Following our interview with 2023 ASA President, Professor Prudence Carter, we invited a group of scholars and teachers to respond to her presidential address in a virtual roundtable discussion. We asked participants to reflect on what they are excited to share with their students from the address, the critiques of the discipline that Prof. Carter offered, and how sociologists can work toward integration and harness the “educative power of sociology” given the challenges of this particular political moment. Responses have been edited for clarity and length.
First Publics: Think about the students you’ll see and the courses you are scheduled to teach when you are back on campus this fall. What specific aspects of Prof. Prudence Carter’s ASA presidential address are you excited to share with your students? What were the takeaways you think your students might connect with?
Michel Estefan: Prof. Carter posed one of the central political questions of our time: how do we build a multi-cultural, multi-racial, and multi-faith democracy that promotes integration across groups? Indeed, how do we even begin to conceptualize such a project when a society like this has never existed? And what could possibly be the next steps in the context of deep political polarization, where groups perceive each other as existential threats, and political backlash threatens to undermine the “reformist” achievements of the Civil Rights movement? These questions will strike a chord with my students’ deep-rooted convictions for social justice while urging them to think more expansively, critically, and with greater nuance about the challenge that lies before us.
Prof. Carter underscored that relying solely on a politics of (material) redistribution would prove inadequate to address these challenges. She urged us to pay equal attention to the relational and sociocultural spaces in concrete organizations and institutions where attempts to resolve intergroup conflicts thrive or wither away. And while she emphasized the importance of deliberation in these spaces, she implicitly noted its limits and stressed that understanding “affective processes” and “cultivating collective feelings” is also crucial. This is a key issue I intend to discuss with my students, for if polarization affords us any insights about political conflict, it is its irrational character, motivated by feelings and myths–about “us” and “them.” I look forward to further discussing these issues with my students and learning about their conception of the political and how it motivates their social action at work, in my courses, with their friends and family, and in the many social spaces where they are attempting to build the moral horizon Prof. Carter sketched out.
Mary Pattillo: My teaching this quarter runs the gamut: a course that uses the work of Zora Neale Hurston to help acclimate entering first year students to college; a required graduate course on race, racism, and resistance; and a course on qualitative field research methods to incarcerated women in our university prison education program. In her remarks, Prof. Carter challenged us to not discount “the breadth of heterogeneous thought and behavior within social groups.” Each of these groups of students is in some ways homogeneous – first year students, graduate students, incarcerated students – but those labels mask significant heterogeneity of experience, perspective, and thought. These small seminar-style courses are the best context in which to put into practice some of Prof. Carter’s provocations to realize integration. In these settings, students are able to share, listen, and consider deeply what their peers bring to and think about the readings and course content. The classroom can be a laboratory for the kind of realized integration that Prof. Carter envisions.
In my view, the classroom is the most immediate setting where sociologists have the opportunity and responsibility to render these macro-structural inequalities vulnerable and the tactic is strictly a question of pedagogy.
– Michel Estefan
Dan Chambliss: First, Prof. Carter describes the difference between official acceptance into a group (or organization, such as ASA) and full, cultural, “true integration.” Marginalized groups often experience “being accepted, but not really,” while excellent books and articles support this point. Prof. Carter’s examples are mainly of race/gender exclusion, even within the ASA itself. She raises a fundamental issue. Many sociologists recognize it. But to encourage student discussions, rather than address a volatile moral question directly, I would ask how such an “official/true integration” distinction can be precisely made. How do you tell if people truly are accepted? How do we recognize “full integration”? Is self-report sufficient? Are there visible signs or behaviors? Goffmanian ethnography could be helpful here.
The best way to introduce students to emotionally charged topics may be to relate them to their own experiences, but beginning with lighter examples and a more theoretical approach, then move gradually towards more volatile cases. For instance: more (cishet) young women say they have a boyfriend than do the corresponding men; an official “boyfriend” may not be “truly” a “boyfriend.” (Or talk about marriages!) How does one recognize such failures of formal contact to become informal “true integration” as well? Having students discuss the more general issue, I find, can be a more effective way of encouraging discussion than simply hitting scary topics head-on.
A second, also fascinating, question from Prof. Carter is how different groups have different “epistemic styles.” This goes beyond different opinions, to how groups use logic and evidence differently, consider different kinds of evidence, or see “truth” differently. A classic case, widely hypothesized in sociology, is the different way that upper-middle class professionals tend to honor precise, carefully planned speech as more “true” (to exterior reality), whereas members of the working classes are often more likely to see truth in spontaneous, more “authentic” speech, that more closely aligns with people’s genuine feelings. Do other groups (different genders, ages, ethnic groups) also have different styles?
