Introduction to Sociology By the University of Texas of the Permian Basin via edX Scheduled (Access to Archived course material) Workload: 36 hours
This course is designed to look critically and analytically through different sociological perspectives, including the functionalist, interactionist, conflict and feminist, to help us realize the extent to which society guides our thoughts and actions. The course material provides a fresh, new look at societies and cultures—more objective, full of inquiry and analysis, striving towards social justice and change. Sociology urges us to draw connections between public issues and personal problems, to see the strange as familiar and the familiar as strange, and to examine biography in a historical and social context.
Issues of inequalities, social class, race, sexual orientation, disability, age and gender are critically examined within a global perspective in this course. You do not need any prior knowledge of sociological theories or methods to take this class. Bring your life experiences and knowledge, and see how the Sociological Imagination will allow you to dispel cultural myths and reframe reality.
This course will cover topics found on the CLEP Sociology exam.
What you'll learn
Sociological perspectives to critically assess commonly held assumptions.
Global perspectives on cultural diversity and interconnectedness.
Inequalities, including race, gender, sexual orientation, age, and class.
Institutions within the local, national and international arena.
In this class we will cover the essentials of sociology, to help you better understand your own life and situations far from your experience.
We live in a world that is changing very quickly. Sociology gives us the tools to understand our own lives and those quite remote from us. The premise of this class is that in order to benefit from the sociological perspective, we need to learn how to ask certain basic questions. We need to know how to seek answers through methods that strive to be systematic and generalizable.We will begin with some of the essential questions: How are the things that we take to be natural socially constructed? How do we live today? How determined is social life? Does the individual make a difference? How is social order possible? Then we will ask what techniques are available to make sense of these questions. We will review comparative, historical, demographic, experimental, and ethnographic methods. Along the way, we will study core concepts including ethnocentrism, social networks, community, unanticipated consequences, social capital, race, class, and gender.
We will strive to understand how interaction in micro-level contexts affects larger social processes and how such macro-level processes influence our day to day lives. We will learn to conceive of inequality by asking how race, class, and gender work in tandem. We will address one of the crises of recent sociology -- whether we can actually isolate the effects of social context. We will think about how social science is changing at a time when we are literally swimming in oceans of data generated by the internet.
Course Syllabus Week 1: The Sociological Imagination Week 2: Three Sociological Questions Week 3: Methods of Sociological Research Week 4: Us and Them Week 5: Isolation, Groups, and Networks Week 6: Cities Week 7: Social Interaction and Everyday Life
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