Crossing Boundaries: Sociology in the Wilderness

This article describes an experiential course that centers on a week-long wilderness journey through the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. The course promotes development of the sociological perspective through a tripartite experiential pedagogy of social removal, social construction, and sociological reflection. Pairing this experiential pedagogy with a wilderness journey has helped to vivify a number of sociological lessons for students in the course. We present a model of the wilderness journey as a social ritual, which frames our past course offerings and has proved useful in charting future directions for the course.