Sociology Week 2 Notes

Private Troubles/Public Issues: Opening Your Sociological Imagination

Sociology is…
●​ The study of the relationship between the individual and SOCIETY, and the
institutions that mediate this relationship

Question the taken for granted

●​ Question the common sense understandings of the world
●​ Canadas Pay Gap
○​ People with the same amount of education/qualifications earning less due to
their gender, race, orientation etc

Social Statics and Social Dynamics

●​ Auguste Comte 1798-1857

○​ The French Revolution
■​ People recognizing their collective power, they’re members of
something greater than themself
○​ “Order and progress” brazilian flag
●​ Some things are stable, some things change
●​ Comes from physics
●​ Believed by applying the principles of science to the principles of society, we could
progress (perfectability)
●​ Believed societies, like all living things, evolve to become better

Structure and Agency

●​ Structure is something external that constrains us, places limits, and has power over
us
○​ We cannot see social structures
●​ Agency is about individual action, one’s ability to act on the world, and having
choices
○​ Opportunity structure
■​ Choices are never completely free, they are constrained
Definition of the Situation / The Thomas Theoreom

●​ If persons define a situation as real, then it is real in its consequences

●​ Trying to get away from the idea that there is a purely objective truth in the social
world
●​ If somebody believes something to be true, then they will act as if it is true

Looking Glass Self (CH Cooley 1864-1929)

●​ We are enmeshed in a complex process of self reflection and adjustment

○​ We imagine how we appear to others
○​ We imagine their judgement of that appearance
○​ We develop our self (adjustment, response, embarrassment etc) through the
judgments of others
●​ We as individuals are nothing without our social environment
●​ As individuals we are constantly adjusting to reflect our social environment
○​ Ex: talking to friends vs talking to parents

Non Sociological Arguments

●​ Nature Argument: X is the natural order, Y is human nature

○​ “It is human nature to be _______”
○​ Generally about preservation of the status quo
○​ Human nature is a social product not a natural product
○​ Ideas of human nature has varied over societies/times

●​ Individual Argument: says that all problems derive from individual failings, decision
making, etc
○​ Youth unemployment: believing that young people are lazy
○​ You cant reduce things to the individual because many of these problem have
bigger origins/structural forces
The Sociological Imagination - C. Wright Mills

●​ Sociologist that was interested and wrote about power, had a CIA file on him

“Men make history not the other way around” - Harry S. Truman
“Men make their own history but they do not make it as they please” - Karl Marx

“Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without
understanding both” - C. Wright Mills

●​ Mills wants us to take our own historcal experiences/biography and understand

them through the context of the society in which we live
●​ Says that modern life is characterized by uneasiness and sometimes even panic, our
lives feel like a series of traps
●​ Says our awareness of the world is restricted to our immediate surroundings (our
orbits)
●​ When we learn about what lies beyond, we may feel even more trapped
●​ We are subject to the sway of forces that are outside of our individual control
●​ Temporal and spatial location​
○​ We can only understand ourselves and our own fate by situating ourselves
within our own period
●​ Social location
○​ We have a good sense of our life chances by looking at the life chances of
others in our circumstances (eg: level of education, parents, etc)

Levels of Analysis/Scale

●​ Social interaction as a basic building block

●​ Dyads - the number of relationships possible between two in a group
○​ A characteristic of dyad is perishability
○​ Hierarchial dyad or egalitarian (equal) dyad
●​ Triads - the magic number
○​ Coalition, conflict, mediation, jealousy

Troubles and Issues

●​ Our task is to connect the personal troubles of our social environment with the
public issues of social structure
 ●​ Troubles
○​ Immediate
○​ Limited to my milieu
○​ Based on personal expereince
○​ Private
○​ Individual values are threatened
●​ Issues
○​ Transcend local environments (can happen anywhere)
○​ Relate to the institutions of society
○​ Overlapping and interpenetrating milieux
○​ Public
○​ Collectively held values are under threat
●​ All structural issues involve more than one person
●​ If causes are social, solutions are social

The Sociological Imagination in Action

-​ Situate ourselves in the world, not limiting our vision to our own immediate
troubles but connecting them to bigger social issues

Sociology Week 3 Notes

We’re (in) Society/Society’s (in) Us: Social Facts, Structure & Suffering

3 broad approaches to sociology

●​ Positivist
○​ Most closely aligned with natural scientific methods
○​ The relationship between independent and dependent variables
○​ Concerned with knowledge about
○​ Statistics, facts, and figures
○​ Premised on a strong belief in objectivity
○​ Social reality is out there to be discovered
○​ There are underlying laws that can be discovered through application of the
scientific method

