Soci Essay questions

race and ethnicity

Notes:

• Race: a group that shares biological features that members of a society deem socially significant

• Ethnicity: a shared cultural heritage

• Assimilation - process where minorities gradually adopt patterns of the dominant culture

• Pluralism - the social recognition that ehtic and racial minorities are distinct but have social parity

• “Being black is bad for your health.” → access to medical services, quality of treatment, Mistrust

• Multiculturalism Act 1988 → enshrining the need to recognize all Canadians as full and equal partners in Canadian society

Terms:

• ethnocentrism: looking at world with cultural lens that is coloured by ethnicity

• Environmental racism: where society places marginalized people/immigrants → on dangerous lands

• Internal Colonialism: an ethnic group is forcibly placed under the economic and political control of the dominant group

Names:

• John Porter (1965) The Vertical Mosaic

• Canadian sociologist → Shift from a vertical mosaic to a cultural mosaic → making a flatter hierarchy in canada

• Michael Walzer

• expressing openness to others, creating/continual maintenance of an inclusive social place

Example: Jordan’s Principal (Jordan River Anderson) → based on a child who needed healthcare but fed/prov gov couldn't decide who pays for child care → gov supposed to pay 23.3 billion → only paid 11.3 billion

Theories

• Conflict theory: views racial and ethnic relations as a struggle for power and resources, where the dominant group maintains its advantage through discrimination and inequality

• Functionalism views race and ethnicity through the lens of how they contribute to societal stability, seeing racial and ethnic differences as having roles that promote social cohesion

Gender

Notes:

Gender stratification

• the unequal distribution of resources based on sex differences

  • money (men making more money than women)

  • institutional sexism → worked into the structure of jobs/careers

• jobs that women take are often valued as “caregivers” → teachers/nurses and are also paid less bc they are valued less

• men historically taking jobs such as engineers/trades (paid more)

• how do we keep gender roles → symbols in family/how we present ourselves

Terms:

Tyranny of the majority: the majority gets to set the beliefs of a society → who gets to get married

Criminalization: taking person/population and categorizing them as dangerous → up to 1969 gay marriage was illegal and could be put in jail for it → not until 1988 was all restrictions fully lifted

Example:

• Employers not wanting to hire women as they will have to be paid on leave/costing money to the firm, but give men a bonus to help raise the child

• legalizing gay marriage

• social justice 12 courses in hs

• Abortion laws lifted in 1969 → could be put in jail → now we are going backwards wtf

names:

Erving Goffman (presentation of self): passing (as normal) → pretending to be normal to go through society (being in the closet)

Mary Wollstonecraft: (feminist theory): calling for women to be educated the same as men → also not really talked about due to her gender (her being a female sociologist at the time didnt get much press)

Theory:

Symbolic interactionism: focuses on how meaning is created and negotiated in daily social interactions related to gender

conflict theory: looks at how gender inequality stems from power struggles between dominant and subordinate groups

Education

Notes:

• Education replaces or mitigates ascribed traits with achieved ones

• diminish traits of individuals and replace with traits that are fabricated and made through education

• difference in schools in the same society

• affected by direct population around the school/students in the school

• poor=less funding, spending on necessities, rich=more funding, spending on extra resources to enhance learning

• Schools socialize and train us that

  • merit is a key value in our society

Names:

Emile Durkhiem: schools need to train people: for life in the “broader society” (citizenship) and specialized skills for their time (using mulitple screens at a time)

Karl Marx: school was reproducing capitalist ideologies and reinforcing existing class inequalities

Terms:

cultural transmission: how society has grown/changed from adapting to things (taking coding classes)

Theories:

Conflict theory (Karl Marx): schools are reinforcing social inequalities and social norms that are bad

Functionalist theory: school teaches us to be functioning people in society

Example:

• teachers having to work during lunch breaks to help kids due there not being enough teachers → low salary, job isnt valued

Socialization

Notes:

• The lifelong social experiences of people that allow them to develop their individual abilities and interests, learn their culture and grow into effective citizens