Nancy Lopez: President Carter’s invitation to be more reflexive and reflective as we strive to do no harm in our knowledge production and praxis is a generative and transformational insight that I will share in my combined undergraduate/graduate course, “Intersectionality: Race, Gender, Class for Social Policy.” What would that mean for this class? Better disaggregated data does not conflate race and ethnicity data, which is the status quo of educational statistics. For example, my colleague and co-principal investigator, Dr. Yasmiyn Irizarry, shared a 2007 memo from the US Education Department directing educational institutions to collect both Hispanic origin and race in separate questions, but to only report Hispanic ethnicity as an aggregate ethnic category “to minimize the reporting burdens for educational institutions and other recipients.” This begs the question: How will we know if have achieved what President Carter calls “unrealized integration,” if we nullify baseline analysis of whether there’s a color line in discipline, access to college curriculum, or graduation outcomes, among Hispanics by racial status. Are Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian, white or other racial status Latinx experiencing the same levels of racial discrimination and barriers to educational opportunity? Are there inequities that remain invisible when we assume that Latinx people are part of a racial monolith? How could their experiences in the elementary schoolyard, middle school history class, high school STEM lab or graduate program, differ according to their street race — the race others would automatically assume they were based on social meanings ascribed to their physical characteristics, including skin color facial features and hair texture in educational institutions, from preschool to graduate school. Imagine if instead we employ intersectionality as inquiry and praxis and cultivate what Patricia Hill Collins, which leads to more accurate diagnoses and better, targeted, equitable policymaking needed to close the complex social inequalities faced by Afro-Latinx and other racially stigmatized groups. How else would we know if we have unrealized integration or social progress? What will you do to advance organization change in the service of our ethical and professional responsibility to do no harm and eliminate discrimination in our federal race and ethnicity data collection guidelines that shape the future of equity and distribution of power to those at the margins of society?
Myron T. Strong: Maybe the most profound moment [of Prof. Carter’s] speech happened at the beginning when she framed her address by dedicating it to ten Black women as pioneers of intellectual thought. I often tell my students how Eurocentric traditional sociology is. I have heard many speeches and lectures that reinforce narrow, oppressive approaches to the discipline. The dedication represented an important acknowledgement of the intellectual tradition of our mothers.
More than anything, the biggest takeaway for me was how Prof. Carter’s address on unrealized integration was a critique of the ways that the discipline [of sociology] has an unrealized integration of thought. The constant exclusion of BIPOC is in many ways due to the inadequate resource distribution and management at all levels of education as well as other factors. Having the students listen to the address and write responses is a great way to engage their understanding. My hope is that by connecting life chances to the unequal educational structure, it empowers students and gives them the tools that allow them to imagine new possibilities. I think of the Robin D. G. Kelly quote in Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, “It is not enough to imagine a world without oppression. We must understand the mechanisms that reproduce and naturalize exploitation and subjugation.”
First Publics: In her address, Prof. Carter offered a set of critiques about our discipline and challenged us to be more reflexive and reflective. How might you personally take up this challenge in your undergraduate classrooms, in your training and mentoring of graduate students, or in your department?
Michel Estefan: Prof. Carter called on sociologists to ameliorate the inequalities in micro social contexts in order to render vulnerable and more fragile the policies, laws, and forces that shape the macro-structural terrain. In my view, the classroom is the most immediate setting where sociologists have the opportunity and responsibility to render these macro-structural inequalities vulnerable and the tactic is strictly a question of pedagogy. The classroom is a microcosm of society, already structured with its many hierarchies and inequalities before the first day of class. It is not, however, an overdetermined social space destined to reproduce those social relations. It is a pivotal arena wherein the political potential lies to alter, reconfigure, and transform these social relations. This possibility calls for a values-centered pedagogy that views the classroom as a moral community and envisions education as a transformative process that recognizes the unique life experience of each student and, on that basis, nurtures their intellectual, moral, and creative capacities.
As such, I would argue that the first day of class should begin, not with a list of authors, books, or content-oriented learning goals, but with a conversation about the values and moral norms instructors ascribe to and the hope of building, alongside students, a culture of dignity that welcomes them, nurtures a safe and collegial space, and strives for equity. When effectively combined with a sociological understanding of classroom dynamics and evidence-based pedagogical practices tailored to the specific student population in the room, this values-first approach can elevate learning to a genuinely transformative journey for students.
