Gender and Justice in the Family in a Graduate Elective Classroom: Cultivating a Sociological Imagination

This article discusses a graduate course designed to cultivate a sociological imagination through the lens of distributive justice within families, emphasizing the influence of gender and ethnicity on daily familial distributions. Grounded in social exchange theory and principles of distributive justice, the course explores how personal experiences of injustice are shaped by gender roles and cultural norms, contributing to the discrepancy between the egalitarian ideal of equal sharing and the reality of unequal household labor distribution. The course, attended by 15 to 20 participants—primarily young, single, and married Israeli-Jewish and Israeli-Arab-Palestinian women—entails conducting in-depth interviews on family injustice, focusing on the patterns of household labor distribution among married couples. The qualitative findings underscore the course’s objective of fostering a sociological imagination, vividly demonstrating the interplay between personal experiences and broader societal structures, thereby highlighting the complex personal and sociological interconnections.