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" Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both."

C. Wright Mills (1959, p. 3)

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“Charity is no substitute for justice withheld” | St Augustine

For me, that line names a shared problem across disability, welfare, and global development: when injustice is reframed as “misfortune”, the response becomes charity rather than rights. Whether it is disabled people, other groups who may require welfare, or communities shaped by colonial histories, “support” is too often conditional, paternalistic, and discretionary. As a sociologist, I am concerned with how this obscures the structural production of inequality; as a disability studies researcher, I see how the charity model entrenches dependence and diminishes dignity. Justice, by contrast, demands secure entitlements, redistribution, and transformation of the systems that make people reliant on goodwill in the first place. It is especially powerful in teaching - sociology and theology students alike often begin by asking, “But isn’t charity a good thing?”. I have found that this challenge startles them, opening up a deeper conversation about justice.

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"To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time" James Baldwin - this speaks to me on so may intersectional levels - and remains highly relevant today, unfortunately!

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Surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinued in its action (Foucault, 1995, p.201)

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"I am deliberate and afraid of nothing" Audre Lorde.

As a scholar-activist this quote challenges me to prioritise integrity, intentionality and a commitment to actions grounded in humanity.

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"Rather than frame post-feminism simply as the backlash against feminism and/or feminist movements... I consider the hyphen in post-feminism as women's reactions and responses to the preceding feminist histories, which signal both continuities and fractures in their everyday life."

- Ge, L. (2025). Ambivalent desiring subjects: young women, agency and post-(socialist-)feminist sensibilities in China. Feminist Theory.

This sentence beautifully captures the messy, non-linear reality of social progress. It asks sociologists to stop viewing historical shifts merely in terms of "progress" versus "backlash." Instead, it encourages us to see how individuals actively react to the histories they inherit, navigating a complex web of "continuities and fractures" to make sense of their present reality.

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I met an old hippy in a pub in the North Pennines, I told him I was a sociology lecturer, he said "Ah, sociology. Looking for justice and finding there none."

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If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences- W. I. Thomas, Society, by Chinoy E.(1967), p 169.

All contemporary relationships as reflected in social statics and social dynamics, have invariably been defined by perceptions of exceptionalism, superiority, inferiority and domination. Social Darwinism, a possible extention of Thomas postulation, in a way, is rooted in societies with growth from families, communities and societies of all ethnicity and races. Charles O Okwuwa

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"The Cass Review has been extensively critiqued by healthcare professionals, scholars, service users and trans communities, and is considered an exemplar in policy-based evidence-making."

- Cal Horton (2026) “The worst thing I’ve ever experienced” – comparing experiences of affirmative and non-affirmative healthcare provision for trans adolescents in the UK" https://doi.org/10.1080/26895269.2025.2609952

The notion of an "exemplar in policy-based evidence-making" speaks to me so powerfully. In just a few words, Horton not only powerfully captures the inherent problem with the Cass Review in and of itself, but also identifies and critiques a wider discursive trend with enormous implications for the contemporary social world. We have now gone well beyond "fake news", and are living in a world where aesthetics of science are manipulated and exploited to justify regressive, pre-determined policy decisions. This is a trend that requires urgent sociological attention, and Horton's intervention both names the problem and issues an implicit call to action.

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The Right looks for allies, the Left looks for traitors

Submitted on behalf of Leslie Sklair.

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Aco Divac

"IBM plus Reality plus Humanism=Sociology”, it is the title of the article written in 1954 by the American sociologist C. Wright Mills.

This lapidary sentence instantly resembles with another equally powerful formula
(E=mc2) that intends to explain the mechanic of physical universe.

Then, Mills was concerned with the rise of narrow and rigid, quantitative, and bureaucratic methods and approach in sociology, which he felt focused on data gathering rather than understanding the broader context of society. He used "IBM" as a metaphor for such technocratic approach.

I came across this catchy title, many years after it was written, in a comprehensive collection of his essays collected under equally powerful title, “Power, Politics and People”.  Since then that catchy formula stays with me as analytical and inspirational reminder.

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"It was a tragedy that beggared the Greek; it was an upheaval of humanity like the Reformation and the French Revolution. Yet we are blind and led by the blind. We discern in it no part of our labor movement, no part of our industrial struggle; no part of our religious experience."

The writer is W.E.B Du Bois, in Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (p 727). He is summing up the history of the "ten million people" transported out of their country into the "new-found Eldorado of the West", their struggle for their emancipation from slavery, and their crucial role in post Civil War Southern Reconstruction, building schools, hospitals and democracy. This ended around 1873 with the development of the "psychological wage" for white workers: together with naked violence, this effectively separated the two groups of working-class people.

