Kevin Gosine is an associate professor of sociology at Brock University in the Niagara Region of Ontario, Canada. He holds a PhD in sociology from York University and a Master of Social Work from the University of Toronto. His research centers on race and ethnic relations, youth studies, social identity formation, the sociology of education, and social welfare. His scholarship encompasses a broad range of topics, including the lived experiences and identity formation of upwardly mobile Black Canadians, antiracism, racial bias and disproportionality in Ontario’s child welfare system, marginalized youth subcultures, and program evaluation within the non-profit sector. He has taught at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, with courses in research methods, quantitative data analysis, community engagement and service learning, and the sociology of education. He has presented at the Heterodox Academy Conference and has contributed to the newsletter for the Society for Academic Freedom. (Contributed April, 2026)

1. In our prior conversations you’ve suggested that the social justice influence has constrained sociological analysis. Can you provide an example of this?

One consequence of the politicization of sociology is a shift in how the field studies inequality. As a person of colour who grew up in poverty in Toronto, the study of inequality is what attracted me to sociology. I took an undergrad course on social stratification at York University with a brilliant professor named Gordon Darroch, with whom I remained in touch until his unfortunate passing a few years back. I found this course so insightful and eye-opening that it prompted me to change my major from history to sociology. Gord gave a wonderfully balanced course where he had us study qualitative cultural analyses, such as that of Paul Willis and Fordham and Ogbu; progressive perspectives that spotlight marginalized lived experience and structural barriers; as well as multivariate statistical analyses of inequality in Canada.

You’re a New Yorker. I’ll date myself and reveal that I completed Gord’s course the year the Rangers last won the Stanley Cup. Sadly, sociology as a discipline, particularly the critically-oriented realm of sociology, isn’t all that well balanced today.

There’s always been a tension: do we stay value-free and follow the evidence, or do we pursue activism and social change? And when I say evidence, I mean hard evidence – multivariate statistical analysis, of census data, data from random samples, and so on. In recent decades, activism has taken the front seat in certain realms of sociology. Moreover, the evidence that informs calls for activism tends to be subjective and non-rigorous. We might be talking a handful of in-depth interviews with participants who self-selected themselves into a non-random sample; photovoice where researchers have participants take pictures of stuff that reflects their reality; or a critical discourse analysis where a researcher studies some text or cultural entity and subjectively draws out latent themes related to inequality, racism, and the like, cherry picking supposed evidence of such themes. And of course, everyone’s favourite methodology, autoethnography, where the researcher uses their own lived experience as data.

Today, inequality is often explained almost entirely in terms of systemic discrimination—discriminatory bias systemically woven into institutions. Moreover, evidence of discrimination often consists of subjective perceptions or lived experience qualitatively elicited from small, non-random samples of people. And while discrimination certainly remains significant, other explanations tend to be pushed aside, particularly cultural explanations.

Why? In part, it’s a reaction against older perspectives that were seen as blaming marginalized communities for their own challenges. Also, in a world that’s highly polarized politically, social justice-oriented scholars feel a need to push back against influential right wing political pundits –the Ben Shapiros, Matt Walshes, and that ilk of character - who can indeed pathologize marginalized communities by overemphasizing cultural causes of inequality and playing down structural causes. Fair play.

That said, sociology has been pushed too far in the opposite direction. Instead of balance, we’re often given a bit of a romanticized story—one that emphasizes strengths, resilience, community assets and sources of empowerment, while avoiding tougher conversations about communal values and attitudes antithetical to educational achievement and upward mobility; family structure-related concerns such as the preponderance of fatherless homes in certain communities; and social and cultural capital-related factors that also play a role. I myself have drawn on strengths-based perspectives in my own work, such as the work of Tara Yosso. But again, there needs to be balance. Shameless plug: I talk about this in an article I published last year in the Journal of Contemporary Issues in Education.

When we’re reluctant to talk about culture, we get an incomplete picture of the factors that generate and sustain inequalities based on race and class. John Iceland and Eric Silver, who recently published an insightful article on this very topic, came up with a useful term for this explanatory superficiality. As they describe it, explanatory superficiality happens when an academic discipline limits available perspectives to explain a given phenomenon in order to produce analyses that align with a preferred political narrative. As far as progressive sociology is concerned, the preferred narrative asserts that systemic racism and white privilege are endemic to Western societies, and these intertwined phenomena are concealed by an ideology of meritocratic colourblindness.

In trying not to blame the victim, we risk ignoring factors that seriously matter. Things like attitudes toward education, or the importance of building strong social networks that can link members of marginalized communities to critical information, resources, and opportunities beyond their communities, which can be quite insular and limiting. Ultimately, structural discrimination and cultural factors both play a role and they’re mutually reinforcing.

