Westmoreland Community College Introduction to Sociology week 1

1. Introduction to Sociology
Ray Brannon

2. A long time ago in a distant galaxy ……I began to program with IBM cards
on very big computers that didn’t have the power of your smart phone.

3. The Syllabus
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o

4. Trapped!!
Psycho –Social Interweave
• Personal destinies are linked to societal structures
• PA Study of Care for the Elderly
• Blinding pace of transformational change

5. Retired President & CEO of
Choice Technologies

8. The Challenge:
To become a critical thinker on sociological
issues because …..
your personal history matters!!

9. • Locating yourself in the period in
which you live- how you are shaped
by society and how you can shape
society
• Link history and biography – three
generations
• My grandfather, father, me, son,
grandson

10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf5nCPFBSHw

12. What is Epistemology?
What is a Paradigm?

13. Paradigm Shift:
The destruction an old theory by new facts and its
replacement as a new theory that fits the new facts.
Thomas Kuhn

14. What is a Paradigm Shift?

17. Changing Sociological Paradigmshttps://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&
utm_source=tedcomshare

18. Did You Know?
We Are a Piece of the Social Puzzle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8lBMFw2xFA

19. Sociology is the study of human society.
What Is Sociology?
19

20. • Macro-sociology:
Where You meet
society at large.
• Micro-sociology:
Where the YOU meet
the Group
What bothers you?
20

21. Trapped by Self Deception and Assumptions
https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shermer_the_pattern_behind_self_deception?language=en&utm_campaig
n=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare

22. Developing Self and Social Consciousness
• Distinguishing personal problems from public
issues resulting from social structure
• Troubles versus issues: personal/ societal
• One man's death is a tragedy: 145 people killed
by a terrorist blast is a statistic.

23. Thinking like a sociologist means
looking at the world
around you in a new way.
Challenge conventional wisdom
and question what most people take for granted.

24. Coined by C. Wright Mills, this tool helps us to:
• connect our personal experiences to society at large and
greater historical forces.
• “make the familiar strange,” or to question habits or
customs that seem “natural” to us.
The Sociological Imagination

25. Imagine – John Lennon
Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRhq-yO1KN8

26. 26
http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_richards_a_radical_experiment_in_empathy.html

27. Outrospection - Empathy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG46IwVfSu8&feature=youtu.be

28. ○ The way individuals define themselves in relationship to
groups they are a part of (or in relationship to groups they
choose not to be a part of).
○ What groups are you in? Or not in? Write down a list of
groups that you define you.
What Is Social Identity?
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29. ○ Social institutions are networks of structures in
society that work to socialize the groups of people
within them.
○ Examples include:
○ the legal system
○ the labor market
○ the educational system
○ the military
○ the family
What Is a Social Institution?
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30. ○ Microsociology understands local
interactional contexts, focusing on face-
to-face encounters and gathering data
through participant observations and in-
depth interviews.
○ Macrosociology looks at social
dynamics across whole societies or
large parts of them and often relies on
statistical analysis to do so.
Divisions within Sociology
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31. Think about you own backgrounds, including
their race, gender, religion, and economic class.
How larger social forces—the economy, civil rights, religious
movements, and so on—have shaped what it means to be a person
“like you”
someone with the same list of traits—in society today.

32. Functionalism, conflict theory, feminist theory, symbolic
interactionism, postmodernism, and midrange theory are all
modern sociological theories.
Theories of Sociology
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Macro Theories

33. Symbolic Interactionism
Micro Theories
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caIlwCi6JCc

34. Sociology focuses on making comparisons across cases
to find patterns and create hypotheses about how
societies work now or how they worked in the past.
Sociology looks at how individuals interact with one
another as well as at how groups, small and large,
interact with one another.
Sociology and Its Cousins