Public Sociology & Teaching the Interrogation of the Personal as Political Praxis

• In Event: Teaching and Learning in Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Roundtable 4: Mentorship and Student Engagement

Abstract

This presentation invites sociology educators to reimagine public sociology as a pedagogical practice rooted in guiding students to interrogate the personal as political praxis. In a sociopolitical context marked by deep polarization, structural inequality, and democratic precarity, teaching cannot stop at vocabulary, theory, or distant case studies. Our students already live within power relations; the classroom can become a site where they learn to recognize, analyze, and situate themselves within those structures. Designed for sociology faculty, this session shares concrete teaching strategies that move students from abstract understanding to critical self-location. Grounded in Black feminist pedagogies, this approach treats lived experience, standpoint, and embodied knowledge as legitimate sources of sociological insight while also challenging dominant norms about objectivity, authority, and whose knowledge counts. Practices include structured autobiographical reflection, positionality mapping, guided dialogue protocols, and community-engaged or experiential assignments that connect lived experience to institutional analysis. Framing the personal as an analytic entry point rather than an endpoint, this pedagogy helps students link biography to history and self to system without collapsing structural critique into individualism. The goal is not confession but consciousness: cultivating students’ capacity to see how power, privilege, and marginalization operate through everyday life and how they are implicated in political processes beyond elections or formal governance. By equipping instructors with adaptable tools for facilitating this self-excavation, the session positions teaching itself as a form of public sociology that prepares students to engage the political world with sociological imagination, reflexivity, and civic agency while disrupting status quo assumptions about knowledge, power, and pedagogy.

Author

• Tuesday Kimberly Barnes, Morgan State University