Understanding racialized capitalism has been a late development in my sociological life: W.E.B. Du Bois richly deserves his new-found place in the canon.

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“It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.”

― Margaret Mead, as quoted in Teacher's Treasury of Stories for Every Occasion (1958) by Millard Dale Baughman, p. 69

Every time I come back to this quote, it brings me somewhere slightly different. At first, I always feel the obvious sting of truth: our lives are not ours to design, and any arbitrary design imposed on a life will always carry at least a touch of cruelty. There’s also the longing for play later in life, and the wish to minimise regret.

But then I start to wonder whether Mead’s claim still holds. I’m in my mid‑forties, doing a PhD in a discipline I didn’t even study before. Yes, I also do the work at home and the minding for my family, but even that is not only work. There is so much fun, curiosity, and learning woven into my mid-life days. Play and learning didn’t end with the end of childhood for me.

And then, inevitably, the question of class and privilege pops up around the corner. Who gets to have this experience? Who can even think of doing a PhD at this age, never mind actually go through with it? It feels like a luxury. And yet there are the more taxing days when it feels like the opposite of luxury, days when I long for a simpler life, one where I “would have seeded everything earlier and could now just be harvesting”. On those days, the old, “arbitrary” life design starts to look almost comforting… I think about my grandparents, who worked in the same buildings and institutions their whole lives. No one expected them to retrain or “upskill.” They were considered educated enough. And then I think of the Polish Silesian miners in the 1990s, suddenly told to “re‑qualify” as the mines were closing. Those memories always brings me back to the uncomfortable side of the “lifelong learning” ideal. In my case the PhD is my choice and it’s fun, but I can’t ignore the way lifelong learning can be twisted: how, instead of freeing people, it can simply restructure the ways we’re being shown our place.

And all this is only me thinking about the learning part of Mead’s quote. I’ll happily leave it to you to unpack the “work in middle age” and “regrets in old age” parts. There’s plenty of rich terrain there too :)

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“I often say that sociology is a martial art, a means of self-defence. Basically, you use it to defend yourself, without having the right to use it for unfair attacks.” Pierre Bourdieu

I first heard this sentence in the documentary Sociology is a martial art (La sociologie est un sport de combat) on Pierre Bourdieu, and it has stayed with me ever since. For me, it is a reminder that sociology reveals the invisible social forces that shape our lives. Understanding these constraints does not eliminate them, but it gives us distance from them. At the same time, this knowledge should not be used as a weapon against others, but as a way of becoming more reflexive about the structures that shape us all. In this sense, sociology becomes a lesson in freedom: the knowledge of our constraints is the beginning of freedom. Knowing that one is unfree is a form of freedom, and this idea, which runs throughout Bourdieu's work, has shaped my way of thinking and teaching.

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“ Like a boat, she has saved the Pandavas when they were about to drown in a sea of disgrace.” (Irawati Karve,79)

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"a cousin is also a wife, and after marriage a cousin is more of a wife than a cousin" in the Southern Dravidian system. Irawati Karve defined kinship as a fundamental organizing principle in India, famously highlighting the stark contrast between Northern and Southern systems. A key insight from her work, Kinship Organization in India.

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'The observer must have sympathy; and his sympathy must be untrammelled and unreserved.' Harriet Martineau (1838) How to Observe Morals and Manners London: Charles Knight and Co. p. 40

From the first book on sociological method.

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“Disability is a rich and undeniably human experience. Disability can be beautifully disruptive; it can change the ways we think about and understand life, death, faith, work, care, sex, art, activism, community and love.”
(Liddiard et al., 2022, p. 145).

This sentence resonates deeply with me because it transforms how we see disability. Rather than a deficit or limitation, it reveals disability as a profound lens through which to understand human life and relationships. It beautifully but powerfully unsettles dominant assumptions that push disabled bodies and experiences to the margins, and instead illuminates disability as a source of insight, creativity, and social transformation. I am especially moved by the phrase “beautifully disruptive”. It captures how disability can quietly disturb what we take for granted, opening new ways of understanding care, intimacy, community, and what it means to live fully. As a sociologist, it reminds me that the margins often hold the deepest truths about society, inviting us to listen more carefully, think more humbly, and remain open to voices that transform how we understand everyday life.

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'Talent is a useless concept. [...] Excellence is mundane. Excellence is accomplished through the doing of actions, ordinary in themselves, performed consistently and carefully, habitualized, compounded together, added up over time.' Chambliss, D. 1989. The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers. Sociological Theory 7 (1): 70–86. I love the boldness of this sentence (and the answering sentence), their deep insight and the explanation that follows. I find this article eternally inspiring and often return to it to remind myself that small, careful, consistent actions are what ultimately create impact in social research and life more generally.

