Teaching Sociology of the Arts at an Urban Community College During the Pandemic: Reflections on Structure,Agency,and Community Engagement

Contrasting or Complementary Perspectives? Bourdieu’s Determinism and Humanistic Sociology

My goal in teaching sociology is to provide students with tools to examine deeper structures of power that constrain their actions and choices. At the same time, I help them to envision possibilities of empowerment through the exercise of what Mills (1959) famously called “the sociological imagination.” Nonetheless, I recognize the often-intractable nature of social constraint and social structure. I will not hide from my students the relationship between central features of our society, such as socioeconomic inequality and racism, and individual and group outcomes. Indeed, less than 30 percent of the students that I teach will go on to graduate and reap the social and financial rewards of higher education (Queensborough Community College n.d.). In this way, my teaching is caught in the tension between the optimism of the humanistic approach, which motivates me to teach sociology, and the pessimistic determinism of Pierre Bourdieu, which forces me to acknowledge the constraining nature of the social structures in which my students and I teach and learn. Yet, as I will argue, it is possible to draw on the strengths of both perspectives simultaneously when teaching Sociology of the Arts in the community college context. To this end, I frame Bourdieu’s work as a powerful sociological theory of the arts in relation to class structure and humanistic sociology as a pedagogical response to the collusion of class and culture he describes. Thus, Bourdieu and humanistic sociology are not so much contrasting perspectives but complementary pairs, especially in the pedagogical context of the community college classroom during a time of social crisis.

Bourdieu’s work is a dominant force in the sociology of the arts and provides a convincing theory that students can apply to their own experiences. While readers of this journal do not need a detailed presentation of Bourdieu’s perspective, ¹ I will briefly summarize the concepts that are most important for me in teaching about class, social reproduction, education, and the relationship between these and aesthetic tastes. To begin, Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) explain the mechanisms by which class is reproduced in capitalist democracies through the interlocking institutions of family and education. Capitalist democracies claim to offer class mobility through educational credentials. However, education’s claim to provide a ladder for class mobility obfuscates its role in class reproduction (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977:10). The failure of the educational system to distribute academic credentials, and thus chances of professional success, evenly across class statuses is not accidental, according to Bourdieu and Passeron. The educational field, they argue, is designed to reinforce and reward the “habitus,” or set of dispositions, habits, and cultural resources that are largely unconscious but bound by class cultures and learned in the home before the student enrolls in the educational system (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977:72). Wealthy families train their children on an ongoing and informal basis to appreciate and feel comfortable with forms of culture that signify elite status, to develop complex verbal skills, and to feel entitled to assume a position of authority (Lareau 2011). These children will likely not only do well on formal assessments of academic potential needed to gain access to elite tracks and schools, but, once there, they will experience a “natural” resonance with the environment and expectations of their teachers. Working-class children, on the other hand, learn cultural habits and skills that help them successfully navigate life in their homes and communities. However, these proficiencies will not necessarily be useful in school or in the professions for which advanced degrees are required. School promises to level the playing field, but, like learning a second language as an adult, mastering the subtleties of expression, accent, and confidence of the dominant habitus is illusive (Rothenberg 2014).

The elite habitus also consists of ways of consuming and evaluating culture that Bourdieu (1971) calls the “aesthetic disposition,” which helped the rising bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century to claim a “natural superiority” because they were able to appreciate complex and abstract cultural forms. The dominated classes, Bourdieu argues, without training in these sign systems or in the habits of “aesthetic distance,” prefer culture that has a more obvious “function”—music that can be sung along with or danced to, broad comedy, sexually arousing images, or drama that has a clear moral message. The appreciation of “pure” art, on the other hand, requires specialized training because this art is not moored in knowledge or experience outside of art. As such, aesthetic disposition is the “distinctive expression of a privileged position in social space” (Bourdieu 1984:56). Like other forms of capital linked to educational success, this elite aesthetic disposition provides students with distinct advantages within the school system (Bourdieu and Johnson 1993).

Bourdieu’s account is a powerful tool for grasping the relationship between structural features of society and individual outcomes. By shedding light on processes of reproduction, these concepts ought to help liberate students from the compulsion to act in accordance with these processes. However, Bourdieu’s determinism leaves little room for such transformation and offers few resources from which to conceptualize real resistance to oppression (Yang 2014).

