Diverse Interests

[OldOldMan]

Hello everyone! 

Long time lurker here. Finally stepping out to ask all you kind people your honest opinion. I am currently finishing up with my Masters in quant econ but for the past few months, I have been really interested in sociology. I have not had that much formal training in sociology (just a class in cinema from a historical/sociological perspective and visual anthropology in undergrad) so mostly I am self taught up to this point. My interest in sociology is based on two major areas: one is immigration (which is also the focus of my masters thesis, of course from an economics perspective), and the other is the study of religious minorities (which is more based on personal experience).

 

Now, my question is how are diverse interests perceived by the departments? Maybe on one level I can characterise them both as a study of identity assertion and integration (perhaps in that sense they are somewhat related), but my approach to both these topics is essentially different. While I want to pursue the topic of immigration with quantitative methods like I have done so in the past, I want to pursue the second topic in a more historical comparative way. Since I belong to the specific religious minority I wish to study, it is a personal passion of mine. The difference between the two gives me this feeling that maybe I am in two boats in the same time and I should pick one.

 

Would you see this as confusion or a lack of focus? Do you feel I should pick only one to pursue academically, or at least only focus on one when writing my SoP? I am considering applying in the next cycle (2015 Fall start) but so far, I am not sure if this is the right path for me. Can you shed some light on how this kind of problem is seen by professors? Is this common?

 

Reply or not, GradCafe is a great resource and I thank everyone who has ever posted here.

 

Good luck to everyone and cheers!

[jacib]

"Mixed methods" is a somewhat hot thing in sociology.  It's certainly a nice-buzzword at least, and one I use to describe my work.  Check out Mario Small's Annual Review of Sociology piece on it--it's probably the best entry point. 

 

There's interesting work on religious minorities and immigration, in both Europe in the U.S.  For the U.S., the best entry point is probably another Annual Review article: Wendy Cadge's "Immigration and religion" (her first book was about "the first generation of Theravada in America" and very qualitative). Fenggang Yang's work might be an entry point (though I like his work on religion in China more than his work on immigrant religion, which mainly means I think his work on China is some of the best stuff being done, period), perhaps "Transformations in new immigrant religions and their global implications".  His book on Chinese American Christian might be another template.  They've both written a lot on immigration and religion (particularly Buddhism and Asian Christianity, respectively).  Obviously, there's also a rich, rich, mainly U.S. based sociological literature on immigration (you know, Portes and all those guys) which I assume you know about from your masters thesis.

Europe is honestly more exciting to me, though that might just be because it's new.  It's mostly about Islam and is much more quantitative. There's definitely a lot of quant-y stuff in America as I'm sure you know, there's just a clear lack of qualitative stuff in Europe--the closest I can think of is the little bit that Wacquant has written on the banlieue compared to the "ghetto" and the book Cosmopolitan Anxieties (Turks in Germany) and a few other studies that are more media/discourse/content analyses than anything else.  The quant stuff I'm just learning about, but one entry point is the Ties Project, which is really sweet.  All their reports are free online.  The European Second Generation Compared: Does the Immigration Context Matter? is the only one I've read so far but it's both ground breaking and fascinating.  The most important historical comparative person in this field would probably be Rogers Brubaker, though he does stuff on nationalism/citizenship rather than immigration per se, his Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany will definitely be important to any historical-comparative immigration you do.

How you should position yourself should be based on what departments you're applying to: departments that are strong in immigration, say you want to study immigration, assimilation, and integration using mixed methods.  Departments that are more historical comparative, say you want study citizenship and nationhood, especially in terms of minorities.  Remember that this is not a contract that you're signing with the department you're applying to.  This is an indication of your general interests and should be a signal that you can come up with an interesting, researchable question--everyone expects your topic to evolve and maybe even change completely before you finish your dissertation prospectus, even.  The particular risk about studying yourself is: lets say I'm not from that minority and I have no interest in them specifically, why should I care about your study?  What's sociologically interesting about this case?  As my father always says, "If this is a case study, what is it a case of?"  You'll obviously need to be able to answer those sorts of questions.  Particularly with historical comparative methodology (at least I've found--ymmv), I think it's important to be able to point out specific things that the current literature is missing--not just "no one has studied this before", but "people think this (CITE 1999, CITE 2013), and it's clearly wrong when you examine this case and we also need to study that."  Maybe you don't want to try to combine them, as I assume you would, and just go with one or the other (or indicate one is a "side project"--I don't know how that's looked on). 

[OldOldMan]

Wow jacib! You answered all that I wanted to know and more.

 

I will keep all your points in mind. Because I am switching fields, I want to be as surefooted as I can about this. Thanks for the help!