Toward a Practice of Critical Recognition: Life Narrative in the Sociology Classroom and Beyond

Personal Reflexive Statement

I was drawn to sociology as a college student because of the conceptual framework it provided to make sense of my own experiences. My trajectory as a sociologist has been guided by an interest in the relationship between experience and knowledge. After 20 years of teaching at a small northeastern liberal arts college, I have come to embrace an identity as “teacher” and “educator,” more broadly. This vantage point has inspired, allowed, and demanded both careful observation and reflective—always trial and error—responses to shifting cultural and institutional sensibilities. As an interdisciplinary scholar ¹ who regularly teaches in the Latin American/Latinx Studies Program, I am drawn to opportunities to nurture humanistic sociologists who feel connected to the class materials and are challenged to think in complex ways about the social world.

Introduction

Pedagogic projects are not simply mechanistic projects, for they derive from theoretical claims about the world and assumptions about how history is made, in other words, pedagogy and theory are mutually related.— M. Jacqui Alexander ¹

This work grows from a desire to navigate the tension between affirming the diverse set of experiences that gather in our classrooms and challenging sociology students to think beyond the self and systemically about the social world. At first blush this seems like an obvious and central disciplinary concern. Yet at this moment the institutional imperative to affirm, itself a messy confluence of social, political, and capitalist demands, coincides with the amplified desire for individual attention. I have found that this confluence can place challenge and affirmation at odds in the classroom. Moreover, in the sociology classroom affirmation of experiences is bound up with an examination of the relationship between knowledge and experience, and with the increased insistence on, and acceptance of, experience as a valuable site of knowledge. Thus, the complex nature of this question can best be explored, to build on Jacqui Alexander, by attending to pedagogy and theory together as “mutually related.” The buzz about Sociology doubling down on its positivists traditions has wide purchase, given the difficulty of parsing the cacophony of relational experiences that comprise the social world. Yet what I am after pedagogically is whether leaning (back) into experience as valuable, and simultaneously flawed, partial, and relational might better address the challenge-affirmation conundrum. It feels timely to revisit Patricia Hill Collins’s case for a “holistic angle of vision.” In an article first published in this journal in 1986, Collins makes the case for an angle of vision that brings together individual experience, cultural/community knowledge, and formal disciplinary training (Collins 2003, originally published in 1986). She argues that an “effective social actor” is one who recognizes and honors all three ways of knowing, their integrative potential, and “the strengths and limitations of each” (Collins 2003, 360; also see Alcoff 1991).

In this spirit, this article offers a close reading of two Latina life narratives, ² Virgina Grise’s Your Healing is Killing Me (2017), a “performance manifesto,” and Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends (2017), a work of literary non-fiction. Each of these texts provides an entryway into all three of Collins’s dimensions of “holistic perspectivity.” I argue that these works affirm the analytical importance of experience and autobiographical storytelling. However, both authors also trouble the self as a site of unquestionable authority and experiential narrative as a site of unmediated truth. Both texts illuminate C. Wright Mills’s sociological imagination because they pointedly locate biographies in their structural and historical context. Yet what I find most compelling about these texts, is that they both shift the conversation from a longing for affirmation to a practice of critical recognition. In the latter practice storytellers are agentic knowers. Rather than delivering the truth of experience, they reveal the “I” narrative to be messy with contradiction. Grise and Luiselli draw the reader’s analytical eye away from the narrator and toward larger structures and history. This article suggests that life narrative in sociology can be used not (only) as a genre or illustrative example of social phenomena, but for epistemological insight that can help students as they critically reflect on their own stories and investment in stories. In this sense, readers are learning from and with the autobiographical narrator rather than about them. ³ While epistemological questions about knowledge and experience have a long history, the moment calls on sociologists to think with a new generation of students about the intellectual legacies we inherit and continue to wrestle with in our contexts.

This article is divided into three parts. In the first section, I locate my own reflections on teaching in the context of the current moment, as well as within long-standing feminist conversations about experience and life stories within the classroom and beyond. In this section, I make the case that institutionalization of scripts of positionality in educational settings (and social media) may work to undermine their more radical history and enduring potential in the classroom. With an eye toward tools that can allow for pedagogical interrogation of “the self,” especially the impulse toward coherent and essentialized identities, the second section analyzes two Latina life narratives that lend themselves to use in undergraduate sociology and interdisciplinary classrooms. I argue that life writing can point toward another way of engaging with stories, away from both the abstraction of theory and the presumed authenticity of experience. Finally, I share a classroom journaling exercise I have used in my teaching to suggest how these life stories may also open pathways to thinking critically, not just about reading practices, but about how we share and listen to one another. Published life writing provides pedagogical opportunities to fortify agentic knowers by cultivating a practice of critical recognition.