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"Sociology- A Science That Makes Trouble"

Bourdieu, P. 1993. Sociology in Question. London: Sage

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"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman". A powerful statement to remind us that becoming is important and becoming can be changed for a better and equal society.

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Edith Bambgoye

Personal Construct: It is advisable for the individual in society to take part in one sociological event or conference, in order to shape society for a better tomorrow.

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“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line, —the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.”
— W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

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Culture is peer pressure from dead people.

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‘It is a music that beats heavily against the walls of babylon, that the walls of come a-tumbling down; a music that chucks a heavy historical load that is pain that is hunger that is bitter that is blood, that is dread.’

Linton Kwesi Johnson (1976), Jamaican Rebel Music. Race & Class, XVII. 4: 397.

This is an article was developed from Linton's sociology dissertation on reggae that he wrote as a student at Goldsmiths College in the early seventies.

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"Influencer culture is probably creeping into your life more acutely, deeply, and frequently than you might think."

Sophie Bishop Influencer Creep: how optimisation, authenticity, and self-brandingtransform creative culture Univeristy of California Press, 2025 p. 207.

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"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."

Simone Weil

quoted in Simone Petriment Simone Weil: A Life, 1976 p. 462

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"Let the ears of a guilty people tingle with truth, and seventy millions sigh for the righteousness which exalteth nations, in this drear day when human brotherhood is mockery and a snare."

W.E.B. Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

from the end of this history-making book.

Les Back, University of Glasgow.

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'The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house' These classic words of Audre Lorde introduced me to understanding systematic oppression. It helps me to reject simple tokenistic approaches to tackling social injustices, discrimination and oppression. Her words inspire me to challenge the structural and systematic barriers to equity and find new strategies to address deep rooted oppression in our societies.

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Politics means a slow, powerful drilling through hard boards, with a mixture of passion and a sense of proportion.

[Die Politik bedeutet ein starkes langsames Bohren von harten Brettern mit Leidenschaft und Augenmaß zugleich.]

Weber, Politics as a Vocation

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‘The word itself, "research", is probably the dirtiest word in the indigenous world’s vocabulary’

Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 1999: 1

A salutary inspiration and a reminder of the harms we can do as researchers, as well as an opening to do research otherwise.

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“It is not people who can communicate; only communication can communicate.” Niklas Luhmann (1990) Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, p. 31.

The idea from Niklas Luhmann is insightful for sociology because it shifts the focus from individual intentions to the structures of communication that shape social life. By looking at how communications connect to further communications, sociologists can better understand how institutions like politics, law, or science maintain their own logics and reproduce themselves over time. Individuals remain necessary participants, but this perspective highlights that social order emerges from communicative processes rather than from isolated actions alone. Christian Morgner

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'We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.'

Judith Butler, Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence (2004, p. 23)

This became a bit of a North Star since my doctorate: whose undoing is recognised, and by whose design?

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[It is]an attempt at least to begin to imagine what a humanistic social science—one that does not, in so doing, abandon everything that is genuinely valuable in the notion of “science”might actually be like. (Graeber, David. Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.)

It is a seemingly impossible, yet nonetheless courageous claim in an era when all totalising systems of value appear to have been shattered—one that, I believe, we all truly need.

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Who does not dare to speak about Capitalism should be silent on Fascism. ('Wer nicht vom Kapitalismus reden will sollte auch vom Faschismus schweigen'). Max Horkheimer, in 'Die Juden in Europa, 1939/ 1942

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"Dear Engels, I presume you got a letter from my wife (about a week ago) in which she thanked you for the wine? She is a little worried lest it should have fallen into the wrong hands. The children, too, are greatly obliged to you for the wine. They would seem to have inherited their father’s fondness for the bottle." (Letter from Marx to Engels, 27 February 1861, Marx & Engels Collected Works, Volume 41, p. 264)

A rarely quoted passage from a foundational text. As the translators note in their Preface to Volume 41 (p. xxi), "Marx's and Engels' letters make it possible to follow the different stages in the writing of Capital and to see how, in the process of preparing the second instalment of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx exceeded the original planned limits of the manuscript."

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"Therefore, albeit oscillating between differing degrees of candor and opaqueness, the concept of race is and always has been, amongst other things, a political resource."

from 'Racialization in the ‘Zone of Ambiguity’ by Brett St Louis in

Racialization : Studies in Theory and Practice, edited by Karim Murji, and John Solomos, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/suss/detail.action?docID=1073520.