Mary Pattillo: Prof. Carter’s critique of sociology is, in part, that we have not wrestled with the fact that our discipline is just as susceptible to the anxieties around the so-called “tipping point” as are the people on the “far right.” The tipping point is when demographic – and thus experiential, ideological, and political – diversity begins to upset groups who had once enjoyed relatively uncontested power and influence. To be more specific, the tipping point can be manifest in questions that lurk in the minds of some sociologists, but remain unspoken: Has the preponderance and leadership of women, Black people, LGBTQ people, agnostics, first-gen scholars, etc. in sociology gone too far? What will the “browning” or “feminizing” of sociology mean for our status in the academy, our attractiveness to students, and our pay? My answer is to lean into these changes. Call me blindly proud, but I think we have so many answers to what ails society that I think we can be the discipline of the future. Climate change, artificial intelligence, and water scarcity (just to name a few of the big preoccupations) are not solely technical problems, they are also social problems. More importantly, they are social issues whose solutions require the brainpower of people of all genders and colors, people who are not always represented in the hard sciences. So, our “browning” and “feminizing” is actually our edge. I think we can attract students and maintain our relevance by making this case.
Dan Chambliss: I disagree with Prof. Carter’s suggestion that we need more reflexivity. Reflexivity and reflection are in some sense raging like wildfires in sociology. Everyone is thinking about what topics to teach; what definitions to use (“what is theory?”); what readings, and with what vocabularies, to assign; which research methods to rely upon or even respect; and what scholars to honor. The discipline of 1960 is now deeply fragmented. But controversial opinions are often shared only privately, or even underground; honest discussions happen mostly within, rather than between, factions. When debates do happen, they can become fiercely contentious, to the point of destroying relationships – again, fragmenting the discipline.
Such angry debates can make undergraduate teaching, in the meaningful sense of changing minds, almost impossible. A less threatening approach might introduce contentious topics with more distant examples and more theoretical arguments. I like, for instance, using Jean-Paul Sartre’s Antisemite and Jew in discussions of the social psychology of racism. This short but sophisticated book describes France in the 1940’s – a very long time ago, to students – and details the fallacies of antisemitic logic among people Sartre personally knew: their convoluted reasoning; the ways they ignored non confirming evidence; how they constructed stereotypes – and where specific stereotypes originated; and finally, the appeal of anti-Semitism among particular (sociological) groups. Students can talk energetically about the broader questions with little apparent animosity or fear, while still quietly coming to understand the contemporary applications.
Our classrooms are powerful forces in allowing students to explore the data, the archives, the books and articles, and the stories that prove that there is a lot of work to be done to respect and uphold the dignity of all people.
-Mary Pattillo
Nancy Lopez: As a Black Latina, US-born Dominican daughter of immigrant parents with a second grade education, rich in cultural wealth, Prof. Carter’s invitation to embrace critical and self-implicating reflexivity and reflection as normative principles in knowledge production and practice resonated with me. Recently, I co-authored a report from the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute that reveals complex social inequalities faced by Afro-Latinxs – people who are ethnically Latino and racially Black. We used Census data that kept race and ethnicity queries separate and made a crucial discovery. Despite possessing higher educational attainment, Black Latinx communities experience greater poverty rates and lower rates of homeownership compared to their non-Black Latinx counterparts. These disparities are especially concerning for Black Latinas like myself, who exhibit higher labor force participation than non-Latina Black women and non-Black Latinas. These inequities would have gone unnoticed if race and ethnicity had been combined into one question.
It is my hope that the status quo of credentialed knowledge production will change. We must act and cultivate communities of practice anchored what Patricia Hill Collins calls flexible solidarity – action and reflection on power relations – grounded in a commitment to healthy, loving and more just communities. Fostering solidarity and unity in our communities and struggle for justice with others who are different — among & across political communities will advance what President Carter calls a “revolutionary unrealized integration” and social progress.
Myron T. Strong: [Prof. Carter’s address] made me think of the importance of having vision. I have often used this metaphor to explain what vision means in sociology. As a kid, I watched the cartoon ThunderCats and each time the leader, Lion-O, wanted to see both physical objects (such as buildings, vehicles and people) and symbolic manifestations, he would pull out his sword and say, “give me sight beyond sight.” Sociology is essential to giving one vision to see, analyze, and critique the world. So, to me the question is, how do I continue to help in my college and colleagues’ vision of the future? I work at a community college that serves mostly minority students, many of whom are international. So, in my particular circumstance, providing opportunities for my colleagues and students to directly interface with the discipline is important. Getting my colleagues and students to read, review, and/or publish in journals, present at sociology conferences and engage in discussions in which they share ways to be innovative in the ways we teach and approach sociology.
