SOCI 210: Sociological perspectives

Agenda

  1. Administrative
  2. Social change
  3. Collective behavior

Administrative

Synthesis essay 2

  • Due next Wednesday (March 19) at 11:59pm

Social change

Photo of three buildings, each clearly from a very different architectural era ranging from 18th to 21st centuries.

Social change

Social rigidity

  • Much of what sociologists look at is way that social sstructures resist change
  • E.g.:
    • Class boundaries
    • Gender essentialism
    • Racialization
    • Economic inequality
    • Norm socialization
  • All focus on ways that dominant ideologies and norms are reinforced
🡂

Social change

  • Empirically, social structures do change
  • New norms emerge, dominant ideologies change, boundaries shift
  • Understanding the parts of social structures that resist change can help us understand how change happens

Social change

How do we explain endogenous social change?

1
Conflict theories
2
Interactionist theories
  • Social inertia is based on structures of dominance, institutionalized barriers, and false consciousness
  • Social change is the product of oppressed populations realizing their common cause and changing institutional framework (class consciousness)
  • Powerful reassert dominance in new context
  • Work of deliberate social change is making the systems of oppression clear, helping oppressed see their common plight, and organizing

Protestors stand in front of the burning Minneapolis Police Third Precinct (May 28, 2020)

Social change

How do we explain endogenous social change?

1
Conflict theories
2
Interactionist theories

Rosa Parks sitting in the front of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama in 1956

  • Social inertia based on constant normalization and reinforcement in everyday interaction
  • Social change occurs when new norms of interaction take hold, subverting previous assumptions
  • Work of deliberate social change is to upset expectations of interaction as visibly as possible

Social change

How do we explain endogenous social change?

1
Conflict theories
2
Interactionist theories

Common thread:
Collective behavior

Social change happens when enough people decide it should

An exercise

Collective behavior

Next class

Coming Out as Fat: Rethinking Stigma
(Saguy and Ward 2011)

  • Being fat is extremely stigmatized
  • Anti-fat stigma is often considered socially acceptable in ways that, e.g., anti-queer stigma is not
    (e.g. media, government, science, …)

Discussing fatness

  • Being fat is not a medical condition needing treatment, nor is it an indicator of poor health
  • Medicalized terms like 'obese' and normative words like 'overweight' should be avoided, as should euphamisms that try to avoid saying the word fat
  • Do not single out individual bodies for comment (celebrity or otherwise)
  • Trauma surrounding bodies is common — be sensitive in your Perusall comments and group discussions
  • Because of the sensitivity of these issues, I will be moderating the Persuall comments more closely than usual