A common phrase with which many of us began our Sociology classes at the undergraduate level is ‘Sociology is not common sense’ (Mills, 1959). It implies that a sociological inquiry is a ‘systematic inquiry’ and concerns itself with empirical exploration, hence it exhibits a tendency to discount the lifeworlds of people who lie beyond the mainstream. As a young undergraduate student in the 2000s, I witnessed the practice of Sociology as a sanitised/closed space, restricted from any ‘common sense’ interventions. Though public universities are often popularly known for their inclusivity and egalitarian foundations, my observation of these spaces has been relative. There revolved an aura around concepts, that renders theories sacrosanct and concepts as frozen in time. My subsequent learning career and opportunity to be in classrooms and companionship with students from diverse caste, class, religious and ethnic backgrounds in later years, made me recognise how different structural locations make experiences heterogeneous (Wagh, 2022). It helped me unlearn the conventional Sociology that I witnessed during my undergrad days. It pushed me to question the mainstream practice of Sociology, which does not endorse common sense (read alternative/ deviant ideas or conceptual alternatives) and resultantly produces knowledge that legitimises dominant scholarship (Rege, 2011). Sociology is not common sense, but we need to question whether the logical/rational approach should render peripheral lifeworlds as common sense, incapable of contributing to a sociological enquiry and sociological imagination. Concepts and theories learnt in a Sociology class are often beyond the lifeworlds of people from peripheries; they are unrecognised in the pursuit of grand theorising and hence evade the scope of falsification.

Our collective experience as students, pursuing Sociology and Social Science, in general, has taught us how the appropriation of power only cumulates oppression. As a student who has been in public universities throughout her career, when I try to implement my reflexivity as a teacher in a private university and initiate a dialogic pedagogy, a reverse hierarchy gets produced. It is because the teacher-student equation also changes with the changing nature of entitlement. Education is perceived as a commodity when it is privatised, and students become potential consumers. Education can be bought, and hence is attributed a de facto feature of ‘preference’ for its kind and nature, often asked for a customised version –– what is ‘more relevant’ (Chaudhuri, 2010; Chaudhuri & Thakur, 2018; Talib & Savyasaachi, 2003; Tripathi, 2023) and ‘useful’ for the consumers. In this context, the teacher is more of a service provider. The students in my present institution majorly come from elite groups, in terms of both class and caste. In a Sociology class, a student once asked, ‘Why should I question my privilege?’ Her query reflected how her ‘common sense’ is shaped by only Brahminical ideas. It also demonstrated why we need to think deeply about the relevance of the practice of dialogue (Sen & Menon, 2021) and a ‘bottom-up approach’ (Hegde, 2011) to encourage the inclusion of personal knowledge and experience into the teaching-learning pedagogy. It brings out the complexity of recognising students’ lifeworlds to question concepts, a practice which I believe has far-reaching impacts in making Sociology an egalitarian discipline (Chaudhuri, 2010). For example, students would look at reservations as discriminatory as their experience is bound by what they have been made to see, fed by the gatekeepers that diligently keep subaltern narratives beyond the threshold of a Brahminical space. This explains that common sense (Schutz, 1967) evolves in social contexts and our interpretations of our experiences. It can be drawn that structural locations shape our lifeworlds, which in turn is mutually shared by a community as ‘common sense’.

My urging them to question privilege makes them discern, “You are asking us to discount all perspectives, but to think in only ‘one’ perspective”. The ‘one’ perspective perhaps may be unwrapped to signify a critical lens that does not miss to see power hierarchies and intersectionalities. And hence this calls for questioning the ‘common sense’ that they have so far internalised from their ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu, 1972). Students of my generation sought refuge in classrooms and universities as their ideas often contradicted the functionalist ideals that families perpetuate. The students whom I teach, on the other hand, are mostly conformists to their families; structural hierarchies and their intersections fall under an otherwise unfamiliar domain, probably because these are beyond the tangible experiential reality for many of their locations. And hence emerges a ‘crisis of relatedness’ (Tripathi, 2023, p. 200). They are familiarised with a majoritarian culture. Since they are already ideologically tuned, Sociology knowledge only challenges their common sense knowledge, rather than providing analytical tools to decipher their reality and every day. For example, gender roles are taken as ‘normal’ and questioning it through concepts, such as ‘Brahminical patriarchy’ (Chakravarti, 1993) sounds ‘condescending’ and an ‘offence’ to many of them. Also, when schooling also alliances with the familial and state’s agenda to produce one-dimensional personalities, the task of disruption becomes doubly challenging.

And this disruption becomes difficult majorly because of the inability to look for nuances when one needs to recognise the essence of white in the black and hence seek for the grey. The ability to problematise is perhaps lost in a milieu which is swept by binaries, such as, good/bad, Hindu/Muslim, left/right, agree/disagree or a multiple–choice questions (MCQ) scheme of assessment. The culture depletes the ability to look and think beyond rejection and acceptance. Social Science has trained me so far to understand that conclusions are never easy and it is mostly discussion instead of conclusion that shapes our engagement. This of course requires a certain degree of communicative rationality (Habermas, 1987) when we need to engage with people with whom we disagree and not only those with whom we share ideologies and those who belong to similar communities.

I will wrap up this piece with a brief anecdote. I was teaching in-group and out-group in one of my classes, and I explained how this distinction also represents the political, which is shaped by inequality and power relations. Citing examples, I talked about how a capitalist class is an out-group to a working class and how the ‘political’ cannot be dissociated from our everyday. The next day, a student comes back and insists that he would like to show me something really important. It follows by his taking out a brick particle from his trouser pocket and saying, ‘This is a particle from the demolished Babri Masjid’. I, being bewildered, asked, ‘Why are you showing it to me?’ He says, ‘My parents were part of the Ramjanmabhumi movement, and I celebrate the history and hence treasure this (pointing towards the brick particle)’. After a pause, I ask, ‘But why are you showing it to me?’ He answers, ‘You talked about being political’. These are significant ethnographic moments which push us to think about classrooms as multiple sites of power, and how classrooms are reflections of the larger ‘outside’ (Ludlow, 2004), and the political and the social that constitute it (Patgiri 2023). We perhaps need to relook at the ‘systematic’ criteria for sociological inquiry, which would aid in revisiting how ‘common sense’ is entrenched in structural locations, and what makes it a prejudiced and inflexible reality in present times.

References:

Bourdieu, P. (1972). Outline of a Theory of Practice. (N. Richard, Trans.) Cambridge University Press.

Chakravarti, U. (1993, April 3). Conceptualising Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India: Gender, Caste, Class and State. Economic & Political Weekly, 28(14), 579–585.

Chaudhuri, M. (2010). Sociology in India: Intellectual and Institutional Practices. Rawat Books.

Chaudhuri, M., & Thakur, M. (2018). Doing Theory: Locations, Hierarchies and Disjunctions. Orient BlackSwan.

Habermas, J. (1987). The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, Lifeworld and Systems: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Beacon Press.

Hegde, S. (2011). Beyond reflexivity? On the enactments of Sociology in India. Sociological Bulletin, 60(1), 125–142.

Ludlow, J. (2004). From Safe Space to Contested Space in the Feminist Classroom. Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, 15(1), 40–56.

Mills, C. W. (1959). The Sociological Imagination. Oxford University Press.

Patgiri, Rituparna. (2023). The Familiar and the Self: Reflections from Teaching Sociology Online in India. Sociological Bulletin. 72(2): 209-223. Sage Journals.

Rege, S. (2011). Exorcising the Fear of Identity: Interrogating the ‘Language Question’ in Sociology and Sociological Language. In S. Patel (Ed.), Doing Sociology in India: Genealogies, Locations and Practices (pp. 213–240). Oxford University Press.

Schutz, A. (1967). The Phenomenology of the Social World. Northwestern University Press.

Sen, R., & Menon, K. (2021). Social Sciences Teaching and Research: Its Resilience and Relevance in Times of the NEP and Pandemic. Journal of Educational Planning and Administration, XXXV(1), 47–58.

Talib, M., & Savyasaachi. (2003). What Skills Can Students Acquire from Social Sciences? In M. Chaudhuri (Ed.), The Practice of Sociology (pp. 72–96). Orient Blackswan.

Tripathi, B. C. (2023). Confronting Reflexivity: Sociological Trajectories of Teaching Sociology in Liberal Arts Spaces. Sociological Bulletin, 72(2), 192–208. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380229221151082

Wagh, A. C. (2022). Bringing Back the ‘Classroom’: Feminist Pedagogy in a Sociology Classroom. Society and Culture in South Asia, 8(1), 7-29.  https://doi.org/10.1177/23938617211047630

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Anindita Chakrabarty pursued her PhD at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai and she presently teaches Sociology. Her specialisation areas broadly comprise citizenship, governance and migration.