First Publics: The concerted movement to roll back rights, violent and racist attacks on our students and colleagues, and the uncertainty about the future of higher education affects us all. How can sociologists work toward integration and harness the “educative power of sociology” given the challenges of this particular political moment? You might reflect on the specific sociopolitical, institutional, or personal and professional context in which you work.
Michel Estefan: In my view, the path to upholding the principles championed by Prof. Carter and pursuing the political goals she envisions for sociology begins with the recognition that the sociologists best positioned to catalyze social change are those in the front lines of our discipline: community college professors and faculty at large public universities that serve as engines of social mobility. These educators are working with student populations that more closely resemble the diversity in the broader American public. And they are doing phenomenal work with severely constrained resources and in many cases under enormous political pressure from state and local officials. It is imperative that we make greater efforts to valorize, promote, protect, and reward their work within our discipline and beyond. This begins by dismantling the status hierarchy between “teachers” and “researchers” and acknowledging the need for both. It takes the form of concrete expressions of solidarity that fight to defend the rights of our colleagues at institutions besieged by political efforts to corrode their autonomy and censure their work. It requires that we embrace and honor teaching as the preeminent form of public sociology and treat our students, pedagogy, and classrooms with the respect, care, and thoughtfulness they deserve. If we do not uphold within our discipline the values we strive for publicly, sociology’s broader influence will rest on shaky ground, propped up solely by the narrow bickering of ivory tower discourse.
Mary Pattillo: I am definitely in a bubble. I work at a rich private university, in a liberal state, in a liberal metropolitan area. I watch from afar the censorship of teachers from kindergarten through graduate school in far too many states. I have the job security to be able to comment on and critique these developments, on the record. And, still, I know I am not safe. We are not safe. The Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action affects all of higher education and reverberates across the labor market that our students are entering. And several Republican presidential candidates are running on agendas that mischaracterize and malign our work. In her remarks, Prof. Carter reflected on the meetings being in Philadelphia, the location of the signing of the U.S. Constitution. Looking out at the ASA crowd gathered for her speech, Prof. Carter quipped that we were likely “the founding fathers’ worst nightmare.” That’s exactly how I want to approach this moment of backlash and intellectual witch hunting. We have to continue to haunt the dreams of reactionary forces. Those of us who still have the liberty to do so must not self-censor in fear that our states or our schools will be next, or that our students will turn on us. We cannot shy away from teaching about racism, sexism, and homophobia, the social movements that resist them, and the resilience of their targets. Our classrooms are powerful forces in allowing students to explore the data, the archives, the books and articles, and the stories that prove that there is a lot of work to be done to respect and uphold the dignity of all people. I stay committed to these efforts in my teaching and mentoring because there is no doubt that the pendulum will swing again.
Dan Chambliss: I’m not sure – but this is not my specialty, at all – that there are obvious answers here, even at the larger scale where most political action occurs: national policy, or social movements, or even at the ASA, although “race/class/gender neutral” policies seem reasonably effective in some settings. At this macro level, of course, we also face the challenge that some actors gain from “divide and conquer” strategies: many people benefit quite directly from oppressing minorities. But in face-to-face teaching, I suspect that the indirect approach I suggested above works better, i.e., an approach in which race/class/gender integration itself becomes less, rather than more, immediately salient. The “lower salience” approach succeeds in part by reducing backlash or framing benefits as zero-sum (“neutral”). Indeed, that’s the essential method proposed by classic work in social psychology, including “pursuing superordinate goals” (Sharif) or more recently, “cluster hiring” (Kanter). Simply put, we should be careful with making, say, contemporary racism or sexism the immediate, explicit focus of early class discussion (see recent studies of diversity workshops, e.g.), especially when only token representatives of a group are present.
Teaching touches more lives than any other aspect of sociology. The best way to fight the attacks is to give students the tools to process information and reject problematic and dangerous arguments. It always fuels their innovation and intellectual curiosity.
