That might sound baffling if you haven't tuned into this cultural skirmish. But for me ' I'm the American Sociological Association's current president and a professor of sociology and public policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst ' it's both disturbing and an opportunity to help the public better understand my academic discipline. A central concept to sociology is the 'sociological imagination.' As defined by the scholar C. Wright Mills, it's the ability to link someone's experiences to societal forces or historical trends; for example, connecting losing a job to waves of unemployment due to a recession. Because my discipline helps identify how social structures work, it provides insight into how to fix processes that malfunction. Sociological research has helped address questions like why 700 people died during a Chicago heat wave in 1995, or why the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, identifying strategies to avoid such catastrophes in the future. The research...
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