While Bourdieu is relatively silent on pedagogical techniques that might enhance students’ understanding and awareness of the role of social structure, humanistic sociology offers a foundation for pedagogical practices that are uniquely suited to fostering students’ understanding of the powerful linkages between the arts and society. I came to embrace humanistic sociology through my interest in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and especially its attempts to understand the position of the arts in modern societies and how the creative human impulse is mediated through historical and social structures in the work of art. Humanistic sociology is more broadly framed and less explicitly Marxist—though Marx is often cited as an early example of humanistic sociology (e.g., Du Bois and Wright 2002)—than critical theory, but it also counters the abstracted empiricism of academic sociology and emphasizes social science’s practical and utopian characteristics (Du Bois and Wright 2002; Mills 1959). Like critical theory’s rejection of abstracted empiricism, humanistic sociology seeks to substitute “prediction, manipulation, and control” with respect for the person. “Humanistic power,” according to Du Bois and Wright (2002:5), is “about influence, creating resources, and empowering people.” Social science, humanistic sociologists argue, should help to “release a person from external controls and to make him less predictable to the observer (to make him freer, more creative, more inner-determined)” (Maslow 1966:40; cited in Du Bois and Wright 2002:5). Thus, the goals of humanistic sociology are not only theoretical, in that sociology should help uncover objective social structures that inhibit human flourishing, but also practical, in that it can help guide practical action oriented toward social change in the interest of a more just and humane society. Humanistic sociology’s emphasis on the practical implications of a sociological perspective elevates teaching as a practice and value central to the field (Goodwin 1987).

Here, it is important to highlight another key position of humanistic sociology. Sociology presents a wide range of perspectives on the relationship between structure and agency. Humanistic sociology tends toward emphasizing actors as meaning-making subjects capable of imagining and initiating social change. As the American sociologist Goodwin (1987:16) explains, “Humanistic sociology . . . emphasizes the examination of subjective existence and objective conditions and pays close attention to the phenomena of human consciousness and meaning.”

Goodwin goes on to explain how this emphasis on the meaning-making capabilities and interests of human beings should inform teaching practice. First, he instructs us to practice “the art of listening intently” and to become “one with them [the students]” (Goodwin 1987:17). He urges teachers to “lead” students to sociological insights by beginning with what they see as important. Similarly, the American sociologist Ballard (1987:8) proposes “[a] view of students as active participants in an interactive learning environment . . . which acknowledges their human dignity and equality.” Although, as Goodwin (1987) argues, there is no pedagogical blueprint for humanistic “best practices,” there are many strategies that derive from the principles of humanistic sociology. Critical pedagogy, most closely associated with the Brazilian philosopher and educator Paolo Freire, has influenced humanistic teaching practices. Freire argues that the traditional classroom and indeed the whole educational system is a microcosm of the macrocosm of capitalist society. Educators oriented toward an expanded view of humanity should rethink the classroom as a space in which a democratic, dialogic, and horizontal relationship between teacher and student are substituted for the top-down structure of the traditional classroom (Freire 2000). By engaging in dialogic practices in the classroom, students learn to recognize and challenge domination (Freire 2000).

Culturally relevant pedagogy, which taps into students’ cultural knowledge, interests, and identities, is also consistent with humanistic sociology. As Ladson-Billings (1995:459) explains, culturally relevant pedagogy, rather than applying a deficits approach that seeks to mold students from culturally “other” backgrounds to fit a white, mainstream normative model of academic achievement, instead “helps students to accept and affirm their cultural identity.” Experiential learning practices also provide strategies aimed toward the goals of a humanistic pedagogy (Traver and Katz 2014). Service learning, for example, pairs students and their educators with community service-based organizations where students can learn from, serve, and help identify solutions to the problems faced by communities. This type of experiential, collaborative practice dovetails with an inter- or transdisciplinary approach to learning, where the project is problem rather than discipline focused. It also collapses boundaries between students, scholars, community members, and advocates (Patsarika and Townsend 2022). Much of the literature on service learning points to its efficacy in promoting undergraduate success (Kuh 2008). Undergraduate research projects are especially effective mediums for experiential learning. Studies indicate that student-led research helps students gain “emotional ownership” of their research (Cooper et al. 2019). When paired with a community engagement focus, undergraduate research is particularly effective at engaging less traditional students, such as the ones that I teach at QCC (Bruthers, Hedman, and Matyas 2021; Trott, Sample McMeeking, and Weinberg 2020).