• capturing the idea that there is no self without a society (and no society without self)

• Re-socialization - radical alteration of a personality through deliberate manipulation of the environment (ex., rehabilitation centres in prisons/psychiatric hospitals)

• we want to make good impressions (go to places we can perform the best- presenting an image of ourselves

• Behaviourism made people believe that behaviour wasn't instinctive but based on experience

• the people we surround ourselves with mirror who we are and what we think of ourselves → looking glass theory

Names:

• Erving Goffman: presentation of self → we want to appear happy/healthy and the best we can be

• George Herbert Mead: life=exchange of symbols → how we give meaning to life

Example:

Presentation of self → how we show ourselves in interviews/meeting partners, parents is different from how we act around our families/close friends

Terms:

Social Darwinism: ranking of social behaviour reinforces social inequalities

Collective Conscience (Emile Durkheim): the shared beliefs, ideas, attitudes and moral attitudes that operate as a unifying force within a society

Taking the role of the other: switching roles with people (student → barista → teacher)

Theories:

Conflict theory (Max Weber): socialization goes beyond economic factors → controlled by class/status/competition leading to ongoing social conflict

Functionalist: values/norms of society are agreed upon by all members of society due to a social contract that keeps society stable

Social Class

Notes:

• we love to rank → economic status/class

• stratification → how we rank

• persists over generations → wealth/poverty gets passed down

• ranking is fluid = changes depending on time/year

• can make life harder/easier for the individual

• Social class is a mix of wealth/cultural norms/expectations/self identification

People:

C. Wright Mills: it is a characteristic of society, not simply a reflection of individual ability

Davis Moore Thesis: social stratification has beneficial consequences for the operation of a society

Terms:

ascription: something we are born with and over which we have no control (race/gender/family/age)

Theory:

Conflict theory (Karl Marx): capitalist society reproduces the class structure in each new generation

functional theory: social class exists to motivate people to fill societies most import roles and to work hard

Sexuality

Notes:

• Sex isnt the same thing as Gender → sex refers to biological assignment of sex organs

• restrictions often placed upon openness and timing of sexuality

• the “Pill” introduced in 1960 removed fear of out of marriage sex

• some believe that society affects/influences people to change sexuality/their sexual habits

• reduction of homophobia/increased number of schools with anti-homophobia signs/movements/policies

• transgender athletes → how do we implement them in sports without including advantages/disadvantages to other athletes

Terms:

• The sexed body: social classification of bodies as variously female, male, or intersex based on morphology, genetics and hormones

• sexual counterrevolution: a conservative call for family values and return to conservative sexual beliefs

• Sexual orientation: a persons romantic and emotional attraction to another person

Names:

Michel Foucault: identified how discussions of sex shifted in 19th century from church focused to something more controlled by the individual

Ira Reiss: defined “Sexual Double Standard” → how the perspective of sexual activity for women was very different to that of men

Example:

• illegal to be gay, or anything not straight until 1969, when restrictions on abortion/same sex marriages were finally lifted (could be put in jail previously)

Theories:

Feminist theory: ideologies of sex around women are often more intense and taboo than to men → causes stigma around women who are sexually active → seen in how female sex workers are arrested more than male sex workers

Structural-Functional Theory: culture/social institutions regulate with whom and when people seek to reproduce → social ideologies on who you are allowed to have sex with/how progressive your community is

Politics/Social Movement

Notes:

• Politics = a social institution that distributes power and sets society's agenda by making decisions

• Monarchy: a political system that is controlled by a family (passes down from generation to generation)

• Canada has a cultural emphasis on individual freedoms shown in Charter of Rights and freedoms/Canadian Human Rights Act

• immigrants/women tend to vote more liberal/NDP, wealthy population tend to vote more conservative

• Canadians are less likely to vote than they were a century ago → affecting who governs our country

• Social change = transformation of culture and social institutions over time → happens often, sometimes controversial, some change more than others

