On the morning of October 27, 2023, Professor Liu Sida of the Faculty of Law of the University of Hong Kong gave a lecture entitled "City and North: Canada in the Sociology of the Chicago School" to Peking University faculty and students. Professor Liu Sida established a connection between the sociology of the Chicago School and Canada, breaking the traditional narrative of academic history and providing a new perspective for the audience to understand the formation of the Chicago School.
An attempt to "decentralize" the history of the Chicago School
Lecture scene
At the beginning of the lecture, Mr. Liu Sida first shared the origin of his concern about the relationship between the Chicago School and Canada. Dr. Liu graduated from the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago and has since taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Toronto. After coming to Canada, he found that his colleagues here were closer to his alma mater, the University of Chicago, in terms of research style, emphasizing interaction, space, time, flow, and other concepts that were valued by the Chicago School of sociology. Starting from his personal feelings, he gradually began to pay attention to the historical reasons behind this phenomenon.
What is the historical relationship between sociology in Canada and the Chicago School? Mr. Liu Sida first took the audience to review several important works in academic history that focused on the history of the Chicago School. The history of the Chicago School is represented by Martin Bulmer's The Chicago School of Sociology, a book born in the '80s that examines the University of Chicago as an institution and uses it as a framework to understand the emergence of the Chicago School. The second major book is Department & Discipline, which Andrew Abbott began writing in the 90s, which focuses more on the interaction between scholars and the American Journal of Sociology (AJS), an academic journal born in the same year as the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago, as a way to understand the changes in the academic world. The third important work is the Chicago Sociology by the French scholar Jean-Michel Chapoulie, which examines a longer period of history than the first two books from a non-American perspective, and presents history in more detail.
The Chicago School studies the work of book shadow
It can be seen that the study of the history of the Chicago School is continuing. However, all three books have in common the following aspects: they have the University of Chicago as the central institution and Chicago as the central location of the story, without paying attention to how the Chicago School came to be outside of Chicago. Professor Liu Sida believes that although the development of sociology is closely related to certain places and social spaces—for example, Professor Albert once pointed out that the allocation of offices in the Social Science Building has a great influence on Chicago studies, but the above works can be regarded as a kind of "centripetal history of the Chicago School", which makes it easy to ignore that most of the representatives of the Chicago School are not native Chicagoans, and that most scholars move between Chicago and other places. Understanding and rewriting the academic history of the Chicago School from the perspective of the flow of scholars is an attempt with academic potential, and Canada happens to be a key part of this attempt that needs to be filled.
The Chicago School's Affiliation with Canada
What is the intersection between the Chicago School and the geographical space of Canada? Professor Liu Sida thus entered the main part of the lecture: an investigation of Canadian-American scholars in the Chicago School and how the Chicago School influenced Canadian sociology. Some of the representatives of the Chicago School were not Americans as we think they were, but from Canada. In the lecture, Mr. Liu Sida first focused on two of the scholars, Anne Brown. Annie M. MacLean and Roderick McKenzie.
McLean was born on Prince Edward Island in eastern Canada, then a British colony, to Scots-based grandparents and Baptist families. Her life reflects the influence of religion and gender on the scholars of the era. The University of Chicago had a strong Baptist background in its early years, and many faculty members, including Albion Small, chair of the sociology department, were members of the denomination, which was a big reason for McLean's attendance. McLean's master's thesis committee includes Mead, and her research focuses on U.S. legislation to protect women's labor. After graduating with a master's degree, she returned to her undergraduate alma mater in Canada to conduct a one-year fieldwork and write a doctoral dissertation on the local ethnic and cultural topics. After graduating from the Department of Sociology at Chiba University in 1900, she continued to focus on labor legislation in Canada, an interest ignited by the Hull House, founded by Jane Adams. McLean was the first female Ph.D. in the Department of Sociology at Chicago University and made seminal contributions to sociological methodology, but her status as a woman and her health status led her to serve as an extension professor in the Home Study Department at the University of Chicago for more than three decades after her Ph.D., providing correspondence courses for adults. As a result, her influence on Chicago sociology has been largely overlooked.
