Interview 2

1. (I realized that you came from Public Relations background to Sociology) What were the specific experiences in your life that drew you Sociology?

She said that during the last semester of her College, she took her first Sociology class. She thought that it was a perfect match for her. However, she did not go to graduate school right after her undergraduate education. She talked about some type of participant production. She worked for a beer factory for a while at the sales department for 11 months. After a while, this experience helped her to shape her research. All of these experiences and Poland’s historical, political experiences helped her to be interested in Economic Sociology as she mentioned during our interview.

2. When did you know “your place” in sociology? (Areas of study B.A./M.A./Ph.D.)

(When I asked this question, I mentioned that in her autobiography she emphasizes that she is also interested in Post State Sociologist Transformations and the effects of Economic liberalization on the workplace. I asked that if it is also related with her experiences in Poland.)

She confirmed that positively. She did a research about the beer factory. Some articles about Industrial Sociology captured her attention, too. Her research question was also related with privatization and how did the system changed in the beer factory after it was privatized. The factory that she focused on was privatized in 1992 and she visited there in 2010.

This only one of the specific interests of her in Sociology, but we continued to talk about the rest by the help of other questions.

3. What was missing from your sociology education?

She said this is a nice question. She studied at Loyola and compared to some other universities, Sociology department was very small and did not have a lot of members. It was around 6. In addition, no one else was specialized in her specific interest area. She found this challenging. The lack of academic, scholarly support… Collective research projects and publication was weak. Yes there were research assistants, but participation was weak. She wished to have more opportunity to publish more.

4. Would you have attended NEIU with its current administration and department/course offerings for your own education?

5. What drew you to teach at NEIU?

6. What keeps you teaching at NEIU?

(I preferred to ask these question together during our conversation.)

She mentioned that she never thought to teach, but she started in 2005.

Only the research was her main plan, but having a son and family made her change her plans.

She said that she was aware of a lot of the problems of having a family, gender roles of the society and so forth and never thought that she could be in this current position. She thought she could handle it differently. We talked about these issue deeper, longer and it got really emotional and personal for both of us But, I did not took notes at some parts, maybe because of this she talked more openly for this reason I will not include that part to this assignment notes.

She said that if she did not have a son she could be in a different country and in a different position with a more radical job such as non-governmental union, etc. Teaching was unexpected for her even though she likes to do it right now. She wished to have more time to make research, hopefully in the future...

6. What has/hasn’t changed within the department since you’ve started teaching Sociology at NEIU?

Many instructors have been fired by the excuse of job constructions and class cancellations.

Administration uses the enrolment rates of the classes to fire the temporary instructors.

Workloads for the rest have been increased. In the past it was 7 classes to keep the full time job, right now it’s 8 classes to keep the salary same. People want to resist, but at the same time they have to be practical to survive. There are a lot of PhD graduate people serve coffee in this country, she said.

I mentioned that I was surprised to hear that some of instructors still have school debts after all these years of teaching. For instance, Dr. Johnson told us that she has 5 more years to pay. The Capitalists system converted the universities to an industry and uses the school debts as a credit card of the system. She was agreed with me during our conversation..

She said that people started to think about the growing gap between tuitions and wage. At one point, school industry will experience similar things like Real Estate Market. I laughed and said hopefully. I mean it is sad and hurtful, but somehow it needs to be changed. I hope it can be by a peaceful way. I do not know what can happen if the school system collapse like mortgage system. She said that we reproduce the system. She apologizes several times by saying a lot of depressive things, but these are realities and if we know them it is better for us to take positions. I agree with her.

7. Please name/define your approach/theoretical stance in Sociology. Conflict V. Functionalism?

She mentioned that Functionalists are very few in the Sociology academia.

8. Name your sociological influences. (Sociologists, Philosophers, friends, family, aspects of society, personal motivations, movies---ANYTHING)

She gave a lot of names such as Marx, Frankfurt School members, Michael Boy… from American Sociology Association.

