Deploying sociological theory is a core part of our teaching in cultural studies. Indeed, one of our most prominent theorists and co-founder of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, the late Stuart Hall, was also a sociologist. It is fair to say that cultural studies is about remixing a wide array of social sciences and humanities disciplines – from anthropology to philosophy to literary studies. I completed my PhD in a sociology department, where I also taught a first-year sociology course, before moving to cultural studies. The experience of shifting between these two worlds means I can speak to the value of teaching sociological theory in non-sociology classrooms. 

Recently, I developed and presented lectures for a second-year cultural studies course on consumer culture and introduced the theories of many self-described sociologists throughout the semester. This included Jean Baudrillard, Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, and Celia Lury, to name a few. Partly, drawing in sociologists reflects the magpie-like nature of cultural studies, but it also speaks to the strong contribution that sociology makes to theories of culture. Both sociology and cultural studies are contested spaces in the academy with porous boundaries. Possible key differences include some of sociology’s focus on quantitative methods, and cultural studies’ concern with representation, popular culture, and cultural artifacts, but in general – and particularly when it comes to theory – the lines are fuzzy. 

That we use so many kinds of theorists in cultural studies to help understand what culture is and how it works indicates something about what constitutes good, robust theory. Good theory speaks beyond disciplinary boundaries, offering a framework for understanding the world broadly. As I tell my students at the beginning of every semester, learning theory can help us better understand the world, and ourselves, and in turn might help guide us in how to change the world. Sociological theory is particularly useful for cultural studies because it is not interested in obscure thought experiments but is specifically intended to make sense of social life. 

In these terms, teaching theory is a form of public sociology, or what we – located in other disciplines – might more broadly call engagement. Engagement work is not just happening when we run a public seminar, it’s happening in class, every day on campus. To say that teaching theory is a form of engagement is to understand the task of translation: how can we, as teachers, not only help students to comprehend theory, but also to apply it to urgent social issues of the day, and indeed to their own lives? When I say theory can help us better understand the world, and ourselves, what does this look like? 

In class, we start with the problem we want to understand. What is consumer culture? How has it rapidly changed, and how did we get here? How might we respond? How might it be otherwise? Theory comes in as the framework for sense-making. For example, Baudrillard helps us to make sense of the excesses of consumer culture, how and why value is assigned to things, and how this maps onto class and status differentiation. Theory opens our eyes. After class, when we walk into a department store, we don’t just see objects for sale; we notice how the counters are overflowing with magical piles of products, how the store itself promises deliverance from a fear of scarcity.  

I think it is crucial to highlight the theorists themselves to students. I always try to include a biographical slide that places the theorist in the context of time and place, so that their thoughts are not simply presented as ahistorical disembodied ideas. This also functions as a good check on who constitutes the canon you’re creating – you notice more quickly if every voice you’re appealing to is a dead white man located in the Global North. It’s for this very reason I noticed this semester that I was introducing a lot of sociologists.

This year I also developed a specific assessment task to get students thinking about how the course content applied to their everyday lives. After the lecture for the week was complete, in the first fifteen minutes of their tutorials, they would be given a reflective question that asked students to directly apply the course content to their own experiences. For example, one week they were asked to reflect on a time when they had engaged in conspicuous consumption. In another week, they were asked to reflect on one aspect of cultural capital they have access to and what this says about their class position. We would practice versions of these questions in the lectures, between discussions of theory. Students would be given short breaks in the lecture to brainstorm ideas with their peers. 

Part of the reason for the design of this assessment activity was to create conditions where the possible use of AI was limited. AI is notoriously bad at reflective work, and generally answering these questions requires a level of personal understanding. It would have taken longer to work out how to instruct AI than simply answer the question. I unofficially and affectionately called this task the “have a thought” assessment, where the bar for getting a good mark was rather low. The aim was to reward students who took in the course content and (after some in-lecture scaffolding) genuinely thought about how the ideas applied to their own lives. 

I also wanted to be able to reward students with the kind of grades they might get in a science lab, through showing their basic understanding of key concepts. To return to sociology specifically, this kind of task asks students to situate themselves within a social context, to reflect on how their desires are in large part structured by the world around them. In my view, teaching theory is in part about teaching real-world applications, and we can and should test and reward students on their understanding of these applications. Building in reflective aspects to this testing helps achieve multiple goals in the age of AI. 

There is no doubt that sociologists will continue to play a key role in my teaching, in the vibrant interdisciplinary space of cultural studies. My hope is that by the same token, sociologists might also glance over to those of us in other disciplines, to see how sociological theory is being taken up, where it travels, and the good it does. 

As I write this, sociology is under attack in Australian universities, and the fate of the discipline is precarious. Macquarie University is proposing to eliminate the major and make the majority of their sociology staff redundant. The Australian National University (ANU), where I studied, is also amalgamating their sociology department and cutting staff. The vital role that sociology plays in shaping many other disciplinary pursuits in the modern university should not be forgotten. 

Sociology is the study of social life – it is essential to developing critical thinking in our student cohorts around why society is structured in the ways that it is, and the role individuals play within these structures. Sociology offers us theory, but is always applied and with thoughtful methods. It is about real people and real life. It is about imagining possible worlds and laying out a plan for how we might achieve change. Any threat to this must be urgently reconsidered, for the flow on effects it will surely have beyond the lines of disciplinary boundaries.

Hannah McCann is a senior lecturer in cultural studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Hannah’s academic work sits within the field of critical femininities, with research on topics including queer femininities, beauty culture, and queer fandom. She is the author of Queering Femininity: Sexuality, Feminism and the Politics of Presentation (Routledge), co-author of Queer Theory Now: From Foundations to Futures (available via Bloomsbury), and co-editor of Taylor Swift: Culture, Capital, and Critique (Routledge). She has a forthcoming monograph Emotions, Bodies, and Identities in the Hair and Beauty Salon: Caring Beyond Skin Deep (Bloomsbury).