These were the prompts we could use:
What is the imagination, what does it do?
How can we apply the sociological imagination to the moment we are living in in August 2020?
Here is what I wrote:
I believe it is important to start out with simply defining imagination to get the full grasp of what was shared in the excerpt. Imagination in itself is defined in many ways, but the most relevant is that it is the ability to form new ideas and concepts that aren't obvious to the senses. To put it more in the form of imagery, it is as if a person starts at a certain obvious thought in their mind, but instead of staying there, they stretch that thought out in all directions to test it and see exactly how far it goes. In doing this, the person begins adding more things until they have a new concept made of finely and intricated webs of preexisting ideas. Take this concept itself and add in society, and you create what is the sociological imagination. It is in this way that we can see beyond our own small bubble of life and extend it into the culture and history around us, which is what Mills was getting at. In a sense, it is taking the words of our life and adding them and comparing them to the story of our time, and in turn, comparing that to the overlying book of the world in history.
It with this entire idea that an application can be made to the now. To apply it to what we are going through, we have to reach out to what is going on all around us. In that aspect, it is taking how everyone, in every culture, is being affected by the pandemic. Is it creating more social injustices or mending them? Perhaps both? And that brings to mind how has it done so and is there a way to apply the mending of injustices to the creating of them? And in that, we can also reach beyond the now and look over the past history to see what has already happened and how it was handled.
As it is, without having the sociological imagination to search for the answers in that way and be observant of how the issues are affecting people (and in a sense creating their troubles), more issues arise as the troubles compound out of what can only be described as ignorance. So the question arises, how does one know when they are truly using the sociological imagination? And will having only a partial understanding of it cause more harm than having none at all?
Summer Month: 3 
Night 
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