Joanne Samcea's Analysis

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The United States of America is a wonderful nation built on freedom and equality. Since the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution, the United States has been labeled as the poster child for equality and opportunities amongst its citizens. Individuals and families across the country take their shot every day at achieving the American dream, but most of them eventually realize that the American dream isn’t easily attainable. Joanne Samcea is an excellent illustration of such a scenario.
Joanne Samcea is a twenty year old college student at the University of Maryland College Park who migrated to America in 1999 at the age of five. She was born on May 15, 1994 in the Republic of Liberia, a small country on the western
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Mills was an American sociologist who believed that “Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both ” (Mills, 2000). He contemplated that an individual’s life experience could be explained by the large-scale social forces that governed the society. This idea of the awareness of the relationship between experiences and the wider society was coined the sociological imagination. By using the sociological imagination, one can contextualize the fact that during 2009 the slumping national and global economy resulted in widespread job loss. Fanta Samcea lost her job not because of her own inadequacies, but due to the poor condition of the United States economy. Her job loss placed the Samcea family in a situation that was all too common for a host of families in …show more content…
The Great Depression is the worst economic collapse in the history of the U.S., one in which twenty-five percent of American workers saw unemployment. Families lost their homes, their possessions, and some even lost their lives due to starvation. The Great Depression and the Great Recession are just two of the forty-seven recessions that have plagued the United States throughout history, but together they show the connection between individual loss and societal loss due to overarching societal forces. No matter how hard Fanta Samcea worked, she was destined, like the other nine million workers, to be laid off due to the economic condition of the United States during the Great Recession. By using the sociological imagination, one can correlate an individual’s personal woe, like Joanna’s aunts, to public issues and social forces facing the society at large. Individual’s problems may seem isolated, but in actuality they are a result of complex forces that can’t be understood without analyzing what Mills calls “the intersection of biography and history” (Mills,

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