Sociology is Exciting, Useful, and Fascinating!

Sociology is a useful scientific enterprise because it gives us the scientific tools we need to understand ourselves and the people around us. Sociology matters because it gives us the scientific tools we need to analyze, explain, and predict human behavior in groups. Therefore, the information you will receive in this course is useful and it matters. All of your course material is either peer-reviewed or is accurate based on your instructor’s training and knowledge.

Sociology is a science. Our scientific perspectives have descriptive meaning in the real world. Science observes various phenomena and then wants to know what those phenomena are, and under what natural or social circumstances they occur. From those observations we develop theories that are tested many times so that we know they are valid and that they apply to real people, real societies, and real social systems in our real world. Science is as objective as the scientist can make it. We follow very strict protocols in our search for knowledge and truth. The material for this course is grounded in the science of sociology and is not “common sense,” or “opinion,” or “well that’s just a theory.” In science, our theories are robust and have weight; they are valid because they have been tested, and they do explain and predict reality. Sociology is useful, and it matters because it is the scientific study of us, all of humanity in all our diversity.

To learn more about this, go to the Modules Tab in EO-Canvas and read all of the information about Perspectives, Theories, and Causation.

This course examines material and contains content that some of us might find challenging, offensive, obscene, or extremely difficult. No personal affront is intended, I am NOT trying to hurt your feelings or give you nightmares, but I maintain the right and responsibility to access your grasp of all the material discussed in this class since it meets all Sociology Department learning objectives. If you are disturbed and if necessary, you may contact me in Eagle Online Canvas email about this.

There are many topics that we may be studying this semester, including but not limited to rape, torture, murder, mutilation by the self and others, nudity (forced or voluntary), slavery, economic, social, and political inequality, human sexuality including gender identity, human trafficking, what it means to be human, how the structures of our society guide how we think and the way we interact with one another, cannibalism, globalism, isolationism, the movements of populations, war, climate change, religion, child abuse, and other equally difficult ideas and topics. I do not teach these things to hurt your feelings or cause you psychological damage, I teach them because they are about the way we behave and the way we interact with one another based on the ways we structure our societies. Many of these topics/issues are very difficult, and we will be looking at videos and still photos that will be profoundly disturbing to many of us. However, we are adults. Even if you are not a legal adult, you are in an adult college classroom, and you must be prepared to be confronted with ideas you had never thought about and knowledge that you didn’t know existed. If you are offended by the course material, withdraw from the course. I am not trying to upset you, I am trying to impart information that it is critical for an informed citizen of the world to know.

Welcome to Our Class!

I love sociology! Even the most difficult of topics that we study I find fascinating because sociology is delving into our collective psyche and behavior. Why do humans behave the way we do? How does our sociocultural background delimit our thought and behavioral processes? For example, I was born and raised in a small town in Southwestern Iowa where we froze in the winter and sweltered in the Fall. From the perspective of most of you, I’m about a thousand years old so my upbringing was probably very different from yours. Not everyone had a telephone! Not everyone had a radio! Not everyone had a TV! All TVs shows were in black and white, there were only three channels, and they went off the air at midnight! Not everyone had indoor plumbing! Not everyone could read or write! Not everyone had a car! Rock and Roll was just starting out and most parents and teachers hated it! Most people didn’t have air conditioning! We walked to more places than we rode. Everyone seemed like a Republican—not the kind of Republicans that exist today with Trump as their leader—who could be very conservative or very liberal. Democrats could be very liberal or very conservative. We were at the beginning of the rise of the American Middle Class and letter carriers lived next door to the mayor, and railroad workers lived next to physicians. Racism, sexism, and homophobia were prevalent and prominent. The Civil Rights Movement was just getting underway and a president and several Civil Rights leaders were assassinated.

That background colored and shaped the way I think about the world and the sociological perspective that provides a particular lens through which I see and understand the world. It is my hope that you will learn to analyze our human society from a different framework than ever before. I hope you will enjoy our class and that you will be glad you took sociology. Thus, I welcome you to our class! Learning is fun, fundamental, and lifelong so let’s get going so that we can be successful students of life!