Graduate Studies

 

First Advisor

Lory J. Dance

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Committee Members

Kelsy Burke, Lisa Kort-Butler, Luis Othoniel Rosa

Department

Sociology

Date of this Version

8-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Citation

A dissertation presented to the Graduate College of the University of Nebraska in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Major: Sociology (Ethnic Studies)

Under the supervision of Professor Lory J. Dance

Lincoln, Nebraska, August 2025

Comments

Copyright 2025, Eli Xavier Ornelas. Used by permission

Abstract

For decades now, post-/de-/settler-/ and anticolonial scholars have advanced the argument that sociology has largely failed to incorporate critical insights from theories of empire into the sociological canon. In this dissertation, I argue that introduction to sociology textbooks offer an important vantage point from which to assess conventional sociological knowledge as textbooks are often thought to be “reflections of the discipline.” I analyze the social theory and race chapters of 21 of the most often used introduction to sociology textbooks in the United States to investigate two chapters where insights from theories of empire would be present if indeed incorporated: how the origins of sociology and race and racisms are described in the social theory and race chapters respectively.

Using a critical discourse analysis (CDA) analytic framework, my dissertation is among the first studies to empirically corroborate the theoretical claim that sociology as a discipline has indeed largely failed to include insights from theories of empire into mainstream sociological discourse within textbooks. Specifically, I use the CDA techniques of lexis, transitivity, modality, and source attribution to determine the following. Regarding sociology’s origin story, only four out of twenty-one textbooks acknowledge the role of European imperialism in sociology’s founding, though three of those four use highly passivated verb structures that largely obscure any tangible consequences of imperial conquest. The Eurocentric lens through which sociology’s origins is explained additionally contributed to the incomplete characterization of two key figures in the early days of sociology: W.E.B. Du Bois and Herbert Spencer. Regarding how race and racisms are discussed, I find that authors overwhelmingly utilize highly charged essentialist language to define race and define racism primarily in terms of prejudice. Nine out of twenty-one textbooks correctly explain how race originated as a justification for imperial violence, but they do so with varying degrees of modality. Finally, mainstream sociological theories of race and critical perspectives in general are largely missing from the race chapters of textbooks. Collectively these results show how the presence of imperial logics within introductory texts serve as an invisible guiding force for how fundamental sociological knowledge is explored and explained.

Advisor: Lory J. Dance

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