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Rural Race and Ethnicity

Building Bridges to a Different Future: Disciplinary History and Collective Memory Julie Zimmerman*, Julie Zimmerman,

What role does having a sense of one’s place in their disciplinary history play in the present? What if our collective reconstructions of the past do not include those who look like us? And, if we cannot see ourselves as part of our discipline’s history, are we less likely to see ourselves having a part to play in its future? Afterall, as the saying goes, we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. But what if we don’t know who they are?

Over the past several conferences of the Rural Sociological Society, the Historian’s display has focused on the hidden history of race in rural sociology seeking to draw attention to persons and research that have been excluded and lost in the passage of time. This presentation continues this journey by exploring the theoretical underpinnings of the larger project.

Integrating literature on collective memory and the role of historical memory in group identity with research seeking to ‘fix’ disciplinary history by including forgotten figures in American sociology, this presentation examines an overlooked implication of excluded histories in contemporary disciplinary identity. Motivated by the notion that seeing oneself within a discipline’s history not only contributes to a sense of belonging in the past, it also contributes to being able to see oneself as part of an unbroken line which, through one’s own contributions, can be seen as then extending into the future. Approaching disciplinary history from this perspective opens the opportunity for a more complex role for historical analyses in disciplinary identity not only as examining the past, but as also playing a role in supporting a different kind of future.