I also asked her if she had any close family members who were a Sociologist and she said that they are mostly engineers and still not know about Sociology. During their holidays, she said that they have a lot of arguments. She also mentioned that most of them need some SOC intro to have a more mutual discuss. I laughed and said that probably this is true for my family, too. I almost graduate and my mother tells her psychologist that her daughter will be a psychologist, too.

9. What do you think is missing from sociology? OR What about sociology misses the mark?

She emphasized a lot of useful critiques about it. She also mentioned this question as a nice one same as the other professors. She mentioned that it seems like Sociologists are more hypocritical than most of the other academicians, because we study a lot of social problems and issues and unfortunately with all these knowledge we still re produce them even in our departments and so forth. She also argued that many sociologists shape themselves and their articles, research topics based on the mainstream of publication environment. They choose popular issues that are easy to publish to escape from refutation or critiques. The mainstream journals, editors force people to control by publication. We also talk about the reservation of Sociology.

Moreover, she mentioned that it is hard to publish in mainstream journals for “lefted” Sociology scholars.

Mainstream is so detached from real society. Pressure to publish in a specific time period to keep the job shape people’s topics.

I said that this is a kind of monopolization of knowledge, too.

In addition, she said that from Comte to now, almost for 180 years, similar with other departments we there are a lot of publications, but there is not enough positive changes. Okay, consciousness, but have we really changed the world in a good way by Sociology? No, she said.

Idealists are discouraged by faculty’s actions or inactions. We became “Intellectual Technicians.” When you get older, you will be more disillusioned, more skeptical and more pessimist.

10. Do you think Sociology could benefit from an interdisciplinary approach? How could Sociology influence other disciplines? What could Sociology gain from other disciplines? Which disciplines would be most beneficial? Is there a discipline you feel might be anti-Sociology?

All science could benefit from these, she said. There are too many compartments to find better solutions. It seems like opposite of Psychology, we skip the part of human’s biological nature and its reality, too. Psychologists mostly ignore or not pay attention enough to the collective, social part of the problems. So we need to work together harder as she mentioned during our interview. We also talked about Clinical Sociology. Sociologists tend to down play that we are biological beings. Some disciplines are very protective for their territories. She said that instead of competition, we need to share and bring. It is hard to go outside of the traditional web. We need to study more history to understand that no reason to be optimistic. These were the main points of her answers for this questions based on my notes.

12. Have you ever experienced discrimination (glass ceiling, ivory tower, etc.) in your career? If so, would you mind talking about it? Has this experience changed your Sociology career focus or strengthened your original focus?

(Based on her answers, I had to combine these 2 previous questions with the last one.)

13. Do you think tenure allows professors to be freer in their work or does it promote restriction? How has that freedom/restriction manifested itself for you? How do you feel about this?

The main problem that she emphasized was being 10 year track instructor or not. She linked this with institutional discrimination. I do not know if I can link her office place and its abandoned atmosphere with this issue or not. But you can feel that she feel being a temporary in that place. It was almost empty. She said that this place is better, she was in basement before.

She said that only the 10 year track faculty can vote and participation is not equal. Universities are not democratically run. One of the problems is the corporatization of university. Women are not likely to be 10 year faculty group and more likely to suffer anxiety as a result of less job security. We study all the discrimination and democracy issues, but in the department we reproduce them, but still you grow as a person in Sociology. From first hand, Sociologist experience oppression, exclusion and so forth. For this reason the best sociologists are from unprivileged groups.

She also talked about the competition in the academia because of the high PhD population. There are 3.5 million PhDs in the U.S. and only 1.3 10 year track jobs in academia.

She shared an internet site about this issue and said that do not share this with Dr. Andreas by laughing. It was 100 reasons not to get PhD. She said that this is not for discouragement the students from PhD. It is better if you know the possible handicaps. If you know the reality you can be well prepared. She said that ı wish I had done more realistic expectations by the help of this kind of internet side. I probably would not change my mind about PhD, but it could be easier to face with the problems.