radical/critical/introductory sociology

Raised in a post-Quaker, social democratic and environmentalist household, becoming a post-biologist in an era when adherents to the humanist ("early") Marx debated the economistic Marxists and left Weberians and earning a PhD in a milieu filled with structuralist political ecologists and socialist feminist deconstructivists, mine has always been a critical/radical sociology. However, the countervailing trend to this intellectual journey has been the denigration/collapse/destruction of traditional mass, left-liberal social movements -- the arenas and anti-Reaganite resistance I was still able to plug into in the early 1980s. The international rise of neoliberal economics and governance and the spread of cultural conservatism domestically, then, generate dual (if contradictory) trends towards intensifying American individualism and reinscribing reactionary/romantic conceptions of religious truth, family/gender relations and cultural aesthetics in general.

On the one hand, this move from social/liberal democratic, monopoly capitalist, high modernity (where nationalisms were generally dampened by the cold war and relatively shared belief in scientific, political and economic progress) to neoliberal, global conglomerate, post-modernity (where jihadist nationalisms -- in Barber's terms -- abound in the face of a McWorldian cosmopolitianism flush with risk society's deep ambivalence about a collective embrace of progress along technoscientific, political ecological and socio-economic lines) has forced some really exciting critical/radical rethinking of ecological, technoscientific, personal, medical, interactonist, infrastructural, political and economic relations.

On the other hand, it has generated student bodies split between those infinitely less receptive to the kinds of reflexive thinking mainstream sociology has long advanced for, variously, neoliberal and neoconservative reasons on the right and those romantically seeking an engagement in liberal politics for which the state provides few opportunities, those embracing a politics of critical individual consumption practices, and those who reactively reject all mainstream technoscience, politics, marketing and production relations on the left. (It is surely worth noting that there has also been a growth in the percentage of students with utterly instrumentalist approaches to higher education as the acquisition of job skills.

All of which is to say that even the most conventional sociological insights are felt to be somewhere between critical and radical in my introductory classes... a phenomenon I find both deeply frustrating and a great joy. It is frustrating because I want so much to teach the material that thrills me the most. It is joyous because it means that the opportunities for playful, pop cultural pushing the envelopes of students individual social, historical and global referents are robust AND work best when I force myself to remember -- and present to them -- where I was at the start of my sociological journey.

By comparison to these imperatives, all the techniques I've had presented to me in teaching seminars and assessment programs strike me as deeply secondary -- they tend to be focused on keeping the students' interest or satisfying administrative discipline, when they ought to stress connecting with and stimulating students.