Down and Out in Paris and London. Lessons From the Damned . Hopefully, the course will help you to develop mental flexibility and critical thinking skills that will serve you in every avenue of life. Sociology is a field with a particular history, content and concerns, and sociological research employs particular methods of investigation, though these are far from uniform. Sociology includes activities such as hanging out with drug dealers on street corners, attending community meetings in small towns or big cities, interviewing coal miners, or crunching numbers on a computer.
Sociology is almost as diverse and divided as society itself.
We will employ the readings in the textbook as maps guiding us through some of the many assorted areas that sociologists explore. In this class, we will emphasize the engagement of sociology in both crucial issues and everyday life. We will learn to examine these issues from numerous sociological perspectives. We will consider traditional sociological questions of social stratification, social class and social inequality, issues of socialization and the family, of racial and sexual identity, deviance and criminality, the social construction of reality, and social change. At the end of this class you will understand what is meant by all of these terms, and how they might relate to your everyday life as a human being living in the United States in the first years of the 21st century.