-Myron T. Strong
Nancy Lopez: In the aftermath of the June 2023 Supreme Court rulings (Students for Fair Admission, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College; Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina et al.) banning race-sensitive (but not gender-sensitive) affirmative action in higher education, I wonder how cultivating intersectional critical reflexivity and reflection for action at the individual and institutional levels can change the conversation and distribution of power for the future of equity in higher education. In her dissenting opinion, Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor quotes our ancestor Dr. Martin Luther King “’The arc of the moral universe’ will bend toward racial justice despite the Court’s efforts today to impede its progress.” I invite everyone to think about one or two actions you can take on this journey. President Carter shares some possibilities, including contributing to legal cases and action, as well as partnering with local and state level groups including civil rights agencies committed to social justice, and helping to create new knowledge that informs equity-based policy and distribution of resources.
Multi-faceted interventions, no matter how small, can make a difference. For example, here is a sample optional and potentially transformative essay prompt that could be used not only for potential student applicants to our undergraduate and graduate programs, but also for staff and faculty hires in academia and K-12 educational institutions: “Please share any experiences that shaped your individual character and/or unique ability to contribute to the university [k-12] setting. This may include discussing your experiences with race (both self-identified race and/or perceived race), tribal status, gender, ethnicity/cultural heritage, language, veteran status, sexuality, disability, growing up in family where no parent/guardian earned a four-year college degree in the U.S. or abroad when you, the applicant, were 16 years of age, nativity, and/or other individual experiences.” My hope is that this essay prompt could plant a seed for imagining a different future where the status quo is questioned and reckoned with. It could also nurture distributional and relational equity, advance epistemic equity and provide the basis for working toward cultivating understanding, compassion for those who are different from you and ultimately what Patricia Hill Collins calls “flexible solidarity.” It can also help advance social progress and dismantle and what President Carter calls “unrealized integration.”
Myron T. Strong: In a lot of ways, these attacks have served to remind the discipline that teaching sociology is as important as research. Historically, teaching has occupied a lower position in the discipline, it is seen as a necessary evil and an unwanted chore. In 1959, Talcott Parsons argued that the major role of the ASA was to share members’ research and train graduate students. I have long felt that among sociologists and academics in general there is an idea that those who can research and those who can’t teach. A sort of valorization of those who teach, like “thank you for your service.” Teaching touches more lives than any other aspect of sociology. The best way to fight the attacks is to give students the tools to process information and reject problematic and dangerous arguments. It always fuels their innovation and intellectual curiosity. This is an opportunity to challenge the systemic inequalities like the credentialism, academic caste systems, and our graduate school training that exist within our discipline and place emphasis on well-rounded approaches that encourage diverse scholars who are prepared for the challenges of the moment.
Michel Estefan is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Sociology Department at the University of California, San Diego. His teaching and research focus on making classrooms more equitable for historically minoritized students. His work has appeared in Teaching Sociology, Inside Higher Ed, and Teaching/Learning Matters and has been covered various times in The Chronicle of Higher Education. His results in the classroom have been recognized with awards from the University of California, San Diego, the University of California, Berkeley, SAGE publishing, and the section on Teaching and Learning of the American Sociological Association.
Mary Pattillo is the Harold Washington Professor of Sociology and Black Studies, and Chair of Black Studies, at Northwestern University. Her research and teaching are in the areas of Black urban life, politics, housing, education, and the criminal legal system. She is the winner of the Community Builder Award at Northwestern, and is the Membership Chair of the Association of Black Sociologists.
Dan Chambliss recently retired after forty years of teaching at Hamilton College in Clinton, NY. Author or co-author of four books and a variety of articles, he is the recipient of ASA Section Prizes in Theory, Medical Sociology, and Teaching and Learning. In 2018, he received the ASA’s career prize for Distinguished Contributions. to Teaching.
Dr. Nancy López (nlopez@unm.edu) is professor of sociology at the University of New Mexico (UNM). Dr. López directs and co-founded the Institute for the Study of “Race” and Social Justice (race.unm.edu), an unfunded academic and research Institute at the University of New Mexico (UNM). Dr. López’s scholarship, teaching and service is guided by the insights of intersectionality –the importance of examining race, gender, class, ethnicity together–for interrogating inequalities across a variety of social outcomes, including education, health, employment, housing, and developing contextualized solutions that advance social justice. Dr. López is the first woman of color tenured in the Sociology department and the first woman of the African Diaspora (Black Latina/Dominican) tenured in the College of Arts and Sciences (2008) and promoted to full professor (2018) at UNM.
Myron T. Strong is an award-winning sociologist, who is currently an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Community College of Baltimore County in Baltimore, Maryland. He frequently writes and lectures on Afrofuturism, race, gender and other social factors in modern comics and popular culture.
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