Guest Chair's Corner: Ezra Temko, PhD
In 1805, Thomas Kirkpatrick settled in what today is Edwardsville, Illinois. After territorial governor Ninian Edwards named the area where Kirkpatrick lived as the county seat for Madison County and appointed Kirkpatrick as a judge, Kirkpatrick named the town Edwardsville, in Ninian’s honor. In 2008, the City of Edwardsville erected a statue of Ninian Edwards on a pedestal in the downtown area to honor the city’s namesake. Ninian Edwards, however, does not deserve this public honor–Edwards owned enslaved people, vetoed legislation to repeal the territory’s indentured servitude law (a de facto system of slavery), and led campaigns of murder and removal of indigenous people.
Growing out of this past summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, a group formed to advocate for relocation of the statue to an educational setting where it will not honor and venerate Ninian Edwards’ racist legacy. I joined this group and since the end of June have been an active co-leader with the group. In November 2020, we succeeded in getting the city council to change the plaza’s name from Ninian Edwards Plaza to City Plaza. We continue to build support for relocating the statue and are currently focused on the April 2021 city council elections.
We have engaged in advocacy, from e-petitions to a joint leader letter to a rally in the plaza to public comments at city council and Administrative and Community Services Committee meetings. We hosted a forum with the League of Women Voters, Beyond the Bronze: The Ninian Edwards Statue in Context, as part of our effort to educate the community about the real history of Ninian Edwards’ legacy and why it is important our public spaces reflect our community’s values. Panelist and SIUE Sociology Professor Flo Maatita, PhD, explained sociologically why our campaign has been met by some community members with feelings of anger, defensiveness and feeling their heritage is being attacked.
You hear a lot in sociology about the sociological imagination—about understanding social phenomena within its broader social context. My sociological imagination makes it clear to me how this statue distorts rather than informs us about our history; about how symbols matter and can enact cultural harm; about how this statue connects to ongoing embedded racism in our society. Public sociology—accessibly communicating sociology to broader audiences and working in partnership with the communities in which we are situated—moves this forward. Public sociology is social movement work because education and collaboration are part of the work of co-producing cultural knowledge and impacting how we conceive social issues.
As an applied sociologist, however, I think the idea of sociological imagination is only half-baked. It requires a partnership with what I call sociological work, in which we take our sociological understanding of inequality and injustice and apply that to personal and social change work. Sociological work means we have to both develop what Barbara Love calls our "liberatory consciousness" and then we have to act on it, challenging the policies, structures, rituals and other phenomena that produce, reproduce and exacerbate structural inequality.
The Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology similarly discusses moving from a foundational sociology that remains insulated in academia to an applied and clinical sociology which applies that understanding to the real world and designs and implements interventions. Sociology starts with learning about and researching social phenomena, including social problems, social stratification, social change and social movements. Applied sociology involves the application of this knowledge—using what we know sociologically about how social change happens, about best practices for advocacy and organizing, about the root causes of our social problems and the corresponding social policies that can address them—and putting this knowledge into practice.
I understand my participation in Our Edwardsville’s advocacy campaign not simply as an extracurricular activity, but as part of the sociological work at the heart of being an applied sociologist. I hope you can make similar connections in your life between sociological knowledge and practice. Consider: In what ways do you engage in applied sociology? How can you enrich your social justice work by ensuring it is sociologically informed? How do you go out and make your sociological imagination useful?
Ezra Temko, PhD
Assistant Professor
SIUE Department of Sociology
