SOC 100-level course of interest to students

NEED ANOTHER CLASS THIS SPRING?  SLOTS ARE STILL AVAILABLE IN ONE OF OUR MOST POPULAR CLASSES!

Rob Robinson is teaching his very popular Introduction to Sociology (S100) class this spring and spots are still available.  Sections and times are listed below. 

23234          02:30P-03:45P   MW     WH 100   

19374          01:00P-02:15P   MW     WH 100   

Both classes carry IUB GenEd S&H credit and COLL (CASE) S&H Breadth of Inquiry credit

About Chancellor’s Professor Rob Robinson: Rob enjoys teaching introductory sociology and graduate courses on writing for publication. He has received eight awards for his teaching at Indiana, including the Edwin H. Sutherland Award for Excellence in Teaching, the IU Trustees Teaching Excellence Recognition Award, the Sylvia E. Bowman Award for Distinguished Teaching (an IU system-wide award), and the Outstanding Mentor Award of the Sociology Graduate Student Association. He is Co-Director of the sociology department's Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) program, for which his department won the American Sociological Association's Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award in 2001, while he was department chair.

About the Course:  How do sociologists look at the social worlds we all inhabit? In Sociology S100 we’ll learn that sociologists have a unique way of looking at the world—the sociological perspective. Through this lens, we’ll look at everyday rituals of deference and domination, community-building and boundary-marking, conformity and resistance. The sociological perspective can help us understand connections between self and society, private troubles and public issues, deviance and normality, order and conflict, and continuity and change. We can use this perspective to explore how meaning is constructed, races and genders created, sexuality policed, work defined, underclasses contained, deviants shamed and families shaped. We can also use the sociological perspective to become aware of how our culture, institutions, families and friends have shaped our lives and to explore how change is possible. We will take a hands-on approach to these core questions, using tools that sociologists employ in their craft: surveys, experiments, observation, and analysis of census data.  Online exercises will allow you to work with sociological data and materials. Because we live in an increasingly globalized world, we will explore social life in the U.S. and other societies, and we’ll investigate processes of globalization, rationalization (“McDonaldization”), and consumerism.