Journal Article — Editor’s Note: Beyond the Dissociative Disorder and Hypnosis of Rigid Disciplinarity — by Mohammad H. Tamdgidi

This is the journal editor’s note to the Winter 2011 issue of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, entitled “Graduate Theorizations: Imaginative Applied Sociologies—Manifest and Latent.” The issue includes nine, theoretically engaging graduate student papers: six from a course in Applied Sociological Theory (Soc. 605) taken during the Fall 2010 semester at UMass Boston, a paper on the philosophy of the self and architecture from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and two master’s theses in psychology from Bangor University, UK. The papers explore sociological imaginations of personal and public issues such as: fear of crime and insecurity; marriage and divorce; growing up a third culture kid; myths of success and the life plan; growing up with Attention Deficit Disorder; present (in contrast to absent) fatherhood; architectural history and practice as shaped by self agency as well as social context; “pathological” versus “normal” experiences of dissociation and hypnosis; and mind-body interactions in psychogenic pain. These papers from diverse ‘disciplinary’ origins or locations insightfully contribute, in both manifest and latent ways, to the application and enrichment of the Millsian sociological imagination. Comparative and integrative readings of these papers also reveal, in turn, the extent to which liberating sociological theorizing and practice amid critical applications of the sociological imagination require awakening to and moving beyond the dissociative disorder and hypnosis of rigid disciplinarity.