By critical recognition I mean a practice that builds on the rituals of personal reflections and self-disclosure that have become standard in many academic spaces, often in the spirit of creating belonging or acknowledging difference. The institutionalization of these practices can often feel scripted and detached from their potentially radical intent. ⁴ I do not wish to dismiss these practices. Even when they feel scripted, they signal a refusal of the premise that knowledge is ever neutral. Yet the prevalence and imperative of sharing on social media and the attendant desire to know, to be right, and to be affirmed create new challenges in the sociology classroom. A practice of critical recognition, one that asks us to consider how and why we share and listen in the classroom and beyond, may help us all better face both what we know and what we don’t know, together. Reading life narrative can surprise us by disrupting rather than satisfying the voyeuristic desire for authentic experience, particularly of marginality, individual exceptionalism of various kinds, and “grit.” There are a growing number of memoirs, autoethnographies, and experimental forms of writing that defy academic genre in exciting ways and merit attention. Your Healing is Killing Me and Tell me how It Ends are both works that use the narrative “I” to turn the reader’s attention to the messy web of relationships that hold structure and experience together. They give us a way to treat both structure and identity as messy rather than fixed. They challenge the desire for certainty, empathy, and a road map (tell me what to do, tell me how it ends). The narrators set us up to not know (them) by inhabiting contradictions, while also pointing to the structural and political. Above all they claim the floor as knowers, while troubling the certainty seeking premise of “speaking your truth.” In other words, working with published life narratives in the sociology classroom can open generative conversations about how we meet and dialogue with an agentic narrator; one who inhabits contractions, stages omissions, points toward questions and is not simply a bearer of self-truth.

Reflections on the Classroom

Building a classroom that is collaborative and analytically attentive to the social relationships that we are shaped through are entwined projects. In my own teaching at a predominately white institution (PWI) I make use of autobiographical storytelling in several ways. I use life narratives to build connections with and between students. I find more joy in teaching when I make opportunities to get to know the students. A fuller sense of one another increases both the possibility and the will to engage in deeper conversations about the materials we examine together. It loosens the barrier between instructor and students, a gesture that can be particularly important for minoritized and first-generation students at PWIs. This loosening can also feel particularly risky for those of us from underrepresented groups or for educators with precarious ties to institutions, particularly when the material is also controversial or difficult. Nonetheless, it is often among these very risk takers that inclusive and transformational pedagogical innovation flowers.

Why do we share? Engagement with the theoretical and pedagogical writings of feminists, particularly feminists of color, ⁵ provides abundant insightful answers to this question. Such engagement also reveals the dialogues that have taken place across feminist difference over time. We share to collaborate (Bhavnani and Haraway 1994; McKittrick 2021; Roshanravan 2018). ⁶ We share to lay the groundwork for transformation (Collins 1991; Gordon 2004; Keating 2013). We share to acknowledge membership in longer wider lineages and communities (Kelly 2002; Taylor 2017). We share reaching for transparency, for connection, and sometimes we share reaching for an intellectual lifeline (The Latina Feminist Group 2001). We share because we believe, perhaps by instinct or training, that wisdom emerges from lived experiences (Freire 1995; Hooks 2010; Mohanty 1997). We share to face what we don’t know, open to what we might know more fully in relationship and dialogue with fellow knowers. Bringing where we stand and how we relate to the surface, as questions—as unfinished projects and ideas to think through—rather than unaddressed undercurrents or immovable postures, is crucial to learning together. To be seen and heard are of equal importance, and arguably foundational to developing study habits, acquiring skills, and building knowledge.