But to avoid stigmatizing the marginalized, much of sociology is producing analyses fraught with blind spots. And when blind spot-laden research informs policy and ameliorative initiatives, solutions risk falling short.

2.What factors would you suggest limit sociological inquiry and campus free speech more broadly?

To my mind, two factors challenge campus free expression and constrain sociological analysis today, and these factors have been spurred by the growing social justice influence within the academy at large and sociology. First, the expansion of what we mean by “harm”; and second, reductionist analyses of inequality, politically acceptable analyses, that divide the world into oppressors versus oppressed. These are the ideas I shared in that Vancouver Heterodox talk where you ‘discovered’ me.

Since the 1970s, far left ideas have become near hegemonic in universities, especially in the humanities and social sciences. Basically, the leftist campus activists in the 1960s, those who decided to avoid the real world, went on to become social science and humanities profs. That shift spurred a growing call to limit speech—not for the sake of control, but to protect marginalized groups. For this reason, social justice scholars and advocates have attempted to situate certain progressive beliefs as settled knowledge that should be shielded from debate. In sociology, this progressive turn has exacerbated explanatory superficiality, to again invoke Iceland and Silver.

But this is the problem: the definition of “harm” is elastic, as psychologist Nick Haslam has put it. It’s been pulled wider and wider. What once signalled clear threats or discrimination now often includes subtle slights, disagreements, or even ideas that challenge broadly accepted narratives. And as “harm” expands, free expression inevitably contracts. Many scholars – Haslam, Lukianoff and Haidt, Frank Furedi.- have studied and written about this.

Also, social justice-oriented scholarship encourages us to see the world in polarized binary terms—oppressor versus oppressed. Progressive scholarship and activists tend to wrap an elastic band around people and label them, flattening differences in class, experience, and outlook.

Once you treat entire groups as uniformly vulnerable, we need a conception of harm that covers the diverse range of experiences within an artificially essentialized ‘victim’ group. The concept of harm stretches to cover more and more scenarios — from unmistakable injustice to nebulous everyday interactions subjectively perceived or experienced as problematic. A middle-class black man who’s a lawyer is unlikely to experience flagrant types of racism, like violent interactions with the police. So the definition of harm, racism in this case, needs to expand to encompass the everyday interactions such an individual might experience that could be questionably construed as microaggressions. That expanded idea of harm becomes the justification for shutting down speech and knocks certain topics, or certain explanations for a given phenomenon, off the scholarly agenda – like cultural explanations for racial inequality. We don’t want to blame and stigmatize the victim, after all!

So what happens when virtually anything can be framed as harmful, and people are funnelled into fixed moral categories?

You get an academic culture averse to disagreement; one with an impulse to silence if a privileged narrative, one deemed noble and socially conscious, is challenged too vociferously. Conformity tends to be valued over curiosity. With this, the academy, and disciplines like sociology, veer from their primary purpose—the unrestrained pursuit of truth which can only be achieved via open debate and disagreement.

3. Do you think sociology is salvageable?

Yes, I think sociology is an important and worthwhile discipline, and I don’t think its ideological capture is as complete as you and others make it out to be. One reason sociology has been vulnerable to politization, and has struggled to cement an identity as an academic discipline, has to do with the fact that its disciplinary boundaries are more permeable than that of most other fields. Sociology departments often hire faculty with non-sociology PhDs – PhDs in gender studies, cultural geography, social anthropology, cultural studies, etc. Many sociology grad programs admit students without prior degrees in sociology. I myself was admitted to a sociology PhD program with a Master of Social Work degree, though I do hold a BA in sociology.

This has resulted in perspectives from diverse fields infiltrating sociology, like postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, critical race theory, and so on. It’s also diversified the range of methodologies, or approaches to research, employed in sociology. Some see this as a strength, and it is in many ways. But it has resulted in a discipline that’s greatly divided methodologically, theoretically, and politically. Nevertheless, there are empirically-oriented sociology departments that produce rigorous, high-quality research.

At its best, sociology provides students with a complete, well-rounded education. You learn different perspectives on how the world works, and gain valuable insights into social problems. You learn how to think critically, formulate and substantiate arguments, as well as how to convey your ideas in writing. You gain statistical literacy and learn how to conduct and critically appraise social research. This can lead to opportunities in fields like market research, or evaluation and needs assessment research in the non-profit sector. But even if you never conduct research, having the informed wherewithal to critique it is critical in a world where we’re bombarded with stats and research findings.

Also, serious rigorous sociological analysis is vital as far as elevating our understanding of the world and informing social policies that aim to address social problems. And while there is a tendency these days to overgeneralize from lived experience, there’s something to be said for a discipline inclined to amplify the voices and experiences of the marginalized. For all of these reasons, I think sociology still has something valuable to offer students and society.