My (limited) career

In my opinion, sociology is basically an interpretative discipline. With this I mean that the task of sociology, as a reflexive way of knowledge, is to “understand the reason behind”, the hidden sense that is expressed in the social phenomena. Because of that the main skill of a sociologist, following my point of view is “to see beyond the appearances”, to, from the empirical events occurred in the society, find sources of domination, inequality, idiosyncrasy, etc. Sociology has developed many theories and to analyze and apply them correctly and honestly (recognizing the purposes searched by the investigations) is also an obligatory skill. Besides this, sociology is nourished by different “sciences”, which grant the data and some theoretical elements to sociology for it to increase its capacity of explain the sense of social phenomena. For this reason, a good sociologist has to have clear notions of economy, political sciences, history, statistics, psychology, “massmediology”, etc. None of these skills are inborn, all can be learnt, even the capacity of investigate or the ability to make rapport with the people.
Sadly the career of sociology in Universidad de Chile has a different conception of what the sociology task is. Even though they believe, like me, that sociology must has a basic teaching in diverse disciplines, is its interpretive character the point they don’t consider as central. Instead of that, for them sociology must search the predictability more than the “verstehen”, the understanding. Because of that there are many courses of statistic, quantitative methodologies and ramifications of sociology with a positivist standard point of view, like public policies. On the other hand, interpretive areas related with sociology like psychoanalysis, theory of ideology, qualitative methodologies are in disadvantage.

For all this reasons, I think that my career gives me the right tools to be inserted in the “sociology’s labor market”, but it denies the direct possibility of being a change actor... the possibility of learn, understand and act "in agreement" with the exploited.