Inequality and Political Action: Research, Capacity Building and Empowerment

As sociologists and citizens we have meaningful roles to play in the political arena to reduce inequality. C. Wright Mills defined one of these roles for us in the first chapter of The Sociological Imagination, where he distinguishes between private troubles and social issues. People in difficult circumstances in our society, he says, privatize their troubles attributing these to fate, personal inadequacy or bad choices. The role of the social scientist, he contends, is to create “consciousness ” that whatever troubles individuals ’ private experience is in fact a “social issue ” determined by larger social forces that are impact it collectively. Only when armed with this understanding, can people act politically to influence and control their own destiny. My colleagues and I would agree with Mills on the importance of creating consciousness as a necessary first step to political action. However, we believe that as social scientists our work is not necessarily to create consciousness, but rather to provide the wherewithal for disenfranchised and marginalized people to develop these understandings in a process of co-discovery. Our research, to the extent feasible, is participatory-engaging those who would have otherwise been the subjects of research in all facets of the research process. In deliberate and self-conscious ways we build the capacity of participants to arrive at new understandings by working together t