Joey Sprague

Sex and Gender, Sociology of Knowledge, Methodology, and Social Theory

My area of expertise is in the Sociology of Knowledge, a field that looks at the impact of social factors on the creation and distribution of knowledge. Some of my work has explored the assumptions underlying what “we know” in the public sphere. For example, I found the Pro-Choice discourse emphasizes the one choice affluent people need to worry about—that to terminate a pregnancy while the Anti-abortion movement represents fetuses out of the context of their total dependency on the body of a woman, thus constructing the two as equals. I have also analyzed the systematic blinders operating in academic discourses. For example the literature on developmental disability emphasizes “self-determination” to the near exclusion of the way social assumptions about what is valuable, normal, and reasonable exacerbate the degree to which cognitive disabilities limit people’s options. The literature on Economic Sociology talks about work and economic activity by marginalizing the work people—mostly women—do to meet the needs of their families. I am revising a book that presents a feminist critique of common assumptions and practices in a range of social research method.

My current focus is moving from how social power gets expressed in the content of knowledge to how social forces influence the production of knowledge. I am particularly interested in formal and informal evaluation practices. I have looked at the way the use of apparently meritocratic practices like the use of student ratings and peer evaluation of teaching actually create gender and probably race biases. I am interviewing sociologists to learn the ways that evaluation practices shape their choices in research, teaching, and service.

Are the ways we make sense of our lives the only ways, or even the best ways to do so?

I want to understand how taken for granted conceptual frameworks, from common sense to professional scholarship, are socially shaped and distorted, particularly by inequalities of class, gender, and race.  While I have analyzed a wide variety of discourses, from public debates over abortion to how disability professionals talk about self-determination, my major focus has been on the social construction of knowledge in the social sciences. 

In Feminist Methodologies for Critical Researchers, I analyze the hidden assumptions and limitations of both mainstream and feminist discourses about how best to do research and develop guidelines that take into account the workings of social power so as to minimize bias.  I am in the beginning stages of a new project that examines the workings of the social institutions that organize the production of knowledge--the discipline and the academy.