This Fall 2011 (IX, 4) issue of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, entitled “Contesting Memory: Museumizations of Migration in Comparative Global Context,” includes papers from the conference on “Museums and Migration” organized by the volume co-editors on June 25-26, 2010, at the Maison des Science de l’Homme (MSH) in Paris. The focus here is on questions of representation and social agency of both migrants and migration museum officials, adopting a comparative perspective on the complex and conflictive articulation between how migrants are represented by themselves and by museum institutions. Migrants are not passive but social agents actively involved in their communities and socially vigilant of the way they are treated, perceived and represented by the host society. They produce also their own representations that are often in conflict with Western hegemonic perceptions of their cultures and identities. Their strong presence in global cities and metropolitan societies today confronts the dominant society with issues of racial/ethnic discrimination and historical memory otherwise ignored by hegemonic Western views. Museums dealing with the history of slavery, migration and colonialism emerged as spaces of contestation, the term “migrant” itself being contested by long-established “minority” groups as one of the ways the dominant society still treats them as “foreigners” and “immigrants.”

This Winter 2011 (IX, 1) issue of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, entitled “Graduate Theorizations: Imaginative Applied Sociologies—Manifest and Latent,” 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. 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.