If to be seen and heard are pedagogical foundations, they are also theoretical ones, as Alexander reminds us in the epigraph. Autobiographical storytelling has a rich history including in sociology. Here it is often most closely associated with qualitative methods that look for patterns and underlying meanings. In fact, in sociology courses across the United States, C. Wright Mills’s “sociological imagination” is one of the most widely used concepts to link sociological theory and pedagogy. Mills’s link between “personal troubles” and “public issues” calls attention to the structures and contexts that enable and constrain individual lives. Particularly in a nation where “rugged individualism” is an enduring pillar of the foundational story, teaching the sociological imagination is a crucial but challenging task.

Sociologists continue to bring foundational building blocks to the much-needed interdisciplinary conversations about the self and its shifting contexts. Even authors of introductory textbooks, traditionally an impersonal genre, locate themselves in their work as a teaching tool (Johnson 2014; Wade 2021). These authors create intimacy and remind us that the self is always being made and remade in different spaces or fields as we move through them. We each participate in this process, including through unreliable memory practices and desires yet to be realized. Thus, the self is both relational and continually in process. This openness conveys sociological language that is attuned and responsive to, but not paralyzingly overdetermined by, contexts.

The debates about partial and situated knowledges have a long history but intensified in the 1980s and 1990s (cf. Bhavnani and Haraway 1994; Collins 1986; Collins 1991; Scott 1991). These debates opened possibilities for considering the ways in which what passed as “objective” or “universal” knowledge was itself partial and firmly tied to institutional power and the authority such a location provided. The problem is not the partiality of knowledges, but the exclusionary arrogance of of claims to universality and mastery, and the related hoarding of institutional power and “knower” status. These practices continue to be facilitated by the casting of global south, working class, minoritized knowers as examples of experience or “difference” under the guise of inclusion. At the same time, global south, working class, and minoritized knowers continue to challenge the very terms of the conversation. Calls for inclusion have been calls to transform what and how we can know, not simply for representation narrowly defined. In sociology they have also been calls to rethink the history of the discipline and account for the knowledge(s) and methods excluded from our own foundational story (Itzigsohn and Brown 2020; Romero 1992, 2019).

Students are increasingly primed to discuss how their own backgrounds shape their outlook and they challenge others to do the same. This was not the case 20 years ago when I started teaching at Vassar College. Nonetheless, the debates about standpoint and objectivity remain alive in academic circles and are sporadically revived publicly. Traditionally aged students at my institution have grown up—often in metropolitan contexts and highly networked online—in a moment when the language of care, inclusion, empowerment, respect for difference, self-reflection, and more recently anti-racism have been mainstreamed among large sectors of the United States. A global pandemic amid intensified (attention to) state violence, war, white nationalism, and climate disaster have come into public focus at the same time. Given the intensity of these competing currents, I have observed among my students that a desire to learn, to be seen, to be heard, and to connect is increasingly accompanied by a desire to say the right thing, not just about the material but about themselves. On the one hand, young people are skeptical of objectivity in fruitful ways. They imbue conversations with questions about (social) scientific methods and they value experience and positionality, their own and that of others. These welcome critical stances also bump up against relativism and the desire for a right or pure answer in ways that are not new or unexpected. That where we stand informs our vantage point appears to be an adage much more readily embraced by, or at least familiar to, young people today. Less clear, and often a source of friction and anxiety, is what to do with this insight.

These epistemological concerns have largely been left to women of color theorists, feminists, queers, leftists, and other radicals. Yet as attention to the links between self and knowledge gain traction in wider public facing circles and popular culture, they seem to be enfolded into zero-sum strategies and fears or a related desire to speak without meeting challenge or disagreement. These frameworks, fueled by politics, can preempt more generative question asking about popular culture’s timely reencounter with epistemological debates (see McGhee 2021).

