Commuter-Scholars: Nurturing Sociological Imagination in Delhi’s Urban Landscape

C. Wright Mills’s, Sociological Imagination is one of teachers' and students' foundational primers. We believe one of the reasons for its canonisation is its unequivocal intention to encourage the ‘doing of sociology.’ Teaching sociological imagination to undergraduate students becomes more exciting because they quickly grasp the relation between their biography and the history of society. In Mills’s words, these students can identify the task and fulfill the promise of sociological imagination.

As a part of their curriculum assessment, sixty undergraduate sociology students from two colleges under University of Delhi, coming from diverse socio-economic backgrounds, are asked to maintain a journal documenting their daily experience of commuting from home to college. This exercise spans two semesters, at the end of which students are asked to analyse their lived experience in the light of Mills’s text. This culminates in a nuanced social theory on gender and space informed by questions of inclusion, privilege, urbanity, and safety, amongst others.

Guided by Mills’s framework students apply sociological imagination by posing three fundamental questions essential to sociological inquiry: a) What is the structure of the society? b) Where does this society stand in human history? c) What kinds of gendered selves prevail in this society and this period?

The students describe their research as exploratory, through which they sought to understand the gendered nature of the public space. The outcome of this assignment rests on the experience of these sixty students who are able to establish a relationship between their ‘troubles’ and ‘issues.’ They became aware of their circumstances.