Sounds Pretty Hopeful to Me: Hope for Sociology in Fostering Social Change

(SAANZ 2022 Student Plenary Paper)

Abstract

Sociology today is critical about its role in bringing about social change. It pays attention to nuances and the context-bound particularities of the world around us. In popular thought, changing the world seems to require identification of the root cause of what needs to be changed but causal relationships are tricky, to say the least. Sociologists need to ask questions that focus on how change happens: What agents are responsible for generating change? Who does change benefit? And what role can academia have in this? During my professional experience as a cultural conservationist, I attempted to use academically connected research to generate social change. As a result, I learned to explore these questions of the role and impact of academia in real-world applications. Through this, I have become aware of the connection between hope and change and the responsibility that sociology as a discipline has towards society. I explore these connections here through a debate conducted among my students in a foundation-level sociology course. The idea of change gives purpose to academia, a way to combat the bleakness of what research often points out about the world we live in. As the students concluded, change is indeed necessary but maybe we need to rethink our inquiry. Is the value of academia related to the expectation that it generates change, or in its ability to reflect on its relationship with social change during a period in which such change has become increasingly rapid