Come Out, Come Out, Whoever You Are

Abstract

with feminist politics meaningfully to her grandmother’s activism in the 1930s for India’s independence. Reza Nakhaie and Carl E. James’s chapters show the enduring impact of racism on their careers, and Nakhaie’s in particular is quite poignant in its explication of how migration, racism, and the precarious academic labor market in Canada shaped his worldview. Cora Voyageur’s thoughtful and engaging chapter details her journey from residential school to academia. Using Indigenous protocol as an approach to the chapter, she outlines her career insistence on not just cataloguing harms but researching First Nations’ labor market participation and continuity using a Marxist, anti-colonial, and effectual approach to Indigenous Studies that takes her life’s knowledge into account. Some chapters include the usual farcical politics of academics and their departments befitting the Netflix series ‘‘The Chair’’— though, dare I say, no Asian women chairs of departments are part of Canadian institutional sociology represented here. Further, the question of white straight men’s dominance in the field is insufficiently attended to in this text as a whole, though they write the majority of the chapters in, and edit, the text itself. Additionally, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, where critical sociological work has flourished, including but not limited to the globally recognized scholarship of Dorothy Smith, is mentioned by just one of its graduates in the volume. This is a notable absence given its record at placing students in tenure-stream position in sociology departments. After reading Canadian Sociologists in First Person, I found myself asking hard questions about whether sociologists are in the main interesting people, whether sociologists are led principally by intellectual or political passion, and whether some chapters were a comical rejoinder to Peter Berger’s Invitation to Sociology. Berger presciently describes sociologists as academic versions of Babbit, concerned with being middle—middle class, middle managers, middle politically— rather than thinkers or riskers. One contributor confesses to writing an introductory textbook to pay for a child’s orthodontia. Most contributors spent considerable time talking about their spouses and heterosexual life – a fact which must calculably affect the discipline, but upon which they did not choose to reflect. Canadian sociology is richly informed by theoretical, political, social, and intellectual concern with power, yet it also mirrors the U.S. practice of continually documenting inequality for its own sake. This volume touches on Canadianization and the struggle against U.S.-dominated hiring and influence, and it is time to have this discussion again, mostly within the highest ranked and largest departments across Canada. Neil McLaughlin, one of the editors, has already done impressive intellectual work bringing these questions to us and continues to do so in this edited collection. For that reason, and others documented here, I highly recommend it.