●​ Interpertive
○​ Centrally concerned with meanings
○​ Concerned with understanding of
○​ Social reality is intersubjective (happening between us)
○​ Method is to understand society from the perspectives of those in it
 ○​ Inhabit perspective of another person
○​ Understanding specific problems from the standpoint of those impacted
●​ Critical
○​ Examine existing conditions and critique them
○​ Confronting power
○​ Naming inequality
○​ Social reality is malleable (changeable)
○​ Active pursuit of a better world
○​ Seeks to connect theory and action
○​ Transformative, often even revolutionary

➔​ Very few sociologists use only one approach

➔​ Many employ elements of each
➔​ Statistics help to build an argument
➔​ Taking others perspectives helps us to develop human empathy and understand
multiple standpoints
➔​ Confronting power helps to build a better world

William Edward Burghardt DuBois (1868-1963)

●​ Born right after abolition of slavery and died right before civil rights movement
●​ Relatively privileged upbringing
●​ Black American sociologist, civil rights activist
●​ First African American to get a PHD from Harvard
●​ Spent 2 years in germany, left as a historian and returned a sociologist
●​ Post PHD he wrote his first book, The Philadelphia Negro (1899)
○​ Empirical study of philadelphias seventh ward
○​ First urban ethnography in the US
○​ Fist study of the lives of african americans
○​ Lived in the area wth family and along wth his spouse, nina dubois,
conducted 5000 interviews
●​ Creates the atlanta school of sociology
●​ Began working on autobiographies
●​ NAACP first meeting occurred in niagara falls canada
●​ DuBois became more and more radical as he got older, started working on
encyclopedia africana at 93
●​ Renounced his US citizenship and became a Ghanian citizens
●​ Died august 27 1963, Martin luther king gives ‘I have a dream’ speech the next day;
august 28 1963
 ●​ Sees autobiographies as a powerful, scientific, political strategy
●​ “Combines the soul of a poet with the intellect of a scientist”

●​ ‘Of Our Spiritual Strivings’

○​ Opens with music
○​ Struggle
○​ Overcoming
○​ Recognition as key
○​ Central concepts
■​ The colour line
■​ The veil
■​ Double consciousness

The Colour Line

●​ Comes from the Mason-Dixon line (seperates the white and black in the south) but is
more than a physical marker
●​ “In all walks of life, a black person is liable to meet some objection to his presence or
some discourteous treatment”
●​ Says the colour line is drawn across the USA and the entire world

The Veil
●​ First noticed the veils existence at school
●​ Beautiful metaphor as the veil is a barrier that can be seen through
●​ Creates a clear separation or barrier
●​ Not a wall, its thin, porous, and distorted

Double Consciousness

●​ Consciousness is awareness, reflection, situated, indiviual awareness of collective

predicament
●​ What is the American Dream?
○​ Anyone can come from anywhere and be anything
○​ DuBois says this is universalizing particular experiences, ways of being, and
ways of seeing (whats the opportunity structure for african americans)
●​ Believed this makes an experience of double consciousness for african americans
●​ Fundamental duality at the heart of the african american experience
●​ Feeling of being an outsider
●​ Seeing and measuring one self trough anothers eyes
●​ Contradiction
 ●​ No true self consciousness
●​ Believed there is a benefit to being marginalized member of society, you are gifted
with a second sight

Tressire McMillian Cottom

➔​ “Dying to be competent”
➔​ American writer, sociologist, and professor.
➔​ Black women are 243% more likely to die from pregnancy than white women
➔​ Black babies in the US die at over 2 times te rate of white babies
➔​ Connecting her own troubles with a bigger issue of medical care and race
➔​ Developed the idea of controlling images; stereotypes that reduce people to
incompetent subjects in a social structure
➔​ She is talking about issues of status, status and wealth don’t go together
➔​

Control Over Time

-​ Working irregular shifts - around 3.2 mil people in the US
-​ Makes it impossible to control your time
-​ Instability of constant work without a constant employer can make it hard to plan
your life
-​ You have to plan for when you will be sick, when your children go to day care, etc

Sociology Week 4 Notes

Capitalism and Alienation

Selves and Social Facts

What do we take for granted about the individual, about the self?
-​ I am a self or I have a self? I am a body or I have a body?
-​ Are the individual and society always and automatically antagonistic?
-​ Selves are thoroughly social
-Looking glass shelf

George Herbert Mead (1863-1931)

Influences on Mead

-​ Behaviorist Psychology
 ●​ Stimulus Response -Lab rats

-​ Evolutionary Theory
●​ Darwinian, but not mainstream Social Darwinism
●​ Human communication -language
●​ Herbert Spencer made the saying survival of the fittest not Darwin!
●​ Human communications is different then animal communications, humans
have the most complex

-​ Pragmatist Philosophy
●​ Interested in meaning and action
●​ Truth is whatever works

-​ No self without society

●​ All action, maybe even all thought, depends on others

-​ Self-consciousness
●​ Humans are higher animals
●​ The self is a subject and an object