Annie S. M. McLean
The City is a classic of Chicago School urban sociology, co-authored by Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and Mackenzie, and it's often forgotten that both authors were from Canada. Burgess was born in Canada, immigrated to the United States with his parents at an early age, and received a complete education in the United States, but he did not officially become an American citizen until middle age; Mackenzie grew up in Canada and completed his undergraduate studies before coming to Chicago. Both received their education in the Department of Sociology at Chiba University as immigrants to Canada and earned their Ph.D. degrees. Of particular note is the notable concept of "Human Ecology," which came from Mackenzie's doctoral dissertation in Ohio, which also examines local communities in Ohio. At Ohio State University, Lecturer Mackenzie and Assistant Professor Burgess first met, and they returned to Chicago at about the same time as Parker, a fortuitous gathering that established an important tradition of Chicago School.
Roderick Mackenzie
From Chicago to the "North"
In addition to attracting scholars from Canada, the Chicago School also had an important influence on the establishment of sociology in Canada. Canada's first sociology department, the Department of Sociology at McGill University, was established in 1922 by Carl Dawson, a graduate of Chiba University Theological School. Mr. Liu Sida pointed out that in the twenties and thirties of the 20th century, the Hughes couple, who were very important in the history of the Chicago School, used this as a base to spread the Chicago School to Canada, and this experience also influenced Hughes's academic career in Chicago.
Everett Hughes and Helen Hughes, both Ph.D. students from the Department of Sociology at Chicago University, married an academic couple in Chicago, who are fully Canadian. Helen came from a prominent background, and her mother was a female judge in the British Columbia Provincial Court in Canada and a pioneer of feminism. In 1927, Everett Hughes and his wife moved to Montreal and taught in the sociology department of McGill University, which was founded as a young institution. Hughes, who lived in Quebec for eleven years, did a lot of social research in Canada, and one of the meanings of this experience was that he was exposed to the multi-lingual social scene for the first time. Hughes, who returned to Chiba after 1938, had already established a fundamental academic reputation and taste in Canada, and his famous assertion that "the different jobs in the world form a system" has influenced generations of professional sociologists and continues to form the theoretical basis for Professor Albert's book The System of Professions. Helen Hughes, a Canadian who returned to the University of Chicago as an assistant editor at AJS, lamented the lack of women in the academic world in the same way as men after the '70s, and her story also shows the marginalization of women in the academic world in the first half of the 20th century.
Mr. and Mrs. Hughes
Professor Liu Sida is researching another famous Chicago School sociologist from Canada: Erving Goffman. Goffman, a student of Everett Hughes, was a Canadian-born Jew. He had a rather unusual early experience: he spent two years at university in Manitobana, Canada, then dropped out to work for the National Film Society of Canada in Ottawa and later completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto. Liu Sida believes that these experiences may have had a profound impact on Goffman's "stigma" and "mimetic theory". These little-known "pre-Chicago experiences" may also deserve the attention of researchers.
In these stories, which show the "intersection" between the Chicago School and Canada, Mr. Liu Sida tries to put forward another side of the history of the school: the school is not stable and completely localized, but behind it is the flow and interaction of scholars across space. At the end of the lecture, Professor Liu Sida proposed that in a similar way, we can examine how the Chicago School influenced Chinese sociology, and what Chinese sociology created when it localized Chicago sociology.
Discussion session
Q&A session
In the discussion session, Mr. Wang Liping asked about the differences between China and Canada in accepting the Chicago School, and Mr. Liu Sida said that the situation of the two countries is quite different, and for Canada, which did not have its own independent social ideological tradition in the 20th century, the introduction of the Chicago School of sociology does not require a process of "localization", but for Chinese, this is a key issue. On the other hand, Canada today is ethnically and culturally more diverse than the United States, which does mean that its sociological concerns are not the same as those of American sociology.
Mr. Tian Geng proposed that the "decentralization" used by Mr. Liu Sida is a very interesting concept. Traditional academic history writing emphasizes the succession relationship between scholars, while Liu Sida's lecture emphasizes not the transplantation of the school, but its reconstruction in another space. Professor Tian Geng pointed out that the Yenching School in China is also a good example, and Wu Wenzao, who pioneered this tradition, and his student Fei Xiaotong, did not like the classic Chicago School of urban studies, but the Chicago School, which emphasized the comparison of civilizations and social anthropology after Radcliffe Brown's visit to Chicago. In other words, understanding the school in a decentralized way is actually a very important perspective for understanding academic change.
Some teachers and students present raised their doubts about the value of the Chicago School's community studies to history, and whether the Canadian School of Media Environment can be traced back to the Chicago School's sociology, which was responded to by Mr. Liu Sida.
School of Education, Peking University
Text: Zhang Zhengtao
Editor|Zhao Qichen