Susan Ortiz Sees Sociology in Everything, Everywhere, All At Once
Alexandra Gore | February 29, 2024
Dr. Susan Ortiz hated her Introduction to Sociology class. An assignment she had been given — observing kids on a playground — convinced her she would never take another sociology course again. Years later, she holds a Master's and PhD in Sociology and is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Warren Wilson College (WWC).
With a bachelor’s degree in education, Ortiz was convinced that teaching elementary school was right for her. A few years later, despite loving the kids she taught, she realized the path was not fulfilling. From there, she became the community relations manager at a bookstore, where she led several diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) events and met a very impactful person.
“One of those [DEI] events was an ethics discussion group with a local college, and there was a professor from that college who I coordinated this group with,” Ortiz said. “We would talk all the time. I would constantly want to talk about things related to stratification. And he said, one day, ‘You need to go to graduate school and study sociology.’ And of course, I was stunned because I had hated my intro to sociology class. But I started looking into it and ended up applying to graduate school.”
As someone who identifies as a woman of the global majority, Ortiz’s own life experiences also contributed to her fascination with how sociology impacts people.
“I have many, many stories about people asking me what I am,” Ortiz said. “Because of how we think about racialized social groups, you have to fit with these Black, white binary ideas of race, and people don't know where I fit in that. It is mostly people who I would argue identify as white and male, who want to know what I am and where I fit, and whether they feel entitled to interrupt people and dig into people's lives. It's sometimes a little irritating, to be on the receiving end of that, where people feel like they can just interrupt you and demand to know about you.”
Ortiz went on to receive her Master’s and PhD in Sociology from Ohio State University. At the time, it was one of the biggest colleges in the country by population. With a big population came big events, so Ortiz conducted one of her research studies on parties there.
“We got to do interesting things like that — study these parties and how they progressed,” Ortiz said. “I would literally stand outside parties at three in the morning with a clipboard, which was also fascinating, to have people come up to you. And as they got more intoxicated as the night went on, they assumed you were doing surveys for some reason, although I can't imagine who would do a survey at three a.m.”
While the population was convenient for her research studies, Ortiz felt that she could not connect with her students on such a large scale.
“I lectured to classes of two hundred students and I didn't know any of them. They didn't know me. And it was boring,” Ortiz said.” “You don't know if you're getting across what you want to get across, you don't know if they're paying attention. And you can't really do a lot of group work or interaction, just too many people to try to coordinate. And certainly, we didn't do any experiential learning or community engagement — it was just way too big.”
Teaching at WWC was Ortiz’s first job after achieving her PhD. However, she was only a sabbatical replacement, so she stayed for just two years before moving to the University of North Carolina At Asheville (UNCA). There, she taught for six years before returning to WWC.
One of Ortiz’s favorite classes to teach was Men and Masculinity at UNCA. She received pushback but also felt she had a big impact on her students. With a specific case in mind, she recalls a time she knew the class had changed one of her students by the end of the semester.
“The first couple of months of that class were completely exhausting, people would challenge everything I said and everything that they read and just never wanted to agree with anything,” Ortiz said. “One student in particular, he just thought, you know, looking at me, I'm teaching a class on men and masculinities — he had identified as a cisgender heterosexual male — he just thought I was out to get him and that I have an agenda. But at the end of the semester, he actually wrote me this letter thanking me for the class. And that felt really good, that he was finally able to understand so much of what had happened in his life and apply sociological concepts and theories to that.”
The applicability of sociology to anything and everything is one of Ortiz’s favorite things to highlight. She considers herself a globalist in the way of seeking answers to the source of problems as opposed to parts of the problem.
“As I took classes, such as the sociology of education, I thought, well, this is bigger than education, that's just one institution, but what about all these other institutions?” Ortiz said. “And so then I took a social stratification class, and I took all these other classes, and I kept wanting to go bigger, like, what is bigger than this? I wanted to go bigger than the media, wanted to go bigger than religion, bigger than any of these things”
In the classroom, Ortiz understands that her students come from different backgrounds and areas of understanding. One of her goals is for her students to leave with an understanding of how widespread sociology really is.
I feel like it’s in everything, everywhere you go,” Ortiz said. “And so I hope my students see that as well. It's everything you do. There's nothing that doesn't apply. Literally nothing. That's what I feel about sociology, give me anything at all, and I can tell you how it's related to sociology.”
As a word of advice to undergraduate students who think they may be interested in studying sociology, Ortiz understands that the discipline can be depressing at times, but believes that realizing our realistic capabilities may help alleviate some of that pressure.
“If you are analyzing systems of oppression and trying to see how they function and are maintained and created and talking about privilege — and usually people not recognizing their own privilege — it can be really hard, and it feels like it's never going to change,” Ortiz said. “The one thing that I have learned that I would like to pass on to everyone is that we need to think about time differently, and we need to think about our own capabilities differently. We have to think longer than our own lifetimes, thinking about time as in not just our generation, but the generations to come, how what we do has a ripple effect. And that's who we want to be preparing for — six or seven generations in the future, that what we're doing now is going to impact them.”