{"id":672,"date":"2025-02-21T17:27:35","date_gmt":"2025-02-21T17:27:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/firstpublics\/?p=672"},"modified":"2025-02-21T17:27:36","modified_gmt":"2025-02-21T17:27:36","slug":"teaching-the-sociological-multiverse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/firstpublics\/2025\/02\/21\/teaching-the-sociological-multiverse\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching the Sociological Multiverse"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Teaching social theory is just plain fun. For me, it\u2019s an opportunity to see our world in a multidimensional way. Who needs a comic book multiverse when you can look at social phenomena through different perspectives? Inspired by sociologist Arthur Stinchcombe<\/a>, one of my favorite things to prompt theory students with is to present them with a news item and ask them to discuss it through different perspectives: \u201cA good sociologist can find three plausible explanations for why they see a particular social phenomenon.\u201d I like to remind students that \u2018three\u2019 works particularly well because it syncs up with the three big umbrellas of social theory (Conflict Perspective\/Marxism, Structural Functionalism, and Interpretive), but it doesn\u2019t have to be so simplistic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why do we have a housing crisis in a country with such great prosperity? Why do people shirk vaccinations and accept other drugs so readily? Why do we have such a massive incarcerated population in the United States when crime has decreased? These are complex questions that demand nuanced answers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Multiverse\u2019 as a term wasn\u2019t coined by Marvel impresario Stan Lee<\/a> but by the sociologically-attuned American philosopher William James in 1895. In his essay, <\/strong>boldly titled \u201cIs Life Worth Living?<\/a>\u201d James offered the term to remind us of <\/strong>the \u201cplasticity\u201d of what we see, and to suggest how we can see a world that God has created but also one that sciences like evolutionary theory can reveal. (It\u2019s actually quite a fun read.) Today, we know the \u201cmany worlds theory\u201d as a problem of quantum mechanics<\/a> and, as I often tell my students, \u201cI\u2019m not that kind of doctor.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For sociology, James is one of the key figures who helped lay the foundation for one of the cornerstone theories of contemporary sociology: Symbolic Interactionism. James\u2019 philosophy, called pragmatism, was based on the concept of the \u201csocial self\u201d as a social construction, arguing that human nature arises from real-world social interactions and that these interactions are a worthy unit of analysis. He proposed that our thoughts are generated as a \u201cstream of consciousness\u201d and that meaning is constructed through experiences. Pragmatism lives on through George Herbert Mead and symbolic interactionism. James\u2019 philosophy asserted that there was not a single self but multiple ones that arise from interaction\u2014an idea that lived on through Charles Cooley\u2019s \u2018looking glass self\u2019 and Erving Goffman\u2019s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.<\/em> (Read more, here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, as fun as it is on the big screen (and maybe less fun in physics books), I do not think it\u2019s sociologically useful to imagine that there are multiple universes floating out there with multiple versions of myself teaching math or literature instead of sociology. What I do think is sociologically interesting is just how much people from different life experiences can have very different interpretations of the same phenomenon. The idea of the multiverse as a sociological concept\u2014which I assuredly wasn\u2019t taught in graduate school\u2014does not mean the many worlds depicted with multiple comic book heroes and villains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I see the sociological multiverse as a potential intervention. Are we increasingly seeing the world in a more uni-versal, or one-dimensional, way? Alas, I think so. The social media filter bubbles through which we see the world are algorithmically-tweaked to reflect back to us the world we expect to see. This much we know. Written in the early 1960s\u2014exactly midway between where James was writing and where we sit today\u2014social theorist Herbert Marcuse could not have imagined a social media-infused world when he warned that mass media technology and modern consumerist life were repressing critical thought and freedom. And yet, Marcuse\u2019s fear of the death of critical thinking<\/a> is even more important today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Students, reflecting the population at large, seem to be quick to answer the sociological puzzles I offer above. \u201cThere is a large unhoused population because people are lazy and don\u2019t want to work.\u201d \u201cPeople don\u2019t take vaccines because they are stupid.\u201d \u201cPeople are in jail because some people are just inherently bad people.\u201d Maybe folks aren\u2019t willing to say such callous things in class, but you get the idea. These are not just problems for students. Sociologists, perhaps rewarded via social media, are disturbingly too quick to find one-dimensional explanations for complex social phenomena.<\/strong> It\u2019s class. Race. Sexism. In the words of one sociologist, \u201cFuck Nuance<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But nuance is where multidimensionality exists. Nuance is where people of divergent opinions find commonality. For William James, \u201cTruth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs \u2018pass,\u2019 so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them\u201d (read more, here<\/a>). The philosophical\u2014rather than comic-book\u2014multiverse challenges us not to let our own truth pass without challenge. In a call-out age, challenges come with heightened social repercussions. The need to \u201cCall In\u201d (please see Loretta J. Ross\u2019 brilliant short TED Talk<\/a> on the subject, or read this New York Times <\/em>article<\/a>) is a profound invitation from the multiverse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Teaching theory\u2014not one theory, but all of them\u2014with equal passion and vigor\u2014is the way to get students to think in that multidimensional way. A clever reader might notice that I cite sociologists who are inspired by three different perspectives: Marcuse (from a more Marxist background), Stinchcombe (from a more economic and organizational sociology), and James (who helped shape the interactionist perspective). I think this is how I see teaching not as a means of teaching students what to think, but as a way of teaching them how to think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jonathan Wynn is professor and department chair of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His most recent book was\u00a0The City & the Hospital: The paradox of medically overserved communities<\/a>\u00a0and his novel,\u00a0The Set Up<\/a>, lands in May 2025.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Teaching social theory is just plain fun. For me, it\u2019s an opportunity to see our world in a multidimensional way. Who needs a comic book multiverse when you can look at social phenomena through different perspectives? Inspired by sociologist Arthur Stinchcombe, one of my favorite things to prompt theory students with is to present them […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2218,"featured_media":673,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"series":[],"class_list":["post-672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reflections"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/firstpublics\/files\/2025\/02\/abstract-photo-scaled.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/firstpublics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/firstpublics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/firstpublics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/firstpublics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2218"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/firstpublics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/firstpublics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":682,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/firstpublics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672\/revisions\/682"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/firstpublics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/firstpublics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/firstpublics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/firstpublics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/firstpublics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}