As attention to epistemological questions move through academic spaces, movement spaces, and popular culture another tendency is to use life narratives to cement rather than interrogate the relationship between social position and knowledge. Sharing practices often feel scripted. By this I mean that in many spaces we expect and offer well-rehearsed narratives about ourselves to signal mastery over ideas more than to interrogate who we are and where we stand. For instance, I might describe myself as mixed race, as Latina or Latinx, as a teacher or professor, a procrastinator, shy or an introvert, a mom, the oldest sibling, or someone who has moved around a lot in my life. All these things convey meaning or no meaning at all. This will depend on the reader/listener and the context in which our ideas meet. Nonetheless, as stated earlier, a preliminary sense of who is at the table (including based on social location) can be important to establishing an initial tone and make it easier to take risks. The scripts, even when they feel well-rehearsed or perfunctory, signal a refusal of business as usual; an acknowledgement that who we are matters in the room. On the other hand, if we rely on and scrutinize these scripts to establish certainty about the links between experience, self, and knowledge we close conversations rather than open them. This exacerbates the very problem that sharing practices animated by standpoint theories have sought to address. The compelling arguments made from the academic and political margins have not been that experience and knowledge are interchangeable, rather that experience informs our analytical lens (Alcoff 1991; Budgeon 2021; Varghese 2006). In other words, following Collins, experience forms part of a “holistic angle of vision.” As inclusion and representation are mainstreamed and institutionalized, I worry that identity and knowledge are seen not only as related, but interchangeable and static (Fernandes 2003; Lee 2002; Nash and Pinto 2020). Larger questions about power, knowledge, and experience are too easily reduced to scripts about positionality. These scripts, and the hard-won advances in representation and challenges to “objectivity,” feel purely symbolic when voting rights, legal protections, and pathways to equal access to education are stripped away. Yet each day there are reminders that even symbolic or scripted gestures are perceived as threats, for instance, when they are used as cultural kindle in electoral political wars to ignite fear of inclusion’s imagined excesses (embodied in “wokeness” or “presentism,” for example) or fear of an imminent socialist state.

My students, who opt into classes that explicitly address issues of race, class, and gender, increasingly advocate for inclusive spaces and want to see syllabi that represent difference: disability, non-binary gender identities, racial difference, and issues of power. While much is made in the media about faculty agendas, in this job it is often students who keep us on our toes and push faculty and institutions to expand and account for our thinking.

Yet in classroom conversations about race and racism, for example, white students often choose the security of scripted intellectual, political, and social stances that signal “allyship” as they reach toward mastery of the language of inclusivity. ⁷ Alternatively, they choose silence to avoid speaking for others or making mistakes (Alcoff 1991; Shotwell 2015). Students of color often also rely on scripts, feeling like vulnerability is too risky when white supremacy is on the rise and wavering off script becomes fodder for efforts to dismantle meager success (affirmative action, teaching race in schools, DEI efforts, and more inclusive media representation). Minoritized students express weariness of becoming what Cuban-American author, Jeannie Capó Crucet has called “someone else’s teachable moment;” ⁸ especially when they sense that their performance of “difference” is the core of what is valued at the table.

I find students in general seem drawn to highly theoretical language, even as they crave and ask for more “real world,” qualitative examples, and personal narratives. For example, I have had students eager to categorize texts as decolonial, abolitionist, neutral or objective as a precondition for engaging with them. Abstraction may convey complexity of thinking (or political orientation) in certain contexts, but it also provides a way to evade the messiness of interacting with imperfect authors and texts, and with each other. Abstraction can draw us away from, to borrow from Leela Fernandes, the “dailiness” of ethical interaction with each other in the social world. ⁹ Of course, there are many students who entirely avoid classes that might lead them into difficult or controversial topics and others who are participating in difficult conversations and contexts daily.

What is perhaps most confounding about this moment is that in many spaces to talk about race and racism in the classroom is to risk harassment and one’s job. ¹⁰ Most of us are navigating contexts in which for some students (and colleagues) these conversations are validating, for some they are uninteresting, and for others they are a perceived threat to a comfortable status quo. All classrooms likely include a mix of ideas not easily voiced or disentangled. What coalesces at any given moment as the dominant set of ideas in a classroom reflects a range of things, among them: who is at the front of the classroom, what other classes students are taking, who is in the room, what is trending on people’s media feeds and in their peer circles. This tangle has the capacity to take dialogue off the table. All that’s left is speaking for oneself, and when that is also compromised, speaking against others, or simply avoiding difficult conversations.

There is an increased impulse to speak for yourself and about yourself (Alcoff 1991). I believe this comes from a place of attention to diverse and often hierarchically ranked experiences, and from a cultural moment that is both self-oriented and certainty-oriented. This creates some dilemmas for those of us teaching classes from and about minoritized perspectives and communities or about/from the Global South. Under what conditions is it acceptable for a cis man to discuss feminism, for white presenting Latines to discuss Afro-Latinidad, for a German filmmaker to make a film about the Caribbean, for a Black feminist to disagree with another Black feminist? I see these as significant and enduring epistemological tensions, particularly when meant to attend to long histories of erasure, forgetting, speaking for, and speaking over in the very institutions we inhabit. At the same time, I recognize these as questions that rarely offer the desired guarantees. When these questions become a point of certainty rather than an invitation to inquiry, they have the potential to limit self-reflection and discourage careful reading practices. Such practices are rendered unnecessary if there is already a pre-made script in circulation to signal expertise, allyship, theoretical certainty, or what Alexis Shotwell might call “purity” (Shotwell 2016). The grounds for discussion and growth narrow considerably.

