Concentric Circles of Compassionate Support

Adrienne Carter works on a contract basis for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) along with her full-time job in British Columbia. In a recent email to her I described the model of the work she does in some of the most horrendous war torn areas, as “concentric circles of compassionate support.” Her response was, “What a [...]

Mariano Aupilardjuk, Pond Inlet Drum Dancers at Larga

Mariano Aupilardjuk, Pond Inlet Drum Dancers at Larga

Originally uploaded by ocean.flynn

Mariano Aupiliardjuk (1923-) was honoured with an Aboriginal Achievement Award in 2001 for his contributions as a bridge between generations, Inuit governance, local residents, on how to use IQ in modern society. In local Rankin [...]

Zygmunt Bauman: Theorist of Postmodernity’s Ethical Turn

For Zygmunt Bauman, “sociologizing makes sense only in as far as it helps humanity” and “sociology is first and foremost a moral enterprise.” “To think sociologically can render us more sensitive and tolerant of diversity. Thus to think sociologically means to understand a little more fully the people around us in terms of their hopes and desires and their worries and concerns (Bauman & May 2001).”

The Sociological Imagination

In his influential book, The Sociological Imagination C. Wright Mills (1959) warned that the tendency to misrepresent social disorders as merely individual psychological disorders led to adepolitization of intellectual discourse and the undermining of social criticism. He challenged notions of the false dichotomy between private and public and self and society. He warned against anoverdependence on superficial psychological explanations which ignore complex social accounts. These can only be dealt with through an in-depth sociology based on the nurturing of a sociological imagination that balances the tendency to depend too much on a psychological imagination. By treating public social problems as individual and personal psychosis, the sociopolitical statusquo is maintained (Flynn-Burhoe 1999).