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"It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

Mark Fisher (Capital Realism, 2022, Zero Books)

“It is now easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”

Fredric Jameson (Future City, New Left Review)

I first came across this phrase/sentence reading Capital Realism Mark Fisher's brilliant polemic. The late great Fisher credits the quote, which he uses, in a remixed form not unlike a textual sample, to name the opening chapter of CR, to Jameson and Zizek. I have included the Jameson version. The Zizek version is longer and somewhat more pulled apart and can be found in the opening paragraph of The Spectre of Ideology.

Regardless, this sentence is perfect in that it is simple, thought provoking, endlessly quotable, and, as we watch/experience late stage capitalism destroy everything, sadly true.

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"The weapons of the weak are weak weapons." Pierre Bourdieu

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Men [people] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. Karl Marx - 1852 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

It has Agency vs. Structure,

Inherited Conditions, Context, and Materialism (and in original form sexism [men]) all in one sentence.

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'Doing sociology and writing sociology is aimed at disclosing the possibility of living together differently, with less misery or no misery: the possibility daily withheld, overlooked or unbelieved.'

Bauman Z. 2000 Liquid Modernity

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“Our intention is to transform the research journey into an exiting experience”.

Ebook Social Research Methodology and Methods for Emerging Researchers. 2021

Wise Owls Dublin Ireland.

ISBN 978-1-5272-9308-3

Co-authored by Dr Marjorie Fitzpatrick and Dr. Teresa Whitaker.

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"To trouble a simple binary of queer kinship present and future against a heteronormative kinship past requires embracing the ambivalence, multiplicity and messiness which exists between and across these two idealised positions. It is in this complexity that kinship is done and relationality is built"

Reed, L., & Stella, M. (2024). ‘To raise a village, fall far from the tree’: Methods for queer kinship pasts, presents and futures. Sexualities, 0(0).

I like that this offers a quite simple statement of how we can understand - and must retain - complexity. Queer theory can get bogged down in endless sentences of conditionals, this cuts through that to the heart of what happens when dealing with norms and ideals and ambition for difference - and relationality between people.

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"Hope is a discipline." Mariame Kaba (2021). We Do This 'Til We Free Us. Haymarket Books. I owe my introduction to this sentence to Rachel Rosen; it completely reframed my understanding of hope by combining it with agency, and it’s stayed with me ever since. It moves "hope" from a vague feeling to a daily practice. Kaba teaches us that hope isn’t just an emotion—it’s the daily, disciplined decision to get up and put one foot in front of the other. It’s a brilliant reminder that social change doesn't happen because we feel optimistic; it happens because we show up and do the work, regardless of the odds.

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•The remarkable in the mundane and the mundane in the remarkable (Silverman, 2008)

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"theodicies are always sociodicies"

Bourdieu, P. (1991) "Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field", Comparative Social Research, 13: 1–44.

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This sentence succinctly captures the social functions of religious classification and the interrelations among different levels of sociological analysis.

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"race and queerness are not at end simply qualities of bodies, or identity categories’ but ‘sparking intercorporeal fields through which embodiment, attachment and subjectivity are plotted."

Keaney, J., 2023. Making gaybies: Queer reproduction and multiracial feeling. Duke University Press.

I love the terminology here, sparkling makes those 'fields' dance for me and returns the liveness of humans to the equation in the way the argument of this sentence (and book) is demanding.

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"Consider this again: Everything we need is already here (but we must look for it)."

Niang, Sophie Marie. "In defence of what’s there: Notes on scavenging as methodology." Feminist Review 136, no. 1 (2024): 52-66.

This article is just a powerhouse of critical posiiton on methodology and the very foundations of knowledge production. This sentence encapsulates the argument but it's so artful in the process

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……the most personal is the most impersonal, that many of the most intimate dramas, the deepest malaises, the most singular suffering that men and women can experience find their roots in the objective contradictions, constraints and double binds inscribed in the structure of the labour market and housing markets, in the merciless sanctions of the school system or in the mechanics of economics and social inheritance.

Bourdieu, P. and Wacquant, L.J.D. (1992, p. 201). An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Polity Press

I came across this years ago; it has summed up and shaped both my teaching and research interests.

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“It was Durkheim and not the savage who made society into a god.”

E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion (1956)

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"we can’t know in advance—we can know only retrospectively, if even then—what is queer and what is not, we gather and combine eclectically and idiosyncratically, dragging a bunch of cultural debris around with us and stacking it in eclectic piles not necessarily like any pre-existing whole. "(Freeman, 2007: 499)

Freeman E (2007) Still after. South Atlantic Quarterly 106(3): 495–500

This has been so central in how I have explored and moved forward with queer theory in cultural sociology. It gives a steer on methodology, theory, epistemology generally. It has been a guiding light for my work

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"I’m not going to tell you what to do, because you know your situation much better than I ever will. But I am better placed to understand the wider context in which it develops. So our exchange has to be based on the fact that you tell me what your situation is, and I tell you how it relates to the wider context which you cannot see, or can see only partially, from where you operate." (Giovanni Arrighi 2009, p. 67)

This sentence by Giovanni Arrighi is the neatest formulation I know of the role that sociologists and intellectuals can assume in relation to social movements and society at large.

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"What moves us, reasonably enough, is not the realization that the world falls short of being completely just – which few of us expect – but that there are clearly remediable injustices around us which we want to eliminate." Amartya Sen (2009). The Idea of Justice. Harvard University Press. For me, it pulls sociology out of the clouds and onto the ground. I love this quote because it makes sociology feel actionable, focuses us on "remediable" injustices. It’s a call to use our research to diagnose measurable injustices right in front of us and treat the structural issues that we can actually change today. It turns theory into a tool for actual change.

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"A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo." Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (1987, p. 25)

I still remember the excitement of reading A Thousand Plateaus for the first time. D&G kept reminding us of a possibility: that sociology could cross heterogeneous territories and stubborn boundaries, thinking with the world in and through becoming.

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“The city does not simply contain inequality; it scripts who may dwell, who must move on, and whose very presence is rendered problematic.”

— Dr Abel Mavura

Why it resonates

This sentence matters to me because it shows that homelessness is not just about individual misfortune but about how urban space is organised to welcome some bodies and displace others. It captures how design, policy, and everyday regulation quietly decide who is allowed to dwell in the city and who is constantly told to move on. For my work on homelessness and urban marginality, it is a reminder that inequality is written into streets, benches, doorways, and underpasses not only into statistics or policies and that changing cities means rethinking how they script belonging and exclusion.

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No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent... any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind, and, therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

John Donne, Meditations XVII, 1624.

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…there can be no 'I' without ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘we’, ‘you’ or ‘they’. It is plainly misleading to use such concepts as ‘I' or 'ego' independently of their position with the web of relationships to which the rest of the pronouns refer. (Elias: 1978: 124)

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Unfortunately, it is not superfluous to remind ourselves that in sociology, we are dealing with people. All too often, sociologists…start out with an abstract conception of social action or social system…it makes sense, therefore, to state quite explicitly that we are concerned with people... (Goudsblom 1977: 6-7)

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'We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelated continuity. We are then defining these elements as a "structure": as a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension. Yet we are defining a social experience which is still in process...’ Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (2009 [1977]. p. 132)

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At any moment, all of us can think, speak, and act in a racist manner - not just in an interpersonal context but also in how we participate in society (Adapted from Kendi, 2019).

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Existence precedes essence.Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

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"To make a mistake in a binary choice, to mistake a v for a p, what does this mean? It means being a bad pupil... and why? Mistaking a v for a p, or 100 for 10, none of this is information, it's the transmission of orders - both at a social level and at that of the most obvious power assemblages."

Deleuze & Guattari at Vincennes, 1975-76

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"The function of sociology, as of every science, is to reveal that which is hidden." Pierre Bourdieu. Not an entirely original thought (see Marx, Capital Vol. III), but essential. We muddle though our lives not really understanding how it is that we live or why our days are shaped the way they are (though we may suspect something is going on). An education in sociology changes that; changes the look of the world, forever. It can be a tough reveal. Living is easy with eyes closed, as the song goes.

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The quote-> "Maybe an object is what serves as a link between subjects, allowing us to live in society, to be together. But since social relations are always ambiguous, since my thoughts divide as much as unite, and my words unite by what they express and isolate by what they omit, since a wide gulf separates my subjective certainty of myself from the objective truth others have of me, since I constantly end up guilty, even though I feel innocent, since every event changes my daily life, since I always fail to communicate, to understand, to love and be loved, and every failure deepens my solitude, since...since...since I cannot escape the objectivity crushing me nor the subjectivity expelling me, since I cannot rise to a state of being nor collapse into nothingness - I have to listen, more than ever I have to look around me at the world, my fellow creature, my brother.

The world alone. Today, when revolutions are impossible and bloody wars loom, when capitalism is unsure of its rights and the working class is in retreat, when the lightning progress of science makes future centuries hauntingly present, when the future is more present than the present, when distant galaxies are on my doorstep. My fellow creature, my brother. Where do we start? But start what? God created heaven and earth, sure, but that's too easy. We should put it better: Say that the limits of language are the world's limits, that the limits of my language are my world's limits, and that when I speak, I limit the world, I finish it. And one inevitable and mysterious day, death will come and abolish these limits, and there will be no questions nor answers. It will all be a blur. But if by chance things come into focus again, it may only be with the advent of conscience. Everything will follow from there."

Two or Three Things I Know About Her, Jean-Luc Godard (1967)

Why it matters to me?-> I remember the moment vividly. It was an indistinguishable sweltering summer day. A phase in my life as a MA Sociology student, at the height of Covid19 pandemic, where I was questioning what I might have to offer in this discipline a lot. And serendipitously there it was, in a cinema I decided to watch in order to take my mind off the pile of pending academic readings collecting my quiet sense of doubt as layers of dust, I found my calling for sociological imagination. In this monologue which (in my interpretation of it) felt like it had the magnanimity to explain the very essence of human existence-from macro societies to micro individual selves and rootlike networks that connect all subjects and objects in the universe, I found a sense of purpose in why I love and do sociology. Godard (1967) was right. In a world collapsing with hatred and divisiveness all we can do is take a moment and truly look at/listen to all our neighbors with empathy and understanding-and in doing so we will arrive at love. And hence, even though this quote is from a piece of cinematic media not sociology per say, it has become for me an unexpected gem where I regularly draw sociological inspiration form.

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Not wishing to name drop but we were sitting in a a Prif Phil Abrams Political Sociology Tutorial at Durham in the mid 1970s mostly totally out of our depth whilst evaluating some or other aspect of Political behaviour and he clarified politicos behaviour with a complete show stopper of analytics by saying

'If you can't see there's a problem there isn't a problem '

I've carried this wisdom throughout my life to date..

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‘The proletariat have nothing but their chains to lose’ from the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels.

I became aware of this through sociology as something I already knew intuitively, in the distance through smoke. It came as a hammer-blow to know it consciously as a world-view.

Alan Gay

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“My main problem is to try and understand what happened to me. My trajectory may be described as miraculous, I suppose – an ascension to a place where I don’t belong… For that reason, even if my work – my full work – is a sort of autobiography, it is a work for people who have the same sort of trajectory, and the same need to understand” Pierre Bourdieu, 1994.

You see, I grew up on a council estate in Salford, Greater Manchester - an area ranked in the top 10% most deprived LSOAs in England according to the Index of Multiple Deprivation 2025.

Today, the Government’s own figures show that, in Salford, over 5,000 people remain on the housing waiting list and nearly 1,000 children are living in temporary accommodation.

Meanwhile, 22% of those aged 16-24 are economically inactive - not in education, employment or training - a stark contrast to the 13% national average.

My family, including my mum and brothers, are among these statistics, entrenched in poverty and deprivation.

Yet, I am fortunate to be one of the few who have escaped this reality - those of us born into postcodes that too often brand their identities onto our future possibilities.

Despite limited horizons, I held high aspirations and an ambition for the pursuit of knowledge.

I am in receipt of an ESRC Widening Participation Scholarship pursuing a PhD at Cambridge University; a scholarship designed to improve access to, and participation in, postgraduate research, aimed at those from underrepresented backgrounds.

My research, "Devolution: The Promise and Pitfalls for British Democracy", seeks to reclaim the politics of place and social class, as sociological phenomena which demand theoretical and empirical attention after decades of neglect within the discipline.

Between reading and writing about whether British democracy, and by extension, devolution, diminishes or restores dignity and agency, suppresses or amplifies the seldom-heard voices of fractured and forgotten communities; I have been compelled to reflect on my own positionality, between where I came from and where I find myself today.

Like Bourdieu, I strive to reconcile my seemingly paradoxical worlds... A working-class female, born and raised on a council estate; now, an intellectual elite attending a world-class university.

While I may have my seat, at the so-called high table in the ivory tower that is Cambridge, I sit at it, to challenge and change the systems of privilege and power from within.

That, for me, is the purpose and promise of widening participation: the transformation of knowledge production and dissemination.

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'Nowadays men often feel that their private lives are a series of traps' (C Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, p.2 of the 1959 Oxford edition). With these 13 opening words Mills entices the reader to practise sociological thinking. How do people (which we would now say rather than 'men') come to feel trapped in their domestic relationships, their neighbourhood, their work, or other aspects of their personal lives? Furthermore, that 'nowadays' encourages action: things could be different, if we use our imagination.

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How is society possible?

Simmel, Georg. 1910. How is Society Possible? American Journal of Sociology 16 (3): 372-391.

This is a fundamental question for any sociologist, regardless of their area of specialisation. Without it, sociology could not exist.

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'The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles' (Marx and Engels, 1848).

In was exposed to the content in 2012, since then I have often used the excerpt as a foundational lens to understand human relations, particularly in relation to equality, subtle and fluid forms of inequality, freedom, and human rights. For example, I have witnessed in education systems, some children employ elaborated linguistic codes in speech and writing, which earned better teachers’ perceptions of ability engendered access to academic opportunities such as scholarships. In contrast, children who use restricted codes were subtly disadvantaged, not through explicit exclusion but through institutional expectations that privileged certain forms of expression. Dominant groups continually define and redefine what constitutes legitimate social capital at different historical moments, while marginalised groups must renegotiate their identities and strategies in order to access opportunities. In the context of global migration, similar patterns are evident: citizens from economically and politically powerful nations are often described as expatriates when they relocate abroad, whereas individuals from less developed countries are frequently labelled as (il)legal immigrants. These distinctions reflect underlying power relations rather than neutral classifications.

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After all, we do not punish non-flyers for not flying. Oliver, M. (1993). What’s so wonderful about walking. Inaugural Professiorial Lecture, 9th February. Came across this line when supervising a Masters student. It has stayed with me and is a reminder how many barriers that minority or marginalized people face are socially constructed.

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The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID) -Stafford Beer

This also applies to individuals, groups & institutions: never mind what they say, watch what they do & their outcomes.

Art Kleiner's book on the Core Group illuminates this for organisations.

A powerful insight for almost every area of inquiry & social action.

Beer, Stafford (2002). "What is cybernetics?". Kybernetes. 31 (2): 209–219. doi:10.1108/03684920210417283. ISSN 0368-492X.

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“The personal is political.”
— Carol Hanisch (1969)

Why it resonates

Although the sentence uses the word political, it is deeply sociological in meaning. Here, political does not refer to party politics, but to power, social structures, and collective responsibility. It reminds us that personal experiences—such as stress, inequality, exclusion, or mental distress—are not merely individual issues but are shaped by social norms, institutions, and systems.

For me, this sentence continues to matter because it bridges lived experience with sociological understanding. It encourages us to look beyond individual stories and ask how society itself produces these conditions, and therefore how social change must also be collective, ethical, and structural. I am currently working for the Mental Wellbeing of Youth and Adolescents and it gives me a clear picture of the critical situation as well as help bridge the gap between generations.

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An influential statement by the Iranian social theorist Ali Shariati:

“The most fundamental and dangerous problem facing human societies is neither colonialism, nor exploitation, nor despotism; rather, it is estihmār (the systematic stupefaction of the masses) — yes, estihmār, estihmār, estihmār! Dr Mohamamd masud Noruzi-University of Liverpool

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"How do we learn about each other? How do we do it without harming each other but with the courage to take up a weaving of the everyday that may reveal deep betrayals? How do we cross without taking over? With whom do we do this work?" Maria Lugones (2010), Toward a Decolonial Feminism.

This sentence has stayed with me because it reframed sociology as a way of knowing as well as an ethical practice. I often return to it when designing new research projects, especially in my commitment to participatory methods that try to give participants as much voice as possible. It has also shaped my interest in the everyday rather than the spectacular, and my focus on women’s lived experiences in areas that are often overlooked.

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"Not belonging does not in other words have to have purely negative consequences, just as belonging is not necessarily a positive thing or an ideal state."

May, V. (2011) ‘Self, Belonging and Social Change’, Sociology, 45(3), pp. 363–378. Page 373. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038511399624.

As the forever outsider, reading this sentence (and the paragraph it came from) during my master's was eye-opening, and made me feel hopeful.

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Kim Heyes

A friend and colleague recently sent this to me, and it speaks volumes in the work I do: "If you educate a man, you educate an individual. But if you educate a woman, you educate a nation". This is widely attributed to Dr. James Emman Kwegyir Aggrey (1875–1927), a Ghanaian intellectual, educator, and Christian minister, highlighting the transformative impact of educating women on entire societies.

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'Who watches the watchers?' A phrase attributed to Juvenal that has been interpreted in different ways. To me, however, it poses a fundamental question about power: What mechanisms exist to protect people from those who abuse their authority? This question continues to inform both my advocacy and my research. Source: Juvenal, The Sixteen Satires (1998, p. 45), translated by P. Green.

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“…sociology must be carried on in a continuous conversation with both history and philosophy or lose is proper object of inquiry. This object is society…made by men [sic], inhabited by men and, in turn, making men, in an ongoing historical process. It is not the least fruit of a humanistic sociology that it reawakens our wonder at this astonishing phenomenon.”

Berger and Luckmann (1966). The Social Construction of Reality, p.211

This call to arms is both inspiration and a haunting wake-up call for sociology which in my view is continuously undermined by losing the wood for the trees in failing to deliver a coherent, integrated framework, scope and ontology (roughly equivalent to the physical sciences) that would underpin and ground the subject without losing its rich variety of perspectives.

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Sentence:

We need sociology because, as the market says, we can all participate, but we don't! Family is a place where we are equal; needless to say, deep down we all know it. The law says it is universal and equal protection of the law for everyone; our records and archives show how the law was biased and discriminatory. Sociology matters because a man and a woman are treated differently by the market, so does the age, caste, vocational skills, and bargaining power. Sociology helps you to "think" with footnotes.

Why it resonates:
This has stayed with me ever since I first heard it. I was an undergraduate student, unsure about the discipline and unsure about my place within it. Even in my final year, I often felt that our discussions produced no neat conclusions. Then this sentence arrived like an anchor. It taught me that sociology is not about quick resolutions; it is about learning how to think, how to pause before acting, and how to read the conditions that shape what appears universal.

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'From plans arising, yet unplanned

By purpose moved, yet purposeless'

Norbert Elias, The Society of Individuals (Dublin: UCD Press, 2010 [Collected Works, vol. 10]), p. 62.

This little couplet, dating originally from 1939 (in German, of course), neatly encapsulates the central problem of understanding processes of social change, and bypasses all the rubbish about "agency and structure" that sociologists tend to bleat on about!

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“Human is a child of the customs and the things he has become used to. He is not the product of his natural disposition and temperament. The conditions to which he has become accustomed, until they have become for him a quality of character and matters of habit and custom, have replaced his natural disposition” (Ibn Khaldun in Muqaddimah).

This is a quotation from six hundred years ago and represents one of the earliest indications of thinking about the social through social constructionism.

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'Who benefits from this and how?' which applies to every social situation. I realised the importance of this question in understanding economic power dynamics, following David Blane's teaching on Marxism on the London University intercalated medical sociology course in 1987.

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therefore, it is essential to adopt sound international policies aimed at correcting these disparities, by supporting less developed countries and providing the necessary resources to develop their social and economic infrastructure. A decent standard of living is not only a human right but also the cornerstone for building healthy and stable societies capable of growth and development.

Researcher Fatima FERHANE

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“Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.”

Mills, C.W. (1959) The Sociological Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

As an undergraduate in 2002, this sentence was the moment sociology clicked for me, becoming more than just theory. Now I am studying for a PhD in Sociology, investigating VCSE involvement in mental health research, and it still speaks to me. It legitimises lived experience without psychologising it, framing personal troubles as inseparable from structural conditions. It continues to shape how I think about mental health and inequality, and why individual stories need sociological explanation rather than individual blame.

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'Humanity is outraged in me and with me. We must not dissimulate nor try to forget this indignation which is one of the most passionate forms of love'

George Sand

The Correspondence of George Sand and Gustave Flaubert - in the aftermath of the Paris Commune Massacre in 1871

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Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. (Marx, Theses On Feuerbach https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/). For me, sociology is not only the discipline of social change, but it is also the discipline of social action. What is the point of studying social phenomena, and social inequalities in particular, if we do not want to see an improvement in the lives of the people we are researching with? It is unethical to just research groups and publish without trying to change their lives for the better.

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The term social problem indicates not merely an observed phenomenon

but the state of mind of the observer as well.

Willard Waller, Social Problems and the Mores, American Sociological Review, Vol. 1, No. 6 (Dec., 1936), pp. 922-933.

The foundation of the sociology of social problems - and much else besides. All social problems are problems in the eyes of someone who is defining them - and we must give that person and their perspective the same critical attention as those who are being defined, even if we sociologists are the people doing the defining or we happen to agree with the definition. Reflexivity 1930s style and so simply put.

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‘Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent responses to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.’  Donna Haraway (2020). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.

This sentence for me sums up the ethical and political responses we might take as sociologists, as we engage with the world around us, with sociological theory and with our students.

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"The mind is not a hermit’s cell, but a place of hospitality and intercourse. We have no higher life that is really apart from other people." (C.H. Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order). This sentence helped me realise that the study of societies is not only that of what happens at the scale of culture, group life or interaction, but that it also includes inner life: insofar what we think contains reference to others, the social does not only act outside us but within us, even when we are alone.

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“Where there is power, there is resistance” Foucault, M. (1978) The History of Sexuality, Vol. One. Pantheon Books: USA.

This short quote ignited my sociological imagination, empowering me to enact agency via technologies of the self, to curate by body, mind and life. Prior to reading Foucault, I like so many, internalised experiences of discrimination and abuse, as an inevitable personal trouble.

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“To be aware of the idea of social structure and to use it with sensibility is to be capable of tracing such linkages among a great variety of milieux. To be able to do that is to possess the sociological imagination.”

C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (1959, pp. 10–11)

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'[A]re these people working class? By the brands of their tongues they are.' (Byrne

2005, p. 808)

Stumbled upon this sentence in this article in Sociology and ended up writing a whole PhD around it.