Disciplines Unbound: Notes on Sociology and Ethnic Studies

Abstract

The new social movements of the 1960s and the post-1965 increases in racialized immigrant populations transformed the academy, ushering in new subjects of social knowledge as well as new critical social knowledges (Seidman 1994). These new subjects posed new questions, challenged the dominant paradigms of academic disciplines, and contested the separation of knowledge and politics. The new critical knowledge seeped into the traditional disciplines, but took full shape in the emerging interdisciplinary fields of Ethnic Studies, Women's Studies, Third World Studies, Cultural Studies, and Queer Studies. It was amid this changing intellectual and political milieu that I entered the United States and eventually the university. Arriving from Vietnam in 1975 and entering higher education in the early 1980s, I inherited more democratized and diversified university and more critical and politicized body of social knowledge. By the time I began graduate school in the mid-1980s, I had come to view the university as potentially important site for activism site to generate critical social knowledge and practices aimed at social change. Focusing my scholarship on comparative race and ethnic relations, I received my graduate training in sociology but have worked since then in the interdisciplinary field of Ethnic Studies. It is the relationship between sociology and Ethnic Studies both the gaps and the overlaps that I will attempt to sketch in this brief essay. At its best, sociology grapples seriously and effectively with issues of social inequality, power, and collective action. From its inception, sociology has asked difficult questions about important social issues and believed that it could inform social action in answering them. The founding sociologists Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, and others all responded to the crises of emerging industrial capitalism and intended to shape the course of historical events through their social theories. Within American sociology, the Chicago School sociologists spoke powerfully to the social issues of industrialization and urbanization through their attention to everyday experience. In the late 1950s, C. Wright Mills's The Sociological Imagination advocated critical social science, urging sociologists to commit themselves to an activist critique and reconstruction of society. But there were also prominent countertrends; in particular, during the postwar decades, the growth of the research university and of funding sources for the social sciences scientized sociology (Long 1997: 9-10). Anchored in positivist epistemologies, the disciplinary mainstream of sociology became increasingly more specialized and correspondingly less engaged with related disciplines; its claim to universal and objective knowledge also moved the field away from an explicit commitment to social activism (Sprague 1998). Paradoxically, even as sociologists wrestled with issues of power, conflict, and inequality, they have largely neglected or subordinated race and thus have missed the manner in which race has been a fundamental axis of social organization in the U. S. (Omi and Winant 1994: 13). The great social theorists of the nineteenth century all predicted that race and ethnicity conceptualized as remnants of preindustrial order would decline in significance in modern society. For example, the classical Marxist understanding that capital seeks abstract labor overlooks the ways in which capital has profited precisely from the flexible racialization and gendering of labor. In the United States, before the 1 960s, much of the sociology of race expressed assimilationist principles and predicted that with each succeeding generation, U.S. ethnic groups would improve their economic status and become progressively more similar to the majority culture (Park 1950; Gordon 1964). Developed to explain the experiences of European immigrants and their children, this assimilationist framework did not differentiate