SOCI 210: Sociological perspectives

Welcome

Administrative, syllabus review, motivation

  1. Course mechanics
    (requirements, resources, etc.)
  2. Course structure
    (syllabus review)

Land acknowledgement

McGill University is located on land which has long served as a site of meeting and exchange amongst Indigenous peoples, including the Haudenosaunee and Anishinabeg nations. McGill honours, recognizes and respects these nations as the traditional stewards of the lands and waters on which we meet today.

https://www.mcgill.ca/fph/welcome/traditional-territory

see also:

Chelsea Vowel. “Beyond Territorial Acknowledgments.” Âpihtawikosisân (blog), September 23, 2016. https://apihtawikosisan.com/2016/09/beyond-territorial-acknowledgments/.

Land acknowledgement

What do land acknowledgements do?

  • What is the intendended purpose, generally?
  • What is the intended purpose at an institution like McGill?
  • What are some unintended consequences?

What might do it better??

  • What kinds of practices can we as a university undertake to do a better job of subverting Indigenous erasure?
  • What can we as a McGill sociology class do?

Course mechanics

Black and white photo of two large metal gears interlocking

Course mechanics: Online syllabus

Screenshot of the course syllabus

Syllabus is online

  • Available at https://soci210.netlify.app
  • Contains schedule, assignments, assessment, and other important information
  • Updated with links to slides and lecture recordings, and with any schedule changes regularly
QR code

Course mechanics: class period

Class periods

  • Scheduled classes will be a mix of lectures, class-wide discussions, and activities for individuals and small groups
  • E.g. discussions with partners, contributing to online document, brainstorming ideas, …
  • Content covered during class will be essential to the class, and can be covered on exams
Photo of a group of students in a classroom from the perspective of a teacher. The students look variously confused, bored, and distracted. (Still from Across the Universe, 2007)

Course mechanics: Communication

Animation. A large group of students sits in an auditorium. One raises their hand, and immediately afterwards the rest raise their hands.

Questions

  • General questions (mechanics, content, etc) should go in the "Q and A" channel in Teams
    Students should feel free to answer questions here as well!
  • Personal questions about grades, feedback, etc, can be sent to TAs and instructor via Teams
    Use this link to open a chat with them
  • You may also contact me directly with more specific questions (e.g. accommodations), preferably on Teams
  • Questions and comments are also welcome in class! (Just raise your hand)

Assessments

The wall of a trophy shop showing a wide selection of sports trophies

Assessments: readings

a pile of open books

Perusall for online reading/evaluation

  • Collaborative reading environment
  • To register for this class's Perusall, see MyCourses
  • Each reading is automatically scored 0 points or 1 point
    If you did the reading but were not given credit, send me a message on Teams!
  • Scores based on active engagement with the readings and the annotations https://soci210.netlify.app/pages/perusall.html
  • Can miss 4 readings over the semester without penalty

Texts

  • (About) 3–4 readings per week
  • Textbook (Connerly et al. 2021; Little 2016) for background info and terminology
  • Scholarly readings (articles and chapters) examine a particular case / position / method / topic. These readings are the focus of the course

Assessments: Synthesis essays

Essay topics

  • Three essays over the semester
    (each contributing 18% to your final grade)
  • Each student will be randomly assigned two relevant required readings to juxtapose
  • Assignments will be distributed at least two weeks before deadline

Essay assessment

  • 40% based on peers' assessments
  • 40% based on TAs' assessments
  • 20% for assessing others' essays

Essay content

  • Summary of relevant arguments, methods and findings from readings
  • Parallels between readings
  • Divergences between the readings
  • Contextual synthesis of the readings -- what does the pair of readings do in the context of the rest of the class?
Screenshot of judges from Dancing with the Stars all holding up signs awarding 10 points

Course mechanics: Exams

Close up photo of hand writing on a white sheet of paper with a fountain pen

Two exams

  • Midterm: 80 minutes; in-class (Feb 21)
  • Final: 3 hours; through exams office
  • Both intended to take much less than the allotted time

Exam structure

  • Multiple choice questions
  • Short answer
    - ~ 1–2 paragraphs per response
    - selection of prompts to choose from

Reference (crib) sheet

  • Composed by groups of 10–15 students ahead of exam
    randomly assigned
  • Approved and printed by instructor

Generative AI

an IBM selectric typewriter

"Generative AI"

  • The use of "generative AI" is prohibited in this class
  • E.g. Microsoft Copilot (provided by McGill), Apple Intelligence, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, Meta's Llama, etc.
  • Turning in text written by an LLM as your own work is a violation of McGill's policy on plagiarism.

