Sociology and Your 'Research': A How-to Guide for Professionals

I recently met a person from a faculty that shall remain nameless, although I will offer the 'clue' that it existed within the health research realm, and has only within the past few decades started to offer graduate level degrees based on research with 'human subjects' (their term, not mine). While working in the registrar's office as an undergrad, I discovered this faculty's penchant for graduating self-congratulatory, power-jockeying 'professionals' who tried to get in a fight with anyone who dared question their 'knowledge.' While conversing with this woman, I revealed that I was a graduate student in the department of sociology. She had the nerve to laugh at me, proclaiming "What could you possibly do with that?!" If this wasn't bad enough, she then went on to tell me about her 'thesis,' which was theoretically situated in the work of Goffman, completely unaware of the fact that he was a sociologist. Oh. My. God.

Upon reflection, I realized that a lot of people have this attitude towards our subject matter: it's a joke, it's easy, 201 was an guaranteed A so the rest of it must be, and it has no praxis. There's no clearly delineated career path associated with it, so it really can't be that important. I find that this attitude is especially prevalent amongst the professional groups in our society.

The irony is that when these said professionals take leaves of absence from their respective careers to pursue graduate level work, a large majority of them end up doing (often poorly done) research that's really just a spin off of sociology, but never seem to recognize and/or acknowledge this. As someone who has, in Latour's phrase, 'paid the full price' prior to even being allowed to do research (in the form of an undergraduate degree, an honours essay, a total of 4 methods courses, 3 statistics courses, and a year of graduate course-work), this really chaps my ass. So, because this online space is my personal soapbox, I'm about to be a totally polemic, non-gentleperson scholar, and answer the aforementioned question posed to me for all the 'professional' grad students out there. Here's exactly what you can do with sociology in your own research:

1. Completely rip off the nuance, depth and complexity of sociological theory and bastardize it into a rigid typology that 'completely' explains the phenomenon you're studying. Just remember: under no circumstances do you need to know anything about the disciplinary background of the theorist you're studying. It doesn't matter. The hundreds of years of social philosophy and subsequent social theory that preceded your entrance into grad school are totally irrelevant, and you don't need to know anything about them. Losers in the social sciences and humanities with no jobs can worry about that crap--you're a professional!


2. Read a qualitative undergrad soci methods textbook--while you're in grad school, or, more likely, in a graduate seminar--and learn a grab bag of methods, including ethnography, auto ethnography, phenomenology, narrative analysis and interviewing techniques. Do NOT try to delve into the philosophy of these techniques! Again, that is a concern for the jobless losers who wrote those books. You just need to know how to offer a cursory explanation of them to the children you TA, or the 'brilliant' powers-that-be who referee your professional journal. Any explanations of these techniques should not exceed a paragraph in journal articles, or one page in your dissertation.

3. Learn a couple of sociological terms, like 'informal social control' or 'master status,' and use them frequently in conversations with people who don't have post secondary education. It will make them think you're really smart and cool. Again, you don't have to know what these terms really mean, or who coined them. Just make sure you slip them into everyday conversation so as to convey your expert status.

4. When you meet a real social scientist at a social event, don't even respond to them when they tell you what they do, 'cause they probably don't really do anything except not make money. Remember, they really work for you: all of their theorizing, research, and publications merely exist so that you can put them in your lit review and then apply it to 'important' research. And, why would you bother entertaining a conversation with someone whose pay scales aren't available online on the CHR website? Without this key information, you'll never know whether or not to be nice to them, depending on whether or not they make more or less than you.

5. Take one course--just one--in statistics (descriptive should do) and learn how to write syntax in a software package. Then, tell everyone you know that you're a 'statistician,' which will make you look really cool and smart, especially to people who don't have degrees. Then, you can go and do cool techniques like data mining (fuck those sociologists who say that such practices run counter to the fundamental principles of confirmatory research; if you've never heard of confirmatory research in class, it can't be important).

On: Silence

To begin, I must apologize for the extraordinarily long delay. The past few months have been....revealing, to say the least. An existential crisis forced me to examine issues I was probably unaware even existed within my life, which in turn, resulted in a period of narrative silence. Dorothy Smith was right: experience is pre-lingual, and the Heideggerian assertion, "Tradurre è tradire" (to translate is to betray) seemed to ring true in ways my 'productive' life as an academic never could have prepared me for; I couldn't even talk about them, let alone translate the messiness of my experiences into the tidiness of grammatical and lingual rules. However, I like to think I'm not completely un-optimistic, meaning that this period of enormous personal revelation (or, 'shedding my skin,' as qmass (qmass.wordpress.com) would term it) was not without the sociological lessons that I'm always trying to extract from life. In no particular order, and bearing absolutely zero logical coherence--and in my favourite 'listed' style--here is what I've learned/thought about during this time (and am finally ready to write about) :

1. Medical waiting rooms are a sociological goldmine. The 'holy trinity' of sociology I've come to reify--based on the primacy of race, class and gender for personhood and personal outcomes--are contested within these walls, and appear as arbitrary markers of division that are somehow transcended by people grappling with their own mortality. Their truly is a primacy to health, making it (arguably) the richest topic that any sociologist could ever tackle.

2. Psychology will never be able to tell the tale of illness experience, given the relational nature of getting one's medical 'work' done: these day to day activities never exist in a social vacuum. To even enunciate your experience involves entering into communicative relationships with peers, physicians, pharmacists, and others, who, depending on their standpoint, will either validate your very being, or, in Max Weber's astonishingly prolific terms, give you "a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness of the single individual."

3. I think that Facebook is bullshit. I know many wonderful people who adore it, but I honestly believe that it will eventually lead to arrested development, given that it presupposes a trans-historical and trans-contextual 'self' capable of transcending personal development that can thereby keep us all immutably connected to the past. I also it really speaks to the loneliness of the human condition, which makes me feel sad.

4. The most brilliant movies I've watched within these past few months present characters who defy dichotomous categorizations of being either 'good' or 'evil,' but, alternatively, keep you nervously awaiting their 'true' character, who is never fully or satisfyingly revealed. This truly is art imitating life.

5. In that vein, dichotomies are simultaneously destructively tragic and totally necessary. Opposing forces of good and evil, qualitative and quantitative, left and right, feminine and masculine, straight and gay, etc, etc, etc simultaneously create conflict (destructively tragic), but also force us into dialectic relations that promote a Hegelian 'synthesis' of the thesis and the antithesis, which creates change; this really is the underlying rhythm of our social fabric.

6. If you're gonna live in Cowtown, live in West Hillhurst (or somewhere close by). If Calgary is in black and white, this area is in colour. The trees, the display of alternative sexualities, the giant mess of fabulously rich and direly poor, and the juxtaposition of the young and the old create a 'pulse' in this small corner of a city which otherwise seems to be DOA.

7. And last (brace yourselves for the cheesiness about to ensue), I want to thank those few beautiful people who gave me the space to not narrate, to not produce, to not be reliable, and to simply let me go through it: Ma and Pa, Kaitie, Julia, Nate, Pauline, AWF, Dr. B, and others I'm likely forgetting: I am forever grateful.