Sociological Imaginations from the Classroom

This Spring 2008 (VI, 2) issue of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge includes two symposium papers by Klaus Fischer and Lutz Bornmann who shed significant light on why the taken-for-granted structures of science and peer reviewing have been and need to be problematized in favor of more liberatory scientific and peer reviewing practices more conducive to advancing the sociological imagination. The student papers included (by Jacquelyn Knoblock, Henry Mubiru, David Couras, Dima Khurin, Kathleen O'Brien, Nicole Jones, Nicole [pen name], Eric Reed, Joel Bartlett, Stacey Melchin, Laura Zuzevich, Michelle Tanney, Lora Aurise, and Brian Ahl) make serious efforts at developing their theoretically informed sociological imagination of gender, race, ethnicity, learning, adolescence and work. The volume also includes papers by faculty (Satoshi Ikeda, Karen Gagne, Leila Farsakh) who self-reflectively explore their own life and pedagogical strategies for the cultivation of sociological imaginations regardless of the disciplinary field in which they do research and teach. Two joint student-faculty papers and essays (Khau & Pithouse, and Mason, Powers, & Schaefer) also imaginatively and innovatively explore their own or what seem at first to be "strangers'" lives in order to develop a more empathetic and pedagogically healing sociological imaginations for their authors and subjects. The journal editor Mohammad H. Tamdgidi's call in his note for sociological re-imaginations of science and peer reviewing draws on the relevance of both the symposium and other student and faculty papers in the volume to one another in terms of fostering in theory and practice liberating peer reviewing strategies in academic publishing. Anna Beckwith was a guest co-editor of this journal issue. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge is a publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics). For more information about OKCIR and other issues in its journal's Edited Collection as well as Monograph and Translation series visit OKCIR's homepage.