Teaching Sociology of the Arts Before the Pandemic

I designed and first implemented Sociology of the Arts in 2016. In contrast to how it is typically offered at four-year colleges, my course is designed as a 100-level distribution course requiring no prerequisites. Thus, it must cover the essential components of introductory sociology, including an examination of the historical origins of the discipline, canonical texts and paradigms, tools and methods of sociological research, and an overview of some of the fundamental institutions and structures of contemporary social life. The course then asks students to apply these tools and insights to a study of arts institutions, artworks, art audiences, formal developments in the arts, and the social position of art worlds. Finally, and central to my approach, I invite students to view artworks and cultural objects more generally as important nodes of social information from which to deepen our understanding of social life in a broader sense (Rothenberg 2014). Prior to the pandemic period, and in addition to more conventional classroom practices, I brought my students on field trips to museums and galleries and on walking tours of various arts districts in New York City—sites that many of my students never had the opportunity to visit during their everyday lives. These trips provided opportunities for us to share experiences of social life outside of the classroom, build camaraderie, and open ourselves up to serendipitous and spontaneous interactions with each other and the social fabric of the city.

For the structure and sequence of topics in this class, I followed the textbook that I wrote (Rothenberg 2014). In this text, I synthesize theory and methods from the social sciences with concepts and examples from art history and criticism, literary and music studies, cultural studies, and other disciplines. I then asked students to use concepts from the text to illuminate their own experiences. For example, when I taught Bourdieu’s concept of “cultural capital,” students produced autoethnographic reflections of their subjective experiences touring blue-chip galleries in New York City’s Chelsea art district.

Teaching Sociology of the Arts During the Pandemic

With the pandemic-related transition to online learning in the fall semester of 2020, combined with the life-and-death problems facing my Sociology of the Arts students, I wondered how I would capture students’ attention and make the course material relevant to the myriad challenges they were experiencing. This class would be taught in a synchronous, online format that, consistent with institutional guidelines, did not require students to have their cameras or microphones on during class. Along with missing physical cues that come with in-person communication, I also lost the option of in-person tours of brick-and-mortar social spaces that acted as shared experiences for the class.

This is when I began thinking that studying the impact of the pandemic on community-based arts institutions (CBAIs) might be fruitful, both as a response to pandemic conditions and as a way to address some of the structure/agency problems that emerged from my reliance on Bourdieusian theory alongside my commitment to the pedagogical principles of humanistic sociology. Reflecting a service-oriented approach (Zorach 2019) and the influence of participatory art practices (Sholette 2011), CBAIs directly serve the interests of community residents by supporting local artists, featuring programing related to the experience of community members, and even sometimes providing services, such as food pantries and English as a Second Language classes (Borrup 2006). As we discovered, these institutions both catered to communities most impacted by the virus and were themselves likely to suffer the most during times of crisis. In addition, because these organizations focused on art that was relevant to specific communities rather than on more elitist and general “art world” concerns, we also discovered that they could help students think about the role of art and culture in their own lives.

I would require my students to work in small groups and to interview actors in these worlds over Zoom, thus pushing them to interact with each other and with community members after what had been a period in which many suffered from isolation, loneliness, and social anxiety (Loades et al. 2020). Thus, I envisioned our work as a collaborative, qualitatively robust undergraduate research project.

The Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Cbais

During the first two weeks of the fall 2020 semester of Sociology of the Arts, I introduced key sociological material, including methods of data collection, history of the discipline, and some background in sociological theory. We discussed how sociology could help us to understand art worlds. We then moved on to economy and politics. This topic is key to the project on CBAIs because it outlines the relationship between political and economic institutions and how together they impact what kinds of art is supported in a given society. Using additional news sources, we discussed the arts as key economic and place-making engines in the new urban economy (Markusen and Schrock 2006; Ponzini and Rossi 2010). The end game for most privately and publicly funded urban arts initiatives includes economic development, which leads to gentrification and displacement—even when these initiatives claim to serve the community (Chronopoulos 2016; McRobbie 2011).

During the fourth week of the semester, I introduced the concept of CBAIs as a special subset of arts organizations, and we viewed documentaries that provided information on this type of organization as well as examples of urban-based social-practice art, such as Rick Lowe’s (PBS 2015) and Tania Bruger’s (Forster 2015) community-based projects. With the online assistance of our campus librarians, students located and summarized news reports documenting how the economic, social, and public health impacts of the pandemic exacerbated ever-widening inequality and created existential challenges to the future of cities like New York (Office of the Mayor 2022; Williams 2020). This information would become important later when we examined the impact of the pandemic on the CBAIs, especially given that they served the New York City communities most impacted by the pandemic.