The self is always social

-​ Never fixed
-​ Fluid, multiple, contingent
-​ Malleable, adaptive, self-fashioning
-​ Context-specific
-​ All social interaction and so society is based on mutual understanding
-​ Self restraint, getting things done

The social Self - “I” - Self as Subject

-​ Spontaneous
-​ Creative
-​ Free
-​ BUT - nobody can be all “I”
-​ Why don't people pick their noses in class? - If we were all I, we would o it. But we
understand that we are socialites

The Social Self - “Me” - Self as Object

-​ Rule governed
 -​ Internalized expectations of others. How are we okay with sitting in this class in
silence? Because that is what we are used to, what we have always been expected to
do
-​ Necessary to coordinate collective activities
-​ Sports require you to understand the rules and abide the rules

Where does ‘me’ come from

-​ Children are annoying for a reason
-​ Elementary socialization - “play”, “Game”, “generalized other”
-​ Children do not yet have internalized expectations

What is Poverty

-​ No clear answer
-​ Purely physical/material?
-​ Just food and shelter?
-​ Diverse forms of exclusion

Thinking Poverty with Statistics

-​ Descriptive statistics help us to describe poverty and some basic characteristics
(family type, location etc) of those who are poor
-​ What numbers do you use?
●​ Purely descriptive real number
5000 unemployed people in guelph
-​ Rates
●​ 8% unemployment

Measuring poverty
-​ How many people are poor?
-​ How do we measure it?
●​ Wages? Assets? Household income? -Anything else?

-​ Earnings
●​ By household, person, family?
●​ Legal, illegal, taxable, under the table?
●​ Underground economy
-​ Government Transfers
●​ Employment insurance
 -​ Important considerations
●​ Absolute or relative?
●​ Household composition (how many people in a household
●​ Incidence
●​ Depth
●​ Duration

Three Main Measures used in Canada

Low Income measure

-​ Purely relative
-​ Half the median income (some with adjustments)
-​ Good for international comparison
Low Income Cut-Offs (LICOs)
-​ Statistics Canada measurement
-​ LICO is best known and most widely used measure of low income in Canada
-​ ‘Thresholds’/ ‘straightened circumstances’
-​ Substantially lower income than the average
-​ LICO is connected to household spending on necessities that are far above average
-​ Focuses on the basics: food, shelter, clothing
-​ LICA adds 20% to average household spending on the 3 necessities
Market Basket Measure (MBM)
-​ Relatively new measure
-​ How much does it cost to live?
-​ Basket of goods and services
-​ Food clothes, rent, transit or car, school supplies, phone, etc
Gini Coefficient
-​ Measure of income equality (rather than poverty) -relative measure
-​ Gap between rich and poor measured on scale of 0-1 (0=most equal, 1=most
unequal
-​ Primarily for international comparison

Karl Marx (1818-1883)

-​ Born in Prussia
-​ Law, drank heavily, lots of debt
 -​ Brilliant student
-​ Always carried a small statue of Prometheus (Greek mythology - possessed fire and
hoarded it for themselves)
-​ Zeitgeist
-​ Ziet=time
-​ Giest=ghost/spirit
-​ ‘Spirit of times’
-​ The task of good theory is to capture the zeitgeist, the spirit of its times

Materialism
-​ A materialist looks at where stuff comes from
-​ ‘Natural’ bases of existence, the ‘ground’
-​ Real conditions, real lives
-​ Existing conditions under which we live and those we p[roduce, ‘modification’
-​ Mode of production - way we produce stuff, how and what is produced in our
country
Who owns what?
-​ tribal/collective/state ownership
-​ Private property
What and how we work shapes of our consciousness
-​ Town vs country
-​ Commercial vs industrial labor

Life is not determined by consciousness but consciousness by life

<How we make our living shapes the way we view our world, elon musk thinks he is a
genius

The ideas of the ruling class are, in every epoch, the ruling ideas
<People who have the most power are listened to. When rich people say something, we
listen

What is Capitalism?

-​ Natural condition of people?

-​ How does it develop historically? It is very new
-​ ALWAYS look at materials, we don't like to because once we do look it is very ugly
●​ WHO produces them?
●​ WHERE are they produced?
●​ WHY are they produced there?
 -​ Wracked with fundamental contradictions
-​ Based with TWO HOSTILE CLASSES:

Bourgeoisie
-​ Own the means of production
-​ Take surplus value (what you produce when you work, the value i produced during
labor vs what I actually got paid)
-​ “Leaders of whole industrial armies”
-​ The Ruling Class -
-​ A revolutionary class
Proletariat
-​ Working class
-​ Exploited and alienated/estranged class
-​ “An appendage to the machine”
-​ Create ‘surplus value’ but don't own it
-​ Reduced ti animal need
-​ Treated like commodities potentially (inevitably?) revolutionary

