Sociology Basics
The scientific study of the social world, including social structures, societal institutions, social interactions, identity, and individual experiences of self
What is sociology?
Social conditions that are perceived as problematic by groups of people
What are social problems?
What and how students learn, the sum of an educational experience, and the target of recent bans
What is curricula?
The concept that explains that the ways in which events or issues are framed influences how and what we think about them and the social actors involved
What is media framing?
The aim of social movements/organized collective action
What is to seek or resist social change in what is considered socially acceptable?
The spoken and unspoken rules of a given culture that vary in formality and severity from folkways to mores to taboos
What are social norms?
The main thing that is needed for an issue to be considered a social problem defined as the ability to achieve desired outcomes even if they go against the will of others
What is power?
The social role of K-12 education
What is normative, secondary socialization?
What political system is about at its core
What is the distribution of resources (who gets what)?
Two major types of organized collective action
What are progressive social movements and reactive social movements?
The process by which we learn cultural norms and form our personalities based on those norms
What is socialization?
A campaign for social change that tends to utilize social and mass media to spread the word of a moral panic
What is a moral crusade?
The tendency of American history education to oversimplify and distort historical events in favor of individual social actors
What is hero-ification or hero-making?
The three main social functions of media
What we perceive as injustice depends on this
What is our ideology (which informs what we consider to be right or wrong, just or unjust)
Learning how to recognize and understand the taken-for-granted aspects of life and connect our individual experiences to larger cultural phenomena
What is a sociological imagination?
The two major, but not mutually exclusive, social scientific inquiry into social problems
What are quantitative and qualitative research?
Non-economic resources such as knowledge, skills, education that lead to personal and financial gain
What is cultural capital?
What it means when something or someone is politicized
What is being associated with and/or regulated by policy?
This informs our morality
What are agents of socialization? (like parents/caregivers/adults; religion/church; education/school; friends; media/media actors)
The way our choices and actions are influenced by our socialization and the institutions we take part in
What is the relationship between structure and agency?
Three things that shape our perceptions of social problems
What are the people around us, the media we consume, and the education we receive?
The theory by Michel Foucault that asserts knowledge is power because power is based on and makes use of
knowledge and power reproduces knowledge
depending on intentions
What is power-knowledge theory?
Through various modes of socialization, we learn meanings associated with cultural symbols which determines how we make sense of the world and our pace in it (What is this social phenomenon?)
What is the social construction of reality?
This is a dynamic experience as our morals can shift over time as we learn more about others and the world and experience new things