Social Imagination Sociology

Sociologist Charles Wright Mills coined the term “social imagination” in which he defined as, “the vivid awareness of the relationship between experience and the wider society”. In other words social imagination is the ability an individual can develop or has developed to understand interactions and actions in a social setting and how these are influenced upon by individuals and situations. There are an infinite amount of examples of how social imagination can be used today. One very current example is that a teenage girl suffers from anorexia. The young girl believes she is over weight and has tried everything from dieting to exercise and nothing seems to have helped her look more attractive in her eyes. Out of desperation and loss of hope the young girl becomes anorexic to curb her weight problem. This

This hopelessness soon will transform into desperation, and that desperation leads these young women to want to try anything and do anything to achieve this form of “beauty”. As we can see the young girl’s problem was not a personal isolated problem but a problem that affects many girls in society due to a skewed social image of what females bodies should look like. This is a social problem as seen by using social imagination. As students of sociology some things we can do to acquire or further develop our social imagination would be to further our sociology education and continue to take classes with professors of refined social imagination. Listening to these professors’ ideas and opinions will open our minds to different ideas and ways of thinking that we could never had thought of before. We will learn to look at issues with different light and a different eye. Another way we as students of sociology can acquire social imagination is to practice using it. Social imagination is a skill and like all skills it has to be practiced to be proficient at