Sociology of Self-Knowledge at Macalester College

"I see each of my classes as a makeshift, semester-long, 'research working group' involvement, during which students are treated as more or less young research scholars engaged in a most important research undertaking: understanding (and perhaps changing) their selves within a micro/macro sociological framework. The classroom is thereby transformed into a research collective of scholars whose central goal in the semester is to critically develop new knowledges about (and perhaps realities in) their globally constituted selves." --M. H. (Behrooz) Tamdgidi After having known Behrooz Tamdgidi as a good friend and colleague since the early 1990s, his concept of the sociology of self-knowledge became meaningful to me in my experience of teaching over the past few years. Having become more familiar with his work over those many years, it became apparent to me he was onto something quite profound. After offering a large number of courses on such themes as Global Racial Formations, macro level analysis of race, class, and gender inequalities, Social Problems, and a course on Islam and the West, Tamdgidi's concept of the sociology of self-knowledge made me realize that I had missed the most important theme of C. Wright Mills' discussion of the relationship between private troubles and public issues. It was the interaction between biography and social structure, private troubles and public issues, and the self and society that completed the quest for knowledge creation. It was this relationship between self and society that Tamdgidi's work made me become aware of my teaching bias towards the macro-level. At this point in my life I also began to recognize that my research, although largely about world-historical formations--Orientalism, the Capitalist Modern WorldSystem, nationalism, state formation, modernity, and Zionism--were deeply informed by my life experiences as a young child born in Jordan and then moving to the United States. If my research is itself a product of my life-experience, why should that be different for my sociology students? It was about a year ago, as I was preparing for a senior seminar course, that I finally decided to offer a course in which students were provided full opportunity to explore their lives from a personal and creative, yet sociological, perspective. I titled the seminar, in honor of Tamdgidi's contribution, the "sociology of self-knowledge" and created the following course description: Students come to Macalester with a number of experiences that are crying out for sociological analysis. Many have attended proms, participated in adolescent subcultures, and so on. Reading sociological studies in a number of sites students are familiar with--including their family, their high school, their network of friendships, and even their automobile--this course will allow them to reflect upon their past by asking fundamental sociological questions. Shortly after Behrooz Tamdgidi began publishing his journal Human Architecture in 2002, he kindly invited me to be an advising editor to the journal, which I gladly accepted. Now that I was offering a course on this theme, Tamdgidi and I thought it may be time to have my students submit their papers to his journal. His description of the journal, which I had read a year or two before conceptualizing the course I was to shortly offer at Macalester College, went well with the description of the course I was offering: [Human Architecture] seeks to creatively institutionalize new conceptual and curricular structures of knowledge whereby critical study of one's selves within an increasingly world-historical framework is given educational and pedagogical legitimacy. The journal is a public forum for those who seek to radically understand and, if need be, change their world-historically constructed selves. I was fortunate enough to have a small seminar with four gifted sociology seniors: Ellen Corrigan, Jeremy Cover, Jesse Mortenson, and Jessica Sawyer. …