‘The Sociological Imagination’
“Developing a quality of mind [and]
the capacity to change perspective.”
All day conference at Goldsmiths, University of London
Saturday 24 October 2009
C Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination was published in 1959 some half a century ago. This event explores the legacy of the book but also asks: how has the sociological imagination been transformed since its publication. How is the promise of sociology today different from Mills’ formulation? Mills wrote The Sociological Imagination while a Fulbright fellow at the University of Copenhagen during the 1956-1957 academic year. It is a critique of American sociology and also an argument for his own vision enshrined in books like White Collar and The Power Elite. Initially titled ‘Autopsy of Social Science’ he wrote the book, as Daniel Geary has argued in a recent intellectual biography of Mills, out of the conviction that America sociology had broken its promise. US sociology had resulted in the Grand Theory of Talcott Parsons which papered over conflicts and injustices and the abstracted empiricism of Paul Lazarsfeld that could not see the empirical wood for the political trees. In a similar spirit we want to use its anniversary to ask probing questions about the state of sociology today.
This event was organized by the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths. The program included:
Beverley Skeggs: Introduction
Les Back: ‘The Promise of Sociology in the 21st Century’
Keith Khan Harris: ‘The Practice of Dialogue’
Vikki Bell: ‘Art, Events and Remembering?’
Alberto Toscano: ‘Imagining Finance and Crisis’
Kevin McDonald: ‘Beyond Imagination’
Kate Nash: ‘The Scale of Political Imagination’
David Oswell: ‘On War and Infancy:
Modern Imaginations of Violence at the Borders’
Nirmal Puwar: ‘Imagining Public Spaces’
Nina Wakeford: ‘Visual commitments: design, art, me’
Caroline Knowles: ‘Global Imagining:
Shoes and Fabrics in Motion’
Paul Halliday: ‘Sociological Film’