Canadian Sociologists in the First Person

Sociology is a comparatively young discipline, and younger still in Canada, wherein the first sociology department was started at McGill University in the mid 1920s. Canadian Sociologists in the First Person is an edited volume of invited essays that asks Canadian sociologists across the country to reflect on their lives and intellectual work. The book is organized into five sections: Professional Sociology, Policy Sociology, Political Economy, Social Activism, and Ethnography and Cultural Studies. Taken together, and historicized by the editors, these essays give readers a strong sense of what it meant to be trained in Canada from roughly the 1950s to the 1990s and how these scholars found their way to sociology and stayed. Throughout the sections of this book, there is a prevailing and meaningful engagement with class—the modest, transnational, and hardscrabble experience of parents, as well as a concern for class mobility and consciousness. C. Wright Mills is the most mentioned academic influence, particularly his work on the Power Elite, which many Canadian sociologists extended in Canada. In partnership with one another and Statistics Canada, an arm of social science data collection in the federal government, scholars in this collection also aimed to build databases from which inequality in Canada could be better understood. We see other emphases in Canadian sociology such as migration and immigration, network analysis, feminist sociology, and critical Marxist studies. Nearly every chapter includes assertions of happenstance—a journey of wandering, not knowing, making what the authors call ‘‘stupid’’ or uninformed decisions, and having little guidance. Notably, many scholars in this collection attribute their lives to luck—even though sociology shows us that, in fact, our trajectories are usually part of larger patterns of history, identity, and opportunity. Maybe no one, including sociologists, wants to feel like a data point. Sociologists don’t have much experience making sense of our own lives or reflecting on how our individual narratives might matter in themselves rather than in aggregate. This absence does at times show. The strongest sections in the book are Policy Sociology, Political Economy, and Social Activism, and these are also, arguably, the strongest subfields in the discipline in Canada. In the Policy section, Daniel Béland gives a moving account of traversing francophone Canada and Anglophone sociology and the ways in which such translation work led him to a life of comparative historical analysis. There is a nice pairing of David Tindall and Mark Stoddart, the latter a student of the former. Their collective endeavors give an important account of environmental sociology in Canada, touching on topics such as forestry, colonial natural resource extraction, and violation of Indigenous treaties, rights, and sovereignty. Both recall conflicts between Indigenous activists and the Canadian nation-state as pivotal in their journey toward becoming sociologists. Wallace Clement’s reflections on research on mining add to this important repertoire. Additionally, Metta Spencer’s fascinating chapter includes an important discussion of Scientists for Peace and her research on nuclear armament. There are many strong feminist essays in this book and several that detail racism within Canada and the profession, each of which should be required reading for sociologists in training. Meg Luxton’s chapter is a compelling exposition of how a life of activism produces an impressive record of engaged research, intellectual and political community, and a better world. Sarita Srivastava’s Reviews 477