Thinking Sociologically 🌸 PDF

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Lecture Emily falconer notes...

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What is thinking sociologically? Thinking sociologically is more than just studying society, it’s a way of seeing the world in a different way. We train the mind to think critically, questioning our self of what is ‘normal’ and turning what is ‘natural’ upside down, recognising the patterns and using tools (social theory) to make sense of the world. -Consider not just the indivisible story but the PATTERN and trend that links together many stories. -Be able to make SHAPES with those PATTERNS. Shapes are links between individuals and social groups (race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality) and institutions (family, religion, popliteal ideologies) -Recognise that social structures and forces can turn in SHAPE a person: their worldview, their sense of ‘normal’, their beliefs, expectations and ultimately life trajectory. Thinking sociologically can provide lens with which to turn seemingly personal attributes are part of wider historical social and cultural processes. Let’s see at people always angry, always happy, always sad. Is it something going on behind them? Why are them like that?

The sociological imagination C.Mills (1959): the Sociological imagination situates individual experience and everyday life in historical and social contexts.

How to think sociologically? -Ask questions! -What is the relationship between the individual and the social? -What is the wider social, historical, cultural context behind everyday life and interaction? -What social institutions are we part of? -Question what is ‘normal’, ‘human nature’, ‘just the way it is’. See the unfamiliar the familiar. -Use your ‘sociological’ tools: sociological imagination, social theory, critical mind.

How can thinking sociologically help create change? Theory can be understood, variously, as a ‘resource of hope’, a guide and compass, a friend and colleague, a data set and companion, a craft and a life-long apprenticeship. By providing us with the tools of interpretation, theory can help us to understand the limits and possibilities in our lives, placing biography in the context of larger historical processes and social structures. Indeed, theory can be understood as a form of scaffolding by which we build explanations about the social world we inhabit. This enables us to understand that our everyday ways of life are not natural and inescapable, but are socially constructed....