I have found myself many times navigating a classroom in which it is difficult to move from experience to analysis. I have been in rooms where self-stories are deemed irrelevant and discounted. I have been in rooms where self-stories are so sacred that all we can do is listen, speak for ourselves, and go home. Maybe we leave with fears about what we’ve shared or what we are newly holding for/with our peers. Attention to positionality in the classroom at its best is not a means to discount knowledge or knowers or swap out analysis for experience. Attending to experience should not foreclose conversation between knowers, but rather spark a process that attends to fields of power and to the relational contexts in which knowledge is made (Alcoff 1991; Bhavnani and Haraway 1994; Collins 1986 [2003]; Collins 1991; Gordon 2004). The promise of positionality is in the possibilities it opens, not in what it calcifies. It fosters conversation about what can be known when sets of knowledges are brought into conversation. Taken this way, positionality is about what experience informed analysis reveals about a set of relationships.

By making our investments part of the conversation we create the possibility of coming to new understandings that are more than the sum of parts. But we may also need to unsettle our own attachments and certainties—literally where we stand—in the service of exploring what we don’t know together. Published life writing provides an opportunity to think about experience and its narration as rich and complex texts to be engaged with in sociology. In the two texts I discuss, Grise and Luiselli each invite the reader into a practice of critical recognition. This is a pedagogical opportunity, not just an opportunity to know the authors better, but a chance to tell and listen differently.

Telling and Listening Differently

[In NYC] I learned quick, you can’t get on the train just because the door is open. It might be taking you in the wrong direction! — Grise p. 21

If reading life stories in sociology classes can both affirm experience as a site of knowledge and complicate our understanding of its limits and potential, it is a promising pedagogical practice. This reading practice invites reflection on the particular texts themselves, the production of knowledge in context(s), and the theoretical frameworks that exist within life narratives, including our own (Gordon 2004). This layered reading of life narrative in sociology classes is an opportunity to think with Alexander (2005) about the relationship between theory, theory making, and pedagogy. The texts discussed here are readable in undergraduate classes because they are short in length and resonate with contemporary concerns and orientations. In my own teaching they work because they bridge Sociology, Latin American/Latinx Studies, and Feminist Studies. The texts themselves are quite different from each other in form, but each author writes in a way that allows readers to grapple with the analytical complexity of experience and autobiographical narrative. The authors each reveal the profound importance of experience as a site of knowledge, while also troubling the self as a site of unquestioned authority. They gently pull back the curtain on “speaking one’s truth” by attending to the contexts in which such a practice occurs. Both Luiselli and Grise complicate truth telling by showing the reader an agentic storyteller who reads and navigates the contexts in which they each move.

Interestingly, both authors play with “truth telling,” especially in the context of extracted self-narratives. They both invoke “questionnaires” as tools used by institutions to gather information. And, in each case, the reader is prompted to interrogate the use of autobiographical scripts as a pre-condition for addressing structural failures. Luiselli and Grise show the reader the navigation of questionnaires and scripted answers. These are not simply confessionals; they are negotiated interactions involving agentic narrators, inadequate tools, and flawed premises. The high stakes are made clear, especially the stakes for individuals. The limits and larger omissions are made clear, as well. This analytical toggling orients the reader into structural question asking, while still holding the individual narrative with respect and care. In this way, the reader is asked to sharpen a “holistic angle of vision,” that resists telling and listening solely for experiential authority or certainty.

Thinking with Students About Critical Recognition

The sociological discussion about experience and knowledge is by no means new. However, the entangled rise of memoir, popular therapeutic culture, personal branding, and the prominence of social media as a fast paced and highly influential social and socializing field (in the way once occupied by neighborhood, family, or school) have put the self on display in ways sociologists have yet to fully grasp. If life narratives saturate the social world vying for attention, political gain, profit, and “truth” status, what kinds of pedagogical value do they continue to hold?

