In SOC 1 you will write a three page essay analyzing a current event in this society.
The purpose of this assignment is to showcase how you are applying our course concepts with your experiences and observations of the larger society.
The basic structure of the assignment is this: you choose a current event and you use a combination of sources to explain its sociological significance.
You can take this paper in many different directions (and I sincerely hope you do, because I will have to read 200 of them!). Although each one of you will end up turning in a very different product, below are some step-by-step guidelines to get us all on the same page and hopefully serve as a shared foundation for the assignment.
Step 1: Choosing your current event
A current event refers to something that is happening in the world at present and they are usually described on the news and in mass media. I would like you to choose a media-based report of some current event that took place within the past year in the US.
This means you need to pick a news story from a credible news source that you will base your paper off of. Some suggestions of where to find news articles include the following:
National Public Radio
The New York Times
The Washington Post
The Los Angeles Times
The San Francisco Chronicle
The Guardian
Reuters
Al Jazeera
PBS Newshour
These past couple of years have been a wild ride for society, and weve seen some major, large-scale shifts occur. Whether its this global pandemic, the uprising against police brutality and the movement for Black lives, or an influx of laws and policies that push the boundaries of basic human rights, as sociologically-minded people weve got a lot of material to work with.
In order to write the paper, you will need to do some background research on the event itself so you can answer the basic who, what, where, when, why, and how of it. This background information will help you write a solid introduction to your paper and give the necessary context to understand your current event sociologically.
Step 2: Deciding why your event is sociological
Once you have chosen your current event, your next goal is to spend some time figuring out exactly what element you want to build out as the sociological focal point.
For instance, if my current event is COVID-19, I could take it in many, many different directions: I could write about the racial, class, or gender disparities associated with this public health issue; I could write about its impact on the social institutions like education, family, or religion; I could write about its interaction with mass incarceration; or I could even write about how its changing our relationship to labor and what that means for society.
As you can see, once you select a current event, there will be myriad ways to explore it sociologically. Whichever way you choose will depend greatly on your personal interests.
Of course, I know some of you will end up taking one of my examples from above as your topic– and thats totally ok– but I also want you to know that anything can be (and everything is) sociological, and so I would really love to see you get creative with this assignment.
Remember, to look at something sociologically usually means you are exploring power dynamics, you are looking at the social meanings that are enforced and created, and you are connecting what seems like an individual situation to the larger social structure and placing it within the context of history. Although this is a multi-step paper, this step is the key to earning an A on this assignment, because its where you will be making critical connections and building out your analysis.
Step 3: Selecting your sources
Once you have come up with your current event and an idea of how you want to frame it sociologically, your next task is to find sources to contextualize your claims.
Ultimately, I would like you to pick three concepts from your text/ videos as well as three scholarly articles to substantiate your claims.
In order to get access to scholarly articles for this assignment, please visit the Colleges Library website
In the search box select the articles tab and enter your topic and/or key words related to your topic. (note: sometimes helps to actually include the word sociology so I might search for the term Covid-19 racism sociology etc.)
Check out my example below:
Once you see your search results, filter them using the following options on the left side of the screen: available online, peer-reviewed journals, journals, and articles.
You will then select the best 3 scholarly, sociological articles that speak to your topic.
Step 4: Writing the paper
The goal of this assignment is to show you can deploy sociological concepts and theory to interpret the world around you. Doing so means you will introduce your topic and then build out a systematic argument advocating for its sociological relevance.
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