contributing colleagues’ responses expanded our understanding of both the felt need for and the potential impacts of a humanistic sociology. For example, over the course of the last three years, higher education contexts have been further changed by the impacts of neoliberalism—an ideology and policy aspiration that underscores the value of free market competition with minimal government intervention and regulation. As we write this introduction, more colleges and universities are experiencing the weakening of tenure protections (Cobb 2021), attacks on academic freedom (West 2022), closure of academic departments, programs, and schools (Hegji 2020), enrollment declines (Causey et al. 2023), the expansion of efficiency-oriented online programs (Morris et al. 2020), and increased tuition and fees (Kerr and Wood 2022). Additionally, students’ mental-health needs and concerns have come to play a more central role in higher education. Surveys reveal the depth of students’ suffering (Hu et al. 2022; Son et al. 2020) and gaps in faculty management of and preparedness for students’ psychological crises (Lipson et al. 2022). Likewise, issues of political and cultural polarization, which reflect struggles to define and decide our collective past, present, and future, have moved beyond objects of/for classroom debate to become fodder for wide-ranging attacks on the people, practices, and purposes that constitute higher education more broadly (see e.g., Hollingsworth 2023).

Notably, unprecedented technological advancements have only exacerbated these realities in college and university contexts: Research indicates that students’ experiences with online learning have led many to struggle in and disengage from higher education (e.g., Bettinger et al. 2017; Schnieders and Moore 2021); a recent U.S. Surgeon General’s report reveals the impact of social media on rates of depression, self-harm, and suicide among young people (The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory 2023); and media outlets evidence how educators fear both running afoul of new “educational gag orders” and incurring online attention for seeming to do so (Gross 2022; Sachs 2022). In tandem, the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI)—a technology that promises innovation by mimicking human cognitive functions and skills—has introduced new anxieties about the origination of ideas, intellectual integrity, and the value of a college degree. As media accounts substantiate students’ academic use of ChatGPT (Barnett 2023), college and university faculty rush to create projects and policies that capitalize on AI’s strengths while growing students’ writing, critical thinking, and social skills—skills that many thinkers claim are both distinctly human and already in decline (Brooks 2023; Carter and Harper 2013; LaFrance 2023; Mervosh 2022).

Yet just as these new contextual concerns and realities have informed the needs and expectations that students and faculty bring to academia, they have also expanded the language that both parties use to communicate the meaning, value, and objectives of academia; bringing classrooms to life—both literally and figuratively—through conversations about action and dignity, meaning and interiority, values and ideals, vulnerability and trauma, (self-)care and relationality, belonging and ownership, reparations and resistance, and dread and hope. This language and these conversations highlight an obvious reality: Our academic conditions are our social conditions, and what we are impacted by and what we act on, contend with, initiate, negotiate, and plead for in our classrooms reflect our broader human experiences, needs, desires, and concerns.

As evidenced by the contributions that follow, our teaching-learning contexts and our world beg for and beget a sociology that does more than integrate the humanities and STEM disciplines. This sociology—a truly humanistic sociology—blurs the distinctions between classroom and community, self and society, and the specific and the general. While attending to structural conditions, it alters our view of ourselves through reflective and reflexive processes; fosters human recognition and relationship across diverse histories, standpoints, and interests; harnesses critical inquiry and cultural innovation for personal and social change; and grows individual and collective agency through educative and creative pursuits. Put differently, and in words reflecting the epigraph by Amanda Gorman, this humanistic sociology both incorporates poetry and fosters the hopeful, ever-writing poet.

Humanistic Sociology in Action

“Teaching and Learning a Humanistic Sociology” features five contributions—one Original Article, two Conversations, and two Teaching Notes—that consider what we gain in teaching and learning a humanistic sociology. Although each contributor employs unique techniques and materials to address diverse topics, they all offer insights into how faculty and students can come to a deeper understanding of social issues through a central humanistic intervention, specifically, the cultivation of human agency and community. Read together, these insights highlight the dialectical nature of teaching and learning a humanistic sociology: In grappling with the human realities that both constitute and are constituted by objective data and facts, faculty and students come to acknowledge and create experiences, meanings, and relationships that echo across difference and tie us together.

Susan Pearce and Jennifer O’Neill’s Teaching Note, “One World, Many Stories: Finding Human Connection through Global Sociology,” launches the special issue with a cogent and expansive definition of a “humanistic sociology,” describing it as “an amalgam of interrelated elements: (1) an expansion of a verstehen of a shared experience of the ‘human’ in the world, (2) the integration of teaching source materials from conventionally defined ‘humanities’ fields, and (3) a normative directive to forward global human understanding.” In doing so, they remind us that humanistic sociology is more than an interdisciplinary subfield; it is also an orientation for our scholarly and pedagogical endeavors and an important learning outcome.

