Sociology teaching as a vocation

Abstract

Important issues are obscured if people assume that describing sociology as a vocation is talking of it as a career. Drawing on Max Weber and Martin Buber, I argue that a vocation only exists when there is a shift in the space, time and ontology of ordinary purposive life. When manifesting a vocation, the sociologist is not an acting subject but part of an unfolding presence. Understood vocationally, then, sociology should not be taught as an object with which students are to identify; it must be taught through ascetic practices that suspend the student sociologist’s subjectivity and allow them to find their potential through their relation with an other that is different but not outside. The emphasis should be not on the student’s comprehension of sociological content but on the ethics of their encounter; the discipline of vocational sociology is not based on the desire of subjectification but on love.