1. What if you were born in a different place or a different time? How would you be different? Choose a place or time and brainstorm how you might be different.
Applying Sociology: The Sociological Imagination and Outliers
After brainstorming about how you might be different if you lived in a different time or place, read the following excerpt from Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers. This excerpt is the introduction to the book. It is about a small town in Pennsylvania and how the people in that town were affected by living there.
2. Describe life in Roseto, PA.
3. What did Dr. Wolf set out to study at first?
4. What did he find/conclude at the end of his study?
5. Were the people of Roseto, PA aware of that they were being affected in the way that Dr. Wolf concluded? Explain.
In the book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell writes about extreme success stories (aka Outliers). In the introduction (the excerpt linked above), we learn that the people who lived in Roseto at that time were affected by the social life there even though they did not realize it. In other words, they were affected by where and when they live. This is is the task of sociology; to understand how people are affected by where and when they live.
This understanding is what an important sociologist, C. Wright Mills, calls having a "sociological imagination". Mills explains "sociological imagination" as seeing the connection between history and biography. That is, who we are (our biography) is determined by where and when we live (our history). As an example of this idea, the people of Roseto were affected by where and when they lived. Because they lived in the town of Roseto at that time, they lived in a way that affected them (without even knowing it) so that they had a much lower chance of getting heart disease and living longer than the rest of the country. This idea might seem simple, but C. Wright Mills, an important sociologist, wrote in 1959, that people often forget this in both their daily life and their research. Mills also adds that using a sociological imagination it is possible to see the private troubles as public issues. In other words, often times a person's struggle in daily life is really part of a larger structural issue that individuals can't always see.
The rest of Gladwell's book, Outliers, uses a sociological imagination to explain extreme success stories; for example, Bill Gates' and Steve Jobs' tremendous success and wealth stemming from where and when they lived:
Gladwell describes how being born in the mid 1950s was particularly fortuitous for those interested in computer programming development (think Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, both born in 1955). It also helped to be geographically near what were then called supercomputers, the gigantic predecessors to the thing on which you’re reading this post. Back in the 1960s, when Gates and Jobs were coming of age, a supercomputer took up a whole room and was not something most youngsters would have had a chance to see, let alone work on. But because of their proximity to actual computers, both Gates and Jobs had a leg up on others their age and had the chance to spend hours and hours (10,000 of them in Gladwell’s estimation) learning about programming.
For more info/examples of the sociological imagination, see this post from the Everyday Sociology site that explains how a sociological imagination can be used to analyze how individuals are affected by when and where they live.
6. Do you have any questions about Mills' sociological imagination? Can you explain it?
Imagine Where...
What if you applied to Loyola just like you did and you attended it during the same years that you are now, but you attended ONLY the John Felice Rome Center Campus? Imagine how you might be different, act differently, think differently, just because you went to Loyola Rome for four years.
One example of how you might be different if you lived in Rome is simply how you would cross the street!
For example, when I was in London, I was almost hit by a car because I looked the wrong way on a street!
Loyola was founded by Ignatius Loyola from Spain. Imagine if you lived in the same town that he was from but it was right now. In other words, you lived at the same time as you are now, but you were going to school there. How would you be different from who you are here and now? Use the links below to hypothesize some of the ways that you might think differently, have different values, act differently, have different expectations and even different difficulties because of where you live:
Five Differences between universities in Spain and the U.S.
https://www.isepstudyabroad.org/articles/900
What Student Life is Really Like at a Spanish University
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/apr/01/what-student-life-is-really-like-at-a-spanish-university
Imagine When...
Applying your sociological imagination to where a person lives
Seeing the world with a sociological imagination means being able to see how individuals are affected by where and when they live. Yesterday's lesson applied the sociological imagination to where a person lives. Just ten miles apart from SHS students might have a very different experience. Today we will use our sociological imagination to examine how people might be affected by when they live. Using archives from the school's library, examine the pictures of our school from years past.
Find some examples how, even if you were the same person at Loyola, you would be different if you went here during a different time. 