• Propaganda: information presented with the intention of shaping public opinion

Terms:

• Representative Democracy: authority in the hands of leaders who seek election regularly

• Authoritarianism: a political system that denies the peoples participation in government

• welfare state: a system of government agencies and programs that provide benefits to the population (Canada government)

Names:

Emile Durkheim: healthy political system requires social solidarity, moral consensus and sense of shared identity → anomie threatened it

Karl Marx: Marxism! critiques capitalism and advocates for worker-led society to establish classes society where all are equal

Example:

George Floyd: social movement on BLM after mass police brutality was documented, killing/harming countless African American people

Theories:

Conflict theory: social movements/political power is controlled by a dominant group, and creates compotiton for limited resources

Functionalist theory: society is a complex system wither interdependent parts that work together to maintain stability in society

Age

 Notes:

• life expectancies are getting longer

• cultural shift towards enjoying older age (46 is the new 40)

• more seniors than children

• perfect population pyramid → triangle with seniors on top with majority of population of children and middle aged people for working

  • we are moving towards an inverted triangle → bad

• by 2031: 24% of population = over 65

• spiritual → age is a construct that confines people to traits

Terms:

• Gerontology: the study of aging

• The Disposability Ethic → idea that after certain age people become a burden to those around you → have to be taken care of → NAMES Elaine Cumming and Willam Henry

• ageism: prejudice and discrimination against the elderly

Theories:

Symbolic Interactionism

seniors are giving their reality a different meaning and intention

• redefining the cultural norms of what “being older” means

Activity theory

alternate but equally high levels of activities and roles enhance or maintain personal satisfaction

Culture

Notes:

• Leisure → time to do things (not working 24/7 to stay alive) → developing the weekend! after the enlightenment

• middle class → has extra money to spend, time

• reform movements: these movements seek limited change that will affect everyone → recycling

• buy your image - whether or not you actually had that status/success/membership

• Abstraction (idea) → deciding to teach children to read/write, government, deciding to take turns etc

• cooperation (norms) → population/group issue that demands cooperation with each other

Names:

• Thorsten Veblen: showing off your status and success through buying things

• Theodore Adorno (conflict theorist): Popular culture is continually being reproduced for capitalism

Example: Sapir-Whorf thesis

• the idea that people see and understand the world through the cultural lens of language → removing words related to nature in dictionary and replacing them with words about technology

Theories:

Conflict theory views culture as a product of social struggles between groups with competing interests, rather than a harmonious whole

Functionalism: a system of interconnected parts that fulfill societal needs, promote stability, and maintain social order

Terms:

Production (material culture/institutions): building schools/institutions that represent our values (churches, community centres)

cultural transmission: the process by which one generation passes culture to the next → emojis are the largest growing language

affluence: buying things you don’t need (disposable income)

Family

Names:

Jesse Bernard interviewed parents on certain jobs that they prescribe too

Emile Durkheim's family theory, based on functionalist perspective, views the family as a key social institution- essential functions like reproduction, economic support, and socialization → believed parents’ roles were most important bc children eventually leave and change roles (child → adult)

Example: Women not getting jobs bc employers don’t want to give them payed time off when pregnant/maternity leave

Terms:

• Boomerang kids: adults who move back in with their parents as adults,

• Snowflake kids: been over parented and has affected your life today (less tough/resilient),

• a nuclear unit: working father, domestic mother, children at play

Notes:

• home became a “private” institution - wall between home and work, separates family from society = domestic/child abuse, removal of economic input from mothers

• women focussing more exclusively on child rearing

• kids are too expensive to raise (therefore less children in family)

• multi parent families/co-parenting

• A new social class was born (the middle class) from the Industrial Revolution, creating new family forms

• divorce rates going up

• Largest macro structure

Theories:

Conflict analysis: Social placement: determines your attitudes about religion, education, politics (not unilaterally good/bad, but can be inconvenient for us )

Functionalism: sees the family as crucial for social stability by providing essential functions like socialization and emotional support