(AMHERST, MASS.) In January 2024, Florida officially voted to reduce the number of students enrolled in sociology courses.
That might sound baffling if you haven’t tuned into this cultural skirmish. But for me – I’m the American Sociological Association’s current president and a professor of sociology and public policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst – it’s both disturbing and an opportunity to help the public better understand my academic discipline.
Sociology is the study of social life, social change and the social causes and consequences of human behavior .
Sociologists analyze how society is structured and how people interact with one another in groups, organizations and society.
A central concept to sociology is the “ sociological imagination .” As defined by the scholar C. Wright Mills , it’s the ability to link someone’s experiences to societal forces or historical trends; for example, connecting losing a job to waves of unemployment due to a recession.