Next, during online class discussions and discussion forums on Blackboard, I provided students with a series of prompts, such as the following: What do you think is the most important role of arts institutions in communities? What do you think are the most important questions to ask to better understand the impact of COVID-19 on arts institutions? Building on the responses to these prompts, we arrived at the questions that would ground our class project:

Our next task as a class was to more clearly define what should “count” as a CBAI and determine a set of criteria for inclusion in the study. As in crafting the research questions, we arrived at these criteria as a group through discussion board prompts and responses; however, as the more experienced researcher on our team, I guided students toward clarifying what they considered the most important features of a CBAI. The resulting features included

After this, we sought to identify several institutions that met our criteria and were relevant to students’ lives. I first asked students to conduct their own online searches and present possibilities to the class. Ultimately, we focused on three CBAIs located in three of the city’s five boroughs: the Queens Museum, Bronx Documentary Center, and El Taller Latino Americano.

I then organized students into groups of three to five by institution of choice. Students were given the option of working on the scaffolded sections of the project on their own or together with other group members. The only component of the project that they had to perform as a group was the interview with a staff member from their CBAI, which was to take place over Zoom several weeks before the end of the semester.

By midsemester (at around seven weeks), students had gathered information about mission and programing, structure, funding sources, history, community partnerships, and outreach from CBAI websites. They were then introduced to databases such as the American Community Survey and asked to search these and other sources for demographic profiles of, and the impact of the pandemic on, the communities where the CBAIs are located. The correlations that students discovered through their exploration of community survey data and other sources clearly illustrated the relationship between such variables as neighborhood rates of poverty, homeownership, and immigrant status and the impacts of the pandemic (e.g., mortality rates, economic impacts). Students also used the website ProPublica to locate tax documents from each CBAI that outlined revenue, operating budgets, and other relevant financial information.

Next, students began to investigate the impact of the pandemic on their institution. The centerpiece of this research was a personal interview of at least one staff member from the institution. I frontloaded this part of the assignment by recruiting interview subjects from CBAIs early in the process. Students reached out on their own to these agents to schedule semistructured interviews via email. To guide students in the interview process, I composed a template for the interview questions, which students could alter to more closely fit the characteristics of their institution. I also attended the interview sessions on Zoom, keeping my contributions to a minimum. For example, toward the end of each interview, I often asked subjects to follow up on some of the responses they had given and, in a few cases, asked several more questions. Finally, students completed individual papers of five to seven pages based on the scaffolded components of the assignments that they had completed in their groups.

I taught this course again in the spring of 2021. In that semester, we also followed this format but with even more direct guidance from me. For example, we were able to save time choosing CBAIs because I gave students only the three choices that we had landed on in the previous semester.

Bridging Bourdieu’s Determinism and Humanistic Sociology: Project Insights

Humanistic sociology and Bourdieu are at odds with one another in terms of the degree of agency that each accords to actors to understand and act on society and, in particular, on the role of education in empowering them to do so. This project was conceived in the context of teaching community college students during the pandemic and against the background of the two perspectives I have presented. It is, I believe, an example of how the two perspectives can complement one another. Next, I offer a few insights into how one position was able to inform or make up for weaknesses in the other.

Discussion

Although it was not my intent in crafting this project, it so happened that, because the project directly engaged the arts and art worlds, it addressed and indeed challenged one of Bourdieu’s key sites for the implementation and reproduction of cultural capital. In fact, the project’s focus on art and culture provided a unique opportunity for myself and my students to really examine the conditions under which students’ cultural capital can provide an entry point into their understanding of the concept while also enhancing their possession of more conventional and sanctified versions of cultural and educational capital through ownership of the research experience. Nonetheless, educators in other fields both within and outside of sociology can utilize similar strategies to craft experiential learning pedagogies that draw on students’ unique experiences and capital as valued resources. The key here, in my mind, is educators’ sensitivity to what matters to students in any given context. The pandemic, and its impacts, in particular, on the population of students I teach, provided an obvious context, or historical envelope, that impacted my students and the organizations we studied. Students’ experiences during the pandemic, as well what they had in common with the populations served by the CBAIs we studied, gave them a natural “in” to the subject matter. Perhaps because of this “insider knowledge” they were able to look past some of the barriers that their exclusion from the kinds of capital ordinarily valued by art world members might have otherwise presented. Other contexts will present different “hooks,” which a sensitive educator will identify as they get to know their students’ concerns and something about the communities and cultures that have helped to shape their students’ experiences and orientations.

