Before I began SOCI 288: Introduction to Sociology II, I would have told you I understood the world quite well. After all, I was a carpenter who had lived through poverty, witnessed political theatre at its finest, survived inflation, burnout, and disillusionment. I subscribed to Catholicism—particularly Franciscan spirituality—which emphasizes service to the poor and marginalized. I considered myself a person who already saw the cracks in society. But this course did something different: it helped me name the cracks, trace their origins, and most importantly, recognize how those in power paint over them with ideological primer and call it a “prosperous democracy”.
This course dismantled the illusion that society is a meritocracy, slowly and surgically. Each unit was a brick pulled out from under the edifice of “common sense,” revealing the shaky foundation of the systems we take for granted. Social movements, as I now understand them, are not fringe outbursts or idealistic tantrums. They are disciplined, calculated, often desperate attempts to reclaim power and meaning in the face of systemic erasure. The readings, films, and commentary presented throughout the course—be it about Link Wray’s rebellious strumming, the #MeToo movement, or the corporate hijacking of food systems—helped me understand that power is never neutral. It is built, maintained, and above all, communicated.
What struck me most across the course was how social movements are not just reactions —they are forms of organized memory. They remember the suffering that institutions try to forget. I began to think about how memory itself is a political act. As a Catholic, we often talk about remembrance in sacred terms—“Do this in memory of me.” But now I see that memory is also resistance. To remember injustice is to refuse erasure. That is what movements do: they force society to remember the wounds it prefers to deny, and in doing so, they call the world back to truth.
I had never thought about music—especially Indigenous artists like Link Wray—as a form of rebellion. Watching Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World and hearing Corey Harris describe the ban on drums as a ban on communication opened my eyes. A drum was not just an instrument. It was an act of resistance. As someone who grew up loving music, this changed how I saw rhythm: it was no longer just cultural expression but also a medium for insurgency. The connection between power and communication was made visceral. Suddenly, even something as ordinary as a guitar riff could carry revolutionary potential. But nowhere did this insight strike deeper than in the unit on the #MeToo movement. The readings by Collier Hillstrom and the assignment I completed on the Catholic Church’s response to #MeToo forced me into uncomfortable, necessary introspection. As a devout Catholic who has long wrestled with the institutional rot of the Church, this unit placed me at a crossroads. I could no longer treat the Church’s failings as a distant embarrassment; they were part of a broader patriarchal system that silenced women, protected abusers, and spiritualized suffering to preserve control. That realization angered me—but also deepened my resolve to serve as a reforming voice within my faith.
The further we explored ideology and indoctrination, the more I saw how complicit I had been in my own social conditioning. Reading The End of Homework by Kralovec and Buell was oddly liberating. It confirmed what I had long suspected: much of modern education is more about conformity and obedience than critical thinking. Growing up, I often sensed that school was less about learning and more about endurance. This unit gave me the language to understand that suspicion. Homework, in this context, was not just busywork—it was an ideological tool. It normalized overwork, privatized family time, and blamed the individual (the child, the parent) for structural failures in education. I felt guilty reading this—not because I assigned homework (I never did), but because I once bought into the lie that grinding equals virtue. Reflecting on my own life, I realized how often I internalized the values of hustle culture.
I once wore exhaustion as a badge of honour. I thought that if I just outworked everyone, I would be rewarded. But this course showed me how overwork isn’t always noble—it can be ideological. It keeps us too tired to protest, too burned out to organize, and too isolated to build solidarity. I began to ask harder questions: Who benefits from my exhaustion? What if rest is not laziness, but rebellion? These weren’t just insights—they were wake-up calls.
And District 9, with its grotesque yet all-too-human portrayal of systemic othering, left a moral bruise on me. The alien as a racialized, criminalized outsider wasn’t fiction —it was allegory, and I had seen it before, walking the streets of Toronto.
