Sociological Imagination

This paper will describe the sociological imagination and show how it can be a tool to use when explaining the disadvantages faced by Indigenous Australians. Essentially the sociological imagination is a form of sociological thinking and is a sociological foundation. It helps one to understand the disadvantages faced by Indigenous Australians as it involves the evaluation of the issue on a historical, cultural, structural and critical scale. Indigenous Australians experience many disadvantages that their Non-Indigenous Australians counterparts do not including poorer health, social and economic outcomes. By using the sociological imagination sociologists can link the information from the interdependent factors and make sense of an issue as

Wright Mills in 1959 and describes the sociological approach to analysing issues. As defined, the sociological imagination is “the ability to go beyond the personal issues that all humans experience and connect them to broader social structures. The ability to link distal relations of power to our immediate life situations” (Germov J & Poole M 2015, p. 8). To further this, its the capability to see a connection between an individuals own lived experiences and society’s structural constraints. Essentially, circumstances wether they are of a social, political or environmental nature produce social problems for a wide range of people. These are referred to as public issues and in comparison to personal troubles, they extend beyond an individual level and affect a community as a whole. Mills argues that “no matter how personal or individual we may think our experiences are, they are significantly influenced by larger social forces, such as the political, economic, and cultural factors that set social context in which individuals experiences occur” (Germov J & Poole M 2015, p. 8). The sociological imagination template entails four components including historical, structural, cultural and critical and these interdependent features allows one to conduct a sociological

The poor outcomes for Indigenous have been identified as being caused by socioeconomic and environment disadvantage, inadequate education, underemployment, racial prejudice, high risk health related behaviours and lack of accessibility to services. The unemployment rate for Indigenous Australians has always been significantly higher than their Non-Indigenous counterparts. For example, in 2016 it was 4.2 times higher than the rate non-indigenous people. Unemployed people have a higher risk of death and have more illness and disability than those of a similar age who are employed (AIHW 2016). This can contribute to Indigenous Australians having a life expectancy of around 10 years less than non-indigenous Australians between 2008-12. The vulnerability of Indigenous Australians is understood by the gap which is a term to show the difference between Indigenous Australians and Non-Indigenous Australians. Risk Society was introduced by Ulbrich Beck and describes the centrality of risk calculations in people’s lives (Germov J & Poole M 2015, p. 52) .It was the transitioning of society beginning to worry about external hazards such as environmental issues such as pollutants and radiation and removing themselves from the concern of internal threats such as life expectancy and child birth deaths simply because these threats have been significantly limited. However due to