In implementing such experiential learning projects, especially projects with a research focus, educators should also be sensitive to and realistic about students’ skills as well as their needs and areas for growth. Our project worked better, and students felt more empowered and secure, after I realized that they needed my help front-loading queries to organization spokespeople, communicating with subjects, and so forth. I acknowledged my own advantages in this regard and was able to explain to students why I was intervening on this level and what I was doing to prep them for the more interesting parts of the research process. I believe that without my direct collaboration in all of the preliminary steps and some of the later ones, some students may have felt overwhelmed and insecure by the prospect of situating themselves as sociologists with a legitimate claim on the time and resources of the interview subjects. I tried to frame the project as a collaboration not only between students, and between students and their subjects, but also between me and the students.

This conversation has been focused on a project that occurred, by necessity, in an online format. It demonstrates that it is possible to engage in substantive and collaborative research with community college students in an online modality. Had my class been in person, I would have proceeded in much the same way; however, there would have been a few significant advantages to a classroom-based approach. First, I believe that our collective exchanges would have been easier and more fruitful. I would have had students meet in groups in the classroom and would have been able to move more organically from group to group to facilitate discussions. This also would have allowed me to encourage shy or reluctant students to share their ideas with their peers. Second, I would have scheduled field trips to institutions to give students full sensory experiences of the communities served and the work done, and to model and encourage conversation with organization educators. What I am suggesting here is that this kind of experiential approach can be utilized in hybrid, online, and in-person classrooms, with educators utilizing the advantages and overcoming the limitations of each of these formats.

Conclusion

The pandemic forced me to experiment with new ways of teaching Sociology of the Arts. In doing so, I have also found ways of integrating two contrasting but, as I hope I have demonstrated, potentially complementary ways of understanding the connection between society and agency in and through the arts and arts institutions. My students learned by doing and were aided in this process by the fact that the organizations they studied were grounded in and served communities with which they are familiar.

Students learned that the CBAIs we studied pivoted to social service in response to the devastating impact of the pandemic on the communities they served and, as a result, had fewer resources to devote to their cultural mission. This led to interesting and fruitful discussions about the allocation of public resources to support the arts and other cultural activities and to what degree the government and public should be responsible for providing the kinds of resources that enable human flourishing beyond material reproduction. Students made connections between austerity, which has been behind cuts to arts (and education) funding over the past several decades, and their own struggles to pay for school and their lack of time, money, and opportunity to pursue artistic and cultural expression. Here, Bourdieu’s (1984) discussion of cultural capital and the aesthetic disposition—that is, connecting this disposition with the ability to “keep necessity at arm’s length”—offered a key conceptual starting point. But, again, learning strategies suggested by a humanistic-sociological approach, and, in particular, recognition of the self in relation to community, allowed them to experience these connections.

While it did become clear that students needed my voice and guidance (cultural capital) to get their feet in the door with the organizations, they exercised considerable agency in choosing their subject and brainstorming with me about what we hoped to learn from our investigation. In this way, students experienced conscious connections to the communities they were studying and, through the interviews, engaged in important and collaborative dialogue with other community members. At the conclusion of the semester, more than one student commented that they hadn’t realized that such a vital cultural resource existed in their own community. Others reported that they felt a deeper connection to their community because of the experience.

The pandemic and related economic, environmental, and political conditions have highlighted very real crises that our students will continue to face as they move further into adulthood. Community college students inherit a world in which the shield from these impending crises would appear to be the possession of disproportionate material wealth, a resource that they lack. While I help them cultivate some of the skills that will be advantageous to them in the workplace, my more important job is to activate their sense of agency and engagement with the social world around them, empowering them to envision and help create a society where all members can flourish and live in tandem with the natural environment on which we depend. The extreme conditions wrought by the pandemic clarified these goals for me. I developed this assignment on the fly and in response to pandemic conditions, but it helped cut to the heart of what I believe to be the most pressing educational challenges for the next generation. While it is important, no doubt, to train students to enter the work world and help solve the technical problems that lie in front of us, it is even more important for them to think about why, for whom, and to what ends they will work, create, and produce.