Rationale

  • They are bad for the world.
  • They are bad for students (you).

Generative AI is bad for the world

Environmental impact

Photo of an oil refinery in a blighted landscape

Human exploitation

Generative AI is bad for students

"Typical" text

  • The technology that makes generative AI work is essentially like the predictive text on your phone, but trained on as much of the internet as corporations can get their hands on.
    One thousand Redditors (or Github projects) in a trenchcoat
  • The models are trained solely to sound unsurprising, not to recognize important or interesting ideas.
    "When ChatGPT summarises, it actually does nothing of the kind"

Writing is its own end

  • Struggling to compose an essay or summarize a reading is useful—that is where the thinking (and learning) happens. The final result is just an artifact.
    "We can also save time by undercooking fish, but it’s not ideal." — Eryk Salvaggio
  • Using AI to write or summarize will hinder your learning
  • AI-generated code contains frequent mistakes that can be hard even for experts to spot
  • You are here to learn, and AI will hinder that learning
Generated image of a generic middle-aged white man in front of a black background looking at the camera. His eyes are in sharp focus, other parts of his face are blurry, and everything besides his face is very blurry.

Tools

Online syllabus

MyCourses

  • Class announcements, grades, and assignments
  • FeedbackFruits peer assessment tool is accessed through MyCourses

Perusall

  • Platform for annotating required readings
  • Reading grades are tracked here

Microsoft Teams

  • Q&A
  • Lecture streams and recordings
  • Direct communication with instructor and TAs
  • Collaborative work (e.g. exam refrence sheets)

Course structure

Course structure

The Archipelago of Sociology

Aerial photo of an archipelago of small, plant-covered islands in a deep blue ocean.

Course structure

The Archipelago of Sociology

Aerial photo of an archipelago of small, plant-covered islands in a deep blue ocean.

Islands of highly specialized topics

  • E.g. gender in the workplace
  • E.g. _social movements and language use

Hard to describe the "boundary" of sociology

  • Any topic has a sociological aspect

Hard to slice into distinct pieces

  • There is no obviously correct way to divide sociology into smaller subdisciplines

Sociology is bound by a perspective

  • Sociology is not what topics are studies, but how those topics are studied

Course structure

One way to slice it
a.k.a. our syllabus

  • Foundations
    Methods overview
    Classical (European) social theory
  • The individual in society (bottom-up)
    Ethnicity, race, and nationality
    Disability
    Gender and sexuality
    Class and culture
  • Populations and publics (top-down)
    Inequality and stratification
    Demography
    Politics and economy
    Social movements
  • Social systems (middle-out)
    Interaction
    Institutional change
    Organizations and groups
    Media and technology

Next class

Making sense of the social world

Required:

  • Erikson (2017)
    The View from the Fourteenth Floor

Image credit

Black and white photo of two large metal gears interlocking

Photo by Natasha Wheatland on Flickr

Photo of a group of students in a classroom from the perspective of a teacher. The students look variously confused, bored, and distracted. (Still from Across the Universe, 2007)

Still from Across the Universe (2007)

Animation. A large group of students sits in an auditorium. One raises their hand, and immediately afterwards the rest raise their hands.

Clip from Mean Girls (2004)

The wall of a trophy shop showing a wide selection of sports trophies

Photo from Northwest Trophy (nwtrophy.com)

a pile of open books

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Photo from aboveof three people interacting with a laptop. All threee hands are pointing at different parts of the computer.

Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

Screenshot of judges from Dancing with the Stars all holding up signs awarding 10 points

Screenshot from “Dancing with the Stars (ABC), via the Baltimore Sun

Close up photo of hand writing on a white sheet of paper with a fountain pen

Photo by Adrian Clark

an IBM selectric typewriter

Photo by Wikimedia user Etan J. Tal

Photo of an oil refinery in a blighted landscape

Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash

Generated image of a generic middle-aged white man in front of a black background looking at the camera. His eyes are in sharp focus, other parts of his face are blurry, and everything besides his face is very blurry.

Faces of 500 professional golfers, averaged by Reddit user u/osmutiar/

Aerial photo of an archipelago of small, plant-covered islands in a deep blue ocean.

A scattering of islands in Palau. Photo by flickr user LuxTonnerre

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Live tour of syllabus

Live tour of Perusall