My colleague Teresa Swartz (full disclosure: I’m also married to her) has this writing exercise that she does with all of her Intro students at the end of the semester. In a nutshell, she asks them to write a brief paper situating themselves in the social contexts that have most profoundly shaped and determined their lives and identities. The exercise, which she calls a “sociological memoir,” is inspired by C.Wright Mills‘ famous definition of the sociological imagination as becoming aware of the intersection of one’s personal biography with larger social and historical forces. The book she often has the class read as an illustration is Dalton Conley’s wonderfully idiosyncratic early life narrative Honky. In the last couple of days I’ve read another couple of pieces I think I’m going to recommend to her as well.

Andrew Lindner’s “Epilepsy, Personally and Sociologically,” on TSP’s ThickCulture blog, is one of them. Inspired in part by the  unexpected and profoundly unsettling passing of a member of our TSP family Tim Ortyl from complications resulting from a seizure, Lindner takes us deep into the daily, lived experience of those who have “epilepsy.” I put that word in quotation marks, because one of Lindner’s first and most basic sociological points is about how even the category is a social construction that fails to capture the full range of experiences, conditions, and challenges we so often group together and thus fail to fully understand. But this is just the starting point, and Lindner describes in detail not only the medical but also all of the social challenges of living with epilepsy—things like having one’s driving restricted and implications for work and career choices. And where Lindner is at his deepest and most revealing, I think, is in his application of Erving Goffman’s notions of stigma and impression management. Without much fanfare or unnecessary abstraction, Lindner uses these sociological concepts to bring to life the feelings of embarrassment, vulnerability, shame, and humiliation—and the constant threat of each—that constitute the lifeworld he and so many others experience daily.

The other exemplary piece is a blog post called “Life Father, Like Son.” It opens:

I’m a 41-year-old adopted Korean American and my son is a four-year-old African American adoptee. When I look at my son’s face, I think about how beautiful he is. I think that I’m grateful to have adopted such a wonderful little boy. I also occasionally think about how I was exactly his age when I was separated from my birth parents and sent thousands of miles away to a distant country that spoke a foreign language and where a strange group of people would become my new family.

The author is named Darren Wheelock and though a bit less explicitly sociological than Lindner’s piece, Wheelock’s is not only powerful and moving on its own terms, it uses personal experience to take us into the organization of domestic and international adoption, the complexity of race in the United States, the challenges of multiracial families and parenting, and one case of the adoptee’s identity and experience. I’m a little biased, because Wheelock is a former graduate student of mine, but I couldn’t help but be impressed (and a little proud). And I have to say that this is the first time I’ve seen him write like this and about this.

This notion of a sociological memoir is obviously not  new. Indeed, we’ve had some wonderful examples on our site—Jenn Lee’s reflections on gender and privilege, for example, or Joel Best’s changing views on Social Security in the context of approaching “retirement” age. Still, I think sociologists should lay a stronger claim to the genre and make better use of it. We are so often accused of being overly abstract and disconnected from the lives and experiences of those we study. But when we do our job right, we not only capture the social structures that surround us all, but the ways in which these structures are experienced and understood. We bring them to life. This is sociology with a human touch. And it seems like when we put ourselves in the story—when we make ourselves and our experiences the story—we may be uniquely able to accomplish those goals.