Posted by: Chad M. Gesser
Twitter: @profgesser
Email: chad.gesser@kctcs.edu
All the world is Facebooked, Twittered, MySpaced, Googled….connected.

by Sarah Michele Ford
One of the most difficult things for the new sociology student is to understand what on earth the “sociological imagination” or the “sociological perspective” is. The idea of learning to relate, as C. Wright Mills puts it, your biography to your moment in history and realizing the ways in which that combination of factors influences how you view the world is challenging to say the least, and one of the major goals of any introductory sociology class.
Probably the easiest way to develop the muscles of your sociological imagination is to USE them; the only way to learn to think sociologically is to challenge yourself to DO SO. This week, I asked my class to do just that – to think about how their own biography and history would impact their interpretation of a social phenomenon such as poverty, educational inequality, gender inequality, or the changing divorce rate.
As an example, we spoke about how my own biography and history might impact my interpretation of the childfree by choice movement. In this growing social movement, individuals and couples of childbearing age are making the conscious decision to forego parenting for a variety of reasons.
Every individual would come to an analysis of this phenomenon based on their own experiences. For me, a number of factors will impact how I look at the movement. First off, I am a parent. Not only that, I did not come by parenthood easily. That personal experience naturally must shade my thoughts about people who would choose not to raise children. I’m not just a product of my own relationship to parenting, though; my opinions are also influenced by the historical context in which I live. In particular, I look at the idea of choosing a child free life through the lens of our growing knowledge of the impact that the growing human population is having on the planet.
Somewhere in the space between those considerations lies my sociological perspective on the childfree movement. We all go through this same process, whether consciously or unconsciously, whenever we try to flex our sociological imaginations. The challenge is to be aware of the process.
How do your own biography and history impact your sociological imagination?