In my own sociology department, we have seen increased interest in experimental ways of writing. Central to this drive is an increased desire to center personal experience not as a starting point or complement to research and analysis, but as a substitute. This calls on educators—many of us from a generation that has actively pushed disciplinary boundaries in our teaching and scholarship—to again reckon with how we understand and teach the relationship between experience, analysis, and the production of knowledge. We can continue to consider how life narratives open questions and create opportunities for thinking through and outside the self. Though I am far from certain about what this should look like—especially given the range of institutional contexts in which we each operate—below I provisionally highlight the three nodes that I am attentive to when thinking about life stories in the classroom: framing, self-reflection, and context.

First, I remain deeply committed to the importance of experience—most often shared through autobiographical narratives—both as a pedagogical tool and for its analytical value. One challenge is how to frame experience in the context of sociology. ¹⁶ Collins’s “holistic angle of vision” provides a theoretical language to discuss the epistemological importance of experience, while also pointing to its relationship with community and disciplinary knowledge, each with their own challenges and limitations. This framework allows for conversations in which experience matters deeply, but is less easily consumed or displayed in reductive or essentialist ways. It can be tricky in the sociology classroom to avoid the allure of using published life stories as evidence or as illustrative examples of a social problem, be it poverty, inequality, or even resistance. Most sociologists are not trained to read for or teach genre, for example, but we are comfortable listening to interviews and making larger sense of stories and experiences. To frame and engage with the narrator as an agentic knower, rather than as evidence, invites students to meet the work on another plane. Students can read for the logics, narrative choices, and messy edges that help locate the author in larger contexts, relationships, and histories. Authors increasingly blur the lines between research, experience, analysis, and story in ways that are powerful, moving, and intellectually rigorous. In this work, the self is a process of discovery and narrative interpretation. Life writing can help us fine-tune reading and listening practices that allow us to work with the threads between experience and narrative, between accounts of things that happened and analysis of these happenings.

Engagement with these threads in published life stories also provides a pedagogical opportunity for students to reflect on their own sharing and listening practices. In my teaching, I have asked students to journal about the ways they are moved, invited, and compelled to share over the course of a single week. This simple journaling exercise can bring an awareness to taken for granted practices—sharing our location, fitness goals, and secrets—and the feelings related to the various ways we share. Debriefing about this exercise provides an opportunity to think together about how we each tell and listen to stories—including scripted ones—in the context(s) of our daily lives. Reflecting on how and when we opt out of sharing or into silence is also generative. For students to see themselves and one another as agentic narrators is not to see each other with skepticism but with critical recognition. I have found that young people—as much as they are deeply embedded in circuits of media sharing—are also ambivalent about social media and aware and/or curious about its ties to neoliberal capitalism.

This curiosity is an opening to think about the contexts in which life narratives circulate. I have written elsewhere about the value of guiding students to examine a problem—or puzzle—from multiple angles (Carruyo 2020). If we consider life writing an important source of knowledge, it is also generative to discuss how life stories circulate, and the frictional positions on this phenomenon. There is a rich conversation about the production and circulation of life writing, and, indeed, the digital production of the self (Gilmore 2017; Poletti and Rak 2014; Rak 2017; Smith and Watson 2010). This conversation illuminates both the possibilities life narratives hold and their limits at this particular moment in history. This body of work complicates therapeutic practices like “speaking your truth” and reveals the complicated (and multiple) histories and contexts for confessional practices (Chow 2021; Illouz 2008). Asking students to engage with this conversation facilitates discussions about individual empowerment, individual rights, neoliberal capture of storytelling and standpoint theories, and the contradictory effects of our desire for visibility and recognition (Banet-Weiser 2018; S. Fernandes 2017; Gray 2013; Shotwell 2016; Taiwo 2022). Selves are embedded—never innocent—no matter how much self-work, self-improvement, and self-curating we accomplish.

The ubiquity of self-talk and self-certainty fills our days and leaves many of us reaching elsewhere or otherwise. Yet it does not follow that we should turn away from experience or from narratives about our experiences as crucial dimensions of holistic knowledge. It is the rich complexity and social nature of these knowledge sites that offer myriad possibilities for sociological discussion, human connection, and ethical relational action.