That same lens of othering—the ideological machinery that turns people into problems— showed up in more places than I expected. Whether it was migrants in District 9 or marginalized voices in the real world, I began to see how language shapes who gets excluded. Even the word “illegal” does more than describe—it condemns. It constructs certain bodies as threats. I thought about the people I’ve worked with in construction: newcomers, racialized workers, undocumented labourers. Their silence was not apathy—it was survival. This course gave me the vocabulary to name that silence for what it was: the product of fear and coercion.
What stayed with me most, however, was the subtle dissection of competition. Kohn’s No Contest struck me like a confession. I had always believed in merit—work hard, do good, and you will rise. But the truth is, many of us are running marathons in cement boots while others glide by on escalators. The ideology of competition, I now understand, is not just about racing for limited resources. It is about maintaining hierarchy. The system convinces you that your neighbour is your rival while the ones hoarding the rewards remain untouched. And when I see children hospitalized for stress, or workers like myself treated as disposable, I can no longer shrug and say, “That’s just life.” That is manufactured cruelty.
The ideology of competition also infected my academic life. As a mature student juggling work, marriage, and school, I often felt inadequate compared to younger students with fewer obligations. But this course helped me see that academic institutions also function as systems of stratification. GPA, “prestige,” productivity—they mimic capitalist hierarchies. Instead of fostering community learning, we are often ranked and compared. I now understand why so many students burn out. The structure is designed to sort, not to nurture. It reminded me that if we want a better world, we must challenge the pecking orders within education itself.
The most spiritually jarring unit, for me, was our examination of global food politics. Stolen Harvest was a gut-wrenching but clarifying read. Vandana Shiva felt like a sociological saint—tireless, grounded, and furious on behalf of the poor. Her indictment of monoculture, seed patents, and corporate agribusiness felt like it came straight out of a Franciscan homily. Add to this the haunting documentary Eating Animals, and I found myself reassessing not just what I eat but how I live. How many sins do we commit by proxy when we buy the cheapest food? What does our convenience cost others? It reminded me that morality is not abstract. It’s as close as the bar code on a bag of groceries.
All of this knowledge—painful as it often was—did not merely inform me. It transformed me. I am no longer content with “raising awareness”. That phrase now sounds like putting a band-aid on a broken dam. I am more interested in understanding the mechanisms of power— who holds it, who wields it, and how it is concealed. As someone who is multilingual, deeply religious, and situated in both the intellectual and working-class worlds, I now see that my position is not a contradiction—it is a bridge. This course has not just given me academic insight. It has given me purpose.
I locate myself as a lay Catholic committed to social justice, a tradesman with the calloused hands of a builder but the heart of a reformer. I am someone who once believed that personal virtue alone could fix systemic rot. Now I see that while virtue matters, it must be paired with structural critique and collective action. Real change requires dismantling the scaffolding of false narratives, brick by ideological brick.
This course did not hand me answers. It handed me tools—and not the tidy kind. More like a crowbar to pry open everything I thought I understood about work, faith, power, and truth. What I got from SOCI 288 was not clarity or closure, but a more precise discomfort. A discomfort I now recognize as the start of awareness. I will not romanticize that. It is exhausting. But at least now, I know what I am looking at. And I know that pretending not to see it is no longer an option.
If I have taken one thing with me, it is this: we are not powerless. We are distracted, demobilized, and deliberately fragmented—but not powerless. Reclaiming our attention, our compassion, and our language is the beginning of resistance. Whether through social movements, community action, or just refusing to stay silent at the dinner table, change begins where ideology ends. I do not yet know exactly where this new knowledge will lead me, but I do know I will not unlearn it. And that, perhaps, is the most radical thing of all. And maybe that is where sociology has changed me the most: not by making me angry, but by giving shape to my anger. I feel less alone in my confusion and more rooted in a tradition of critical thought that spans from Wray’s guitar to Shiva’s seed activism. I do not need to invent resistance from scratch—I need only to join it. Whether I continue in academia, heritage work, or trades, I carry this lens with me. It is not a burden. It is ballast. And for the first time in a long while, I do not feel lost—I feel aimed.