The Communist Manifesto

-​ The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles (across all
history)

History of class struggle

-​ Tribal/communal
-​ Ancient (Greece and Rome)
-​ Feudal (Aristocrats and peasants, the manor and the plot)
-​ Capitalist
-​ Communist
Marx believed in progress to a state of perfection/social harmony (shared by many
enlightenment figures)

Sociology Week 5 Notes

Values in Social Research: Objectivity, Bias and Other Fictions

Capitalism is wracked with fundamental internal contradictions

●​ Overproduction
●​ Diminishing returns/competition
●​ Built in obsolescence
○​ All technology is designed to not last
Capitalism’s internal contradictions

●​ Logic of infinite growth and expansion

●​ Marx says capitalism is like a sorcerer (from mickey mouse) who cannot control the
things he conjures up
●​ Low wage = less market
●​ Workers crowded into factories like soldiers
●​ Nesseciaitates expansion of the ranks fo those who might destroy it

Closing Line
“The proletarait have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of
all countries, unite”

Max Weber

●​ Weber’s writing is very dry and dense with some flurries of colorful prose
●​ He uses interpretive sociology
●​ Wrote his demons on the page
●​ Pessimistic about human freedom

Interpretive sociology

●​ Positivist = truth to reality

●​ Interpretive = truth to experience
●​ Humans are sense making - how do we make sense of our world?
●​ What are the meanings of action, our own and others?
●​ History is not unfolding fixed stages - no, look at how history modifies and shapes us

Social Action

●​ The proper subject matter of sociology

●​ What makes it social?
○​ May be oriented to past, present, or future expected behaviour of others
●​ Meaningfully oriented to others

Ideal Types

●​ Tools for thinking - heuristics

 ●​ Conceptualization
●​ No necessary referent in objective reality
●​ Looks for instances that approximate the ideal

Four Ideal Types of Social Action

●​ Traditional
○​ Habituated, non reflexive
●​ Affectual
○​ Emotional, hugs, love, hate
●​ Value-rational
○​ ethical/moral action, not oriented to success
●​ Instrumental-rational
○​ Weighing means and ends, goal-oriented

★​ Animating tension of modern life is between instrumentally rational action and

value rational action

Objectivity

●​ What is it?
○​ Scientific
○​ Elimination of bias
○​ Viewing world from a fixed point
○​ Blindness
○​ Clarity <> distortion
●​ Commonly held view
○​ Science is objective
○​ Objectivity means no bias
○​ Personal ideas should not figure
○​ Political opinion has no place
○​ Values are irrelevant

The Nacirema

●​ Nacirema culture is characterized by a highly developed market economy which has

evolved into a rich natural habitat
 ●​ The focus of activities are the human body, the appearance and health of which loom
as a dominant concern in the ethos of the people
●​ The North American group described actually corresponds to modern-day
Americans of the mid-1950s.
●​ NACIREMA = AMERICAN
●​ NAIDANAC = CANADIAN
●​ What do the Nacirema teach us?
○​ Taken for granted assumptions place blinkers on our vision
○​ Objectivity is not straightforward
○​ Objectivity can distort reality, it can offer unfaithful representations
○​ Sociology is about making the familiar strange
Objectivity & claims making

●​ What does objectivity do?

○​ Does it clarify or obfuscate?
○​ Does it expose biases or veil them?
●​ Why claim objectivity?
●​ What happens when someone claims objectivity?

Sociological view of objectivity

●​ What we study matters

●​ How we study it matters
●​ Who we study matters
●​ Who does the studying matters

Truth

●​ How do we find it? Who speaks it? Is there a relationship between what we see as
true and who claims it is true?
●​ In sociology, we must connect the truth of a statement with an assessment of the
conditions under which a statement is made
○​ What if, when we study those conditions, we find the author has a political
motivation?
■​ Is the claim less true? Is this the case in every instance?
●​ ALL knowledge comes from a place in the world
○​ What place? Whose voice?
■​ Power
 ■​ Representations of what is right - both factually correct and morally
good
■​ Credibility
■​ Who has the right to be heard, listened to, and taken seriously?​

Hierarchy of credibility

●​ “In any system of ranked groups, participants take it as given that members of the
highest groups have the right to define the way things really are” (Becker 1967: 241)
●​ U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell gives a speech to the United Nations that is both
highly consequential and full of fabrications on February 5, 2003. Using talking
points that many within his own government had told him were either misleading or
outright lies, Powell outlined the United States' case that Iraq possessed weapons of
mass destruction, making the argument for the invasion that would happen the
following month.
●​ The right to be heard is distributed unevenly throughout our society
●​ Relationship between power and credibility
●​ Who has credibility?
○​ Governments, policy makers, corporations, economists, analysts
○​ Why?
■​ They claim objectivity
○​ Do they have biases?
●​ Who is biased?
○​ When we accept the hