alabama possible from the alabama poverty project

The Sociological Imagination and Service Learning

Dr. Harry Hamilton, UAB Sociology Department

C. Wright Mills, a motorcycle-riding iconoclastic sociologist at Columbia in the 1950s, introduced the concept of “the sociological imagination,” a quality of mind that allows one to see the relationship between one’s own life and larger social forces.

For example, what is the connection between my college experience and that of a child growing up in a gang-infested neighborhood? What is the relationship between my use of an SUV and civil war in Darfur? What is the relationship between the financial wizardry of credit default swaps and my efforts to get a college loan?

The connections between human beings are endless, fascinating, and often unnoticed. Raising our sensitivity to the countless ways in which human beings impact and are impacted by each other seems to me to be at the heart of why service learning is important to a university.

Some call it building social capital. The point is not that a service learning experience will necessarily lead one to an understanding of the specific connections involved in the above examples, but a little “real world” contact with people unlike ourselves facing problems different from our own can foster that “quality of mind” that primes a person to look for connections they might otherwise overlook, and I would argue that everyone benefits in the process.

Service learning deepens and enriches one’s understating of their social world and that is good for the individual, the university, and for society, regardless of whether they become more civically engaged as a result.