Making a Difference

Excerpts from Schwalbe’s Making a Difference

(Matt) The question usually rises about halfway through every semester.

(Bryce) It’s tinged with frustration and goes something like this: sociology tells us what’s wrong with society, but what does sociology say we should do about it?

(Caroline) When I’ve been asked the question, I’ve usually said that, yes, it can be discouraging to hear so much about what’s wrong with society, but this is information we can’t do without.

(Odalis) Before we try to change society, we need to know how society works so that our efforts to fix things are effective and don’t make matters worse.

(Simone) Most people – and I’m thinking primarily of students in college and university classrooms – who ask about sociology’s value as a guide to action are not policymakers or activists.

(Sidney) They are just people who want to know how to use the knowledge they are acquiring to make a difference in the world.

(Chris) There are many ways to use sociology to make the world a better place – ways that don’t require extraordinary measures, just thoughtful practices that anyone can adopt.

(Amy) If there is a first step in being sociologically mindful, it is learning to see the world as humanly made.

(Minji) Because we are all born into pre-existing groups – families, communities, societies, nations – with established cultures and ways of doing things, it can seem like the social world is just there, a reality as hard as a mountain range or as independent of human will as the weather.

(Brandon) But this is not really so. All the parts of the social world – all the groups, organizations, institutions, political and economic system; all our beliefs, values, symbols, and practices – were created, once up a time, by people.

(Paige) It might seem obvious that the social world is created by people. Where else would it come from?

(Ben) Yet we often experience it as apart from us, or over and above us.

(Jymil) This experience is reflected in how we talk about the social world. We say that the market did this or that, that the economy did this or that, or that technology drives change, or that globalization is transforming society, and so on.

(Brenna) When we think about and talk about the social world in this way – as if it were made of things and forces that are independent of human action – we subtly reinforce the idea that it is unchangeable and that what we do doesn’t matter.

(Morgan) Being sociologically mindful means, in part, recognizing that the social world is humanly made and paying attention to how this occurs.

(Constance) When people invent new concepts and ideas, when they share new ideas with others, when they create new groups and organizations, when they build new tools and technologies, when they come up with new ways of doing things together, when they devise new laws and policies, and when they reject old ways of thinking – they are changing the social world.

(Brendan) So while it may seem like the social world is as solid and steady as a mountain range, in fact it’s changing all the time, and we participate in the process, to some degree, every day.

(Annie) Being sociologically mindful thus allows us to see more possibilities for change, more possibilities for making a difference, than we might have imagined.

(Hayleigh) What matters, then, is how we choose to contribute to this process here and now.

(Glory) We can complain about problems but then act in a way that is likely to perpetuate them. Or we can go beyond complaining and try to act in a way that increases the changes that our lives will contribute to making the world a better place.

DMU Timestamp: October 19, 2020 19:17

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