Pearce and O’Neill demonstrate the practice and potential of this work in the context of the “Global Understanding (GU)” course at East Carolina University (ECU) in North Carolina. Designed around a common “core” curriculum plan that is replicated and made particular across the disciplines, GU course sections in sociology are designed to expose ECU students to sociological concepts and questions through relationships made with students from one of nearly 30 countries around the world. Relying on digital technologies, these course sections create real-time interactions between students across national borders, encouraging their development and application of a global sociological imagination through peer-to-peer bonds—not faculty instruction. In outlining this work, Pearce and O’Neill demonstrate how interactive, digital global learning models can promote equitable and inclusive learning experiences, facilitate the emergence of an awakened “verstehen,” encourage empathy, and foster a deeper recognition of and appreciation for the human in sociological studies.

These takeaways are perhaps best illustrated in Pearce and O’Neill’s poignant account of the relationships between ECU students and Ukrainian students from Lviv—relationships that developed during the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. While most Americans watched this horror unfold on the Internet and in other news media, GU students were forging bonds with students living in and through the hell of war. “I’m more than sure that you think this is happening really far away from you, and I understand you,” one Ukrainian student said to their ECU colleagues. “But the world is really globalized and interconnected and the line between—it doesn’t touch me and it doesn’t bother me—the line is very thin (Smith 2022).” In sharing such poignant examples of students’ learning and connection, Pearce and O’Neill demonstrate how a humanistic sociology encompasses the study of human beings and the act of being engaged human beings with and for each other.

In Óscar Gil-García, Büşra Sati, Justin Martin, and Luz Velazquez’s Conversation, “Using a Decolonial Humanistic Sociological Lens to Teach Global Migration: The Global Migrations Exhibit Assignment,” we see a parallel but different approach to teaching humanistic sociology. Focusing on global migration, Gil-García et al. take issue with conventional approaches to teaching and learning the topic—approaches that address the realities of global migration through concepts and theories detached from the people and places most impacted by the phenomenon. In contrast, they advocate for active learning methods that decolonize and blend together theoretical frameworks to promote critical student engagement with complex global social dynamics. They evidence the power of these methods through their analysis of a narrative-based global migration mapping project that was assigned in an upper-level elective offered in the Department of Human Development at Binghamton University.

As part of this project, students learned the impact of colonial histories and thought on modern societal inequalities. Significantly, in addition to reading relevant scholarly treatments of (de-)colonialism and global migration, they also read semi-fictionalized accounts and ethnographies that give voice to migration experiences, including The Refugees by Nguyen (2018) and The Land of Open Graves by De León (2015). According to Gil-Garcia et al., these textured accounts allowed students to more vividly imagine the impacts of abstract and distant historical facts on migration trajectories. Then, by building on and modeling these readings, students turned what they had learned into a migration narrative that incorporated visual maps and was exhibited to the university community.

While scholars of nationalism have long argued that maps help to translate “imagined communities” into boundary-limited sovereign nation-states (Anderson 1983), students’ efforts to transform one-dimensional scholarly texts into multidimensional and digitally mapped stories helped them to conceptualize nation-state constructions like a global migrant (Scott 1998). In other words, by narrating and designing a visual map reflecting a migrant’s arduous, semi-fictionalized border-crossing journey, students—and for that matter, exhibit attendees—came to grasp the arbitrary nature of the borders that separate and distinguish each of us from one another. Additionally, in exhibiting their projects to the public, students also experienced the transformative power of storytelling, identifying with and developing feelings of compassion toward the subjects of their migration accounts. Through this felt responsibility to an imagined “other” and in contrast to prior course-based experiences that stressed more abstract data-based analyses of global migration, student engagement around and understanding of the phenomenon was also transformed.

A semi-fictional account of structural inequalities and their personal impacts also grounds Stephanie Sears’ Teaching Note, “‘Pieces of my Soul’: A Humanistic Approach to Teaching Race to Black-Identified Students.” In this contribution, Sears reviews her use of Gyasi’s (2016) novel, Homegoing, in an interdisciplinary African American Studies course designed for Black-identified students and taught by a Black professor at the University of San Francisco, asking: What happens when a multiethnic/multiracial cohort of Black-identified students study key sociological concepts while reading a literary account of the historical events and institutional policies/practices that have helped to shape their diverse, multiple identities? While the context of Sears’s teaching may be unique, her efforts to answer this question nevertheless provide useful insight into the work often left undone for Black students when race is taught in sociology courses in predominantly White institutions.

According to Sears, when read in supportive learning environments, novels like Homegoing provide opportunities for Black students to question history, examine their personal biographies, and access both an individual and collective vulnerability. Despite their semi-fictionalized content, such novels can also help Black students develop a sociological imagination, construct a nuanced understanding of Blackness, and grapple with the universal human quest to find a home (i.e., a symbolic and physical space of belonging where one can authentically exist on one’s own autonomous terms). Notably, Sears’s powerful reflection confirms the transformative impacts of humanities materials on students and faculty as students and faculty in that through their shared reading and analysis of Gyasi’s novel, both groups regained a sense of agency and cultivated a place of belonging in higher education together.

As a collaborative autoethnography, or duoethnography, between a sociology faculty member and an undergraduate student, Esa Syeed and Blanca Valenzuela’s Original Article, “When Filling the Research Gap Is Personal: Autoethnography and New Majority Students,” also outlines the introspective, agentic impacts of humanistic sociology on students and faculty alike. In this writing, they demonstrate how autoethnography, the method around which Syeed organized four sections of a qualitative research methods course offered between 2021 and 2022 at California State University-Long Beach, can initiate a profound kind of inquiry that “yields new knowledge by engaging students emotionally” and takes the form of reflexive action research.

Syeed and Valenzuela start by positioning autoethnography in the context of humanistic sociology—pointing at its capacity to blur the line between the humanities and social sciences and convey the value of the “sociological imagination on humanistic terms.” Describing autoethnography as a specifically liberatory praxis for new majority college students (i.e., those for whom college was not initially designed and who are challenging taken-for-granted norms in higher education), they draw on their own firsthand accounts of the course, their course memos, and Valenzuela’s course work (e.g., an autoethnographic final paper, periodic self-evaluations, assignment responses, etc.) to extend the literature on effective high-impact educational practices that more directly engage an increasingly diverse higher education student population.

Through their analysis, Syeed and Valenzuela show how autoethnographic learning allows students to connect with sociology and their lived experiences in new ways, expand their understanding and conceptualization of research, create the space and community bonds necessary to foster well-being, and actualize a new social reality. In Valenzuela’s own words, autoethnographic insights make sociological research both “personal and purposeful,” helping students to develop a “new lens” through which to both conceptualize their experience outside of academia and “[create] the sort of domino effect that is needed to create social change.”

Valenzuela’s autoethnographic insights also reveal the importance of agency and ownership in the learning process more generally; demonstrating how students, in recognizing the importance of their own experience navigating social structures, become empowered to build a stronger, more academically rigorous understanding of the world. In parallel, through reflections on his pedagogical practice and praxis, Syeed demonstrates how autoethnography, when matched with ungrading and diverse forms of evaluation, can encourage faculty to reevaluate and transform their work as teachers and researchers.

A pedagogical desire to address both the humanistic and the human—or more broadly, students’ learning and their overall well-being—also grounds Julia Rothenberg’s Conversation, “Teaching Sociology of the Arts at an Urban Community College during the Pandemic: Reflections on Structure, Agency, and Community Engagement.” COVID-19 transformed the lives and learning contexts of Rothenberg’s Queensborough Community College (QCC) students, many of whom lived in the New York City neighborhoods most impacted by the spring 2020 viral surge. Grappling with high rates of pandemic-related illness and death, new and/or extended experiences of economic precarity and essential work, crowded living conditions, and the digital divide, QCC’s students made the early transition to online learning in March of that year, and they looked to QCC and their communities for help, explanation, and inspiration.

In moving her Sociology of the Arts course, a 100-level distribution course that drew on extensive in-class interaction and regularly scheduled field trips, online, Rothenberg pioneered a new course model grounded in an immersive community-based project with a focus on high-impact experiential learning. In this project, students were paired with a New York City community-based arts institution (CBAI) that was experiencing pandemic impacts that mirrored their own (e.g., lost material resources, lost opportunities for physical co-presence and community support, illness and family tragedy among staff, and the need to rethink and reassess long-term goals and plans). Working in small groups, students were tasked with interviewing CBAI leaders via Zoom to better understand the organization’s mission, history, support for local artists, funding structure, and interactions with and outreach toward the community—both before and during the pandemic. Incorporating additional insights from media treatments, scholarly articles, and quantitative analyses of neighborhood-level data, students reported their findings in a research paper analyzing the role of arts institutions in communities experiencing difficult times.

Notably, insights from Rothenberg’s pandemic- and context-specific case become generalizable in the Conversation framework as she sifts through the project’s insights to weave together two seemingly incompatible—but ultimately complementary—contributions to the discipline: the tradition of humanistic sociology and the more deterministic perspective on social reproduction, education, and culture offered by the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu. By attending to students’ learning—particularly their recognition of self in relation to context—theoretically, she offers powerful reflections on the connection between society and subjective experience. Yet even as she does so, Rothenberg never loses sight of the creative, human impulses that ground Sociology of the Arts, art-making, and social interaction in the main; she just asks her students, and all of us, to think critically about why, for whom, and to what ends we employ our creativity. One important branch of this questioning invites reflection on the role and ethos of the teacher in an unequitable classroom and specifically the limits of radical methodologies that, if applied without caution and empathy, may prove counterproductive to students.

Our special issue concludes with reviews of four valuable tools that humanistic sociologists might employ in their work with students. Three of these tools reflect historical methods and materials: Alec Cali reviews the Civilization Series podcast of the Anti-Empire Project, demonstrating its relevance to conversations about race, science/medicine, and the production of knowledge in sociology classrooms; Juan Cruz Ferre describes his use of Exterminate All the Brutes, a four-part documentary series that he has harnessed to teach racial formation, whiteness, colonialism, and structural racism; and Marianne Madoré outlines the diverse “counter-institutional” collections hosted by the Digital History Archive of the City University of New York, which keenly illustrate the potential of student-led efforts for educational reform. The fourth tool, Amanda Gorman’s Call Us What We Carry: Poems, is reviewed by Christine Crofts, who—true to our iterative conceptualization of this special issue—reveals the poet’s capacity to both capture and change the social world.

As we draw this introduction to a close, we extend our most sincere thanks to the many busy humans who helped to make this special issue possible. We greatly appreciate the peer reviewers who shared their expertise with the authors published herein: Yasemin Besen-Cassino (Montclair State University), Kathleen Coll (University of San Francisco), Michel Estefan (University of California, San Diego), Marta Herrero (University of York), Marisela Martinez-Cola (Morehouse College), José Muñoz (California State University, San Bernardino), and Shiri Noy (Denison University). We are also grateful for the support and guidance of Teaching Sociology’s editorial team, Michele Lee Kozimor and Barbara F. Prince, and editorial board. Most profoundly, we are moved by the work of our dedicated contributors and by extension, their engaged students. They are humanistic sociologists, all—and inspirations.

Footnotes

Author Biographies

Amy E. Traver is a professor of sociology at Queensborough Community College of the City University of New York. Her research interests include student success in community college contexts and intersections of adoption, race/ethnicity, religion, and material culture in American family life. Her most recent publications include articles in Teaching Sociology, Internet and Higher Education (with Volchok, Bidjerano, and Shea), Qualitative Inquiry (with Duran), and Qualitative Sociology. She is also the co-editor of Humanistic Pedagogy across the Disciplines (with Leshem for Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Poetry across the Curriculum (with Jacob and Kincaid for Brill/Sense, 2018), and Service-Learning at the American Community College (with Perel Katz for Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Traver is a 2019–2020 recipient of a Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship. She is also a graduate of Colgate University (BA, 1997), Harvard University (EdM, 1999), and the State University of New York at Stony Brook (PhD, 2008).

Hwaji Shin is an associate professor of sociology at University of San Francisco, California. She was born in Japan as a descendant of Korean colonial migrants. A first-generation college student, she earned her bachelor’s from the Kansai Gaidai University in Japan and University of Wisconsin at Eau-Claire and her doctorate from the State University of New York at Stony Brook (currently known as Stony Brook University). She is an award-winning teacher who is a fierce advocate for first-generation students and immigrant parents like her. She is also an expert in globalization, nationalism, migration, and citizenship and is author of the forthcoming book, Being Korean, Becoming Japanese?: Nationhood, Citizenship, and Resistance in Japan.

Malgorzata Bakalarz-Duverger is a deputy director at Warsaw Observatory of Culture and a part-time faculty at Parsons School of Design in New York. She received her PhD in social sciences from the New School University and her MA in art history from the UKSW University, Warsaw. Her interests in visual culture, memory studies, real-and-imagined spaces, and education navigate the intersection of research-based reflection and practice: both in her career choices, which always included nonacademic involvement, and in her research, which favors “action-research”-inspired approaches. She considers her academic mission to be that of a midwife—centered in the classroom (real and imagined), facilitating the growth and exchange of ideas. Teaching is her preferred methodology for thinking, as in the article she coauthored with Mariah Doren: “Teaching Re-seeing: Deploying Archives in Arts and Design Education.” She also contributed to The Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism.

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