Sociology Terminology
Anything that represents something else and carries shared meaning.
What is a symbol?
This sociological theory sees society as a system of shared meanings built through daily interaction.
What is Symbolic Interactionism?
This perspective examines how gendered systems of power create and maintain inequality.
What is Feminism?
This Indian leader used nonviolent civil disobedience to lead India to independence from British rule.
Who is Mahatma Gandhi?
This 18th-century war led to the independence of 13 American colonies from Britain.
What is the American Revolution?
Examples of this include shaking hands, saying "thank you," raising your hand in class, etc.
What is a norm?
This thinker believed history is driven by conflict between economic classes.
Who is Karl Marx?
This is the Marxist term for when workers feel disconnected from their work and from society.
What is alienation?
She refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Who is Rosa Parks?
Beginning in 1789, this revolution chopped the heads off of the aristocracy and resulted in the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte.
What is the French Revolution?
This the term for the things and concepts that society sees as good or desirable (eg, freedom, democracy, etc).
What are values?
This theory views society as a set of interrelated parts that work together to maintain stability.
What is Functionalism?
This idea describes how systems like racism, sexism, and classism overlap and produce unique experiences of inequality.
What is intersectionality?
This South African anti-apartheid revolutionary became the country’s first Black president in 1994.
Who is Nelson Mandela?
This 1917 event led to the fall of the Tsarist autocracy and the rise of Communism.
What is the Russian (or October) Revolution?
This is the term for a group that rejects or challenges the status quo and dominant cultural values and instead creates its own.
What is a counterculture?
Emile Durkheim used this term to describe the breakdown of social norms that leads to disconnection.
What is anomie?
W.E.B. DuBois coined this term to describe the experience of living with two social identities.
What is double consciousness?
This environmental activist started the global “Fridays for Future” movement at age 15 and was recently captured by Israel as part of her "Freedom Flotilla."
Who is Greta Thunberg?
This leader led a revolution that established the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
Who is Mao Zedong?
This is the term for the belief that your own culture is superior to others, often leading to bias or misunderstanding.
What is ethnocentrism?
This concept, introduced by Emile Durkheim, describes the type of social cohesion that arises in modern, industrial societies where people depend on one another because of specialized roles and interdependence.
What is organic solidarity?
This revolutionary Black movement emerged in 1966 to protect African American communities and challenge systemic racism.
What is the Black Panther Party?
The youngest Nobel Prize laureate, she advocates for girls’ education after surviving a Taliban attack.
Who is Malala Yousafzai?
Fidel Castro led this 1959 revolution that overthrew Batista’s regime in his island country.
What is the Cuban Revolution?