Dr Mónica Moreno Figueroa - Department of Sociology

Studying Sociology now is important because... because change has happened.
Because it's possible, right, the fact that I am here, just to start, like a
Mexican lecturer black woman in Cambridge is already a sign of change,
right, so it is possible.
I think one of the jobs of Sociology, if you read Mills,
you would say our task is to kind of explore with students how can they
develop their sociological imagination
and how can they make personal problems or
little problems, individual problems, connected to big social, you know, big things.
So, how you connect the personal with the public, the social, right.
So to make those links, what I found that is really important is to tap into the
personal resistances that we might have to learn a particular thing either - and
that is, for example, not finding something relevant has to do more,
says more, about ourselves than of the subject itself. And it says more that
maybe it makes us uncomfortable, maybe we think of ourselves too big and we think
we should be concerned about things that are disconnected, or is just too painful
for us to be dealing with. Actually, I start my lecture telling - my series of
lectures saying we're going to sign an agreement here, like we need to agree
that we're going to have discussions that are going to be uncomfortable but
that we're going to need to speak and that that's the deal here. If we don't
talk here, where are we going to talk about this issues? When we hear
racist things and we read these very difficult descriptions of people, when we see
images of lynching or we see images of a man being beaten up or a woman hanging
or... you know, those things are really kind of - they stick to us and they do things
to us, you know. So what I do when there thinks these
things happen, and throughout my teaching, is to make them talk about those
feelings. And because it might seem weird, you know, in a teaching environment where
you're just like 'oh, here are the facts and here's information processes, these are
the tools to analyze it, go home now,' I'm more like 'I want you to be able to think
and to think, you know, we need to not be so stressed and use those barriers and
those feelings to cover up our process of thinking and engaging.
It's a very specific method whereby she asks us to talk to the person next to us and speak
uninterrupted for two minutes and listened entirely to that person.
And then it's the other person's turn to speak uninterrupted for two minutes.
And you'd be surprised at how it feels to speak and know that person's listening
for two whole minutes, which is actually quite rare and it allows you to now all kind of
emotions that have been incited by the, kind of, the shocking nature of historic
racism or contemporary racism.
So, for example, in Soc 3 I teach on three topics
a module within the course called body project, the body project - so, their global
body project. So basically I try to bring issues of
cosmetic surgery, sex tourism, and beauty pageants...
And those three topics allow me to explore with them issues
around intersectionality, the situation of women, debates around feminism that are
tackling this this particular issues and how they cross nations and how they
connect people and power relations in different ways.
I just want students to be critical, right, basically, to have a sociological
imagination that allows them to engage with social issues and problems.
I mean, one of the things I do say to them is that I study Sociology because I'm very angry
and I want them to be as well, angry, so that that criticality makes them
engage with things and realize why they are not sustainable or why they have to
change, right. So I'm not here - we can't enjoy reading about disasters in the
world. No, I don't enjoy it at all. It makes me very... yeah, angry. And in that sense
it's an anger that I wanted to be productive, right, and that's what I want
them to be thinking, you know, we need to know why it matters, why these issues
are important and then you have to go on and do something about them, basically.

Dr Mónica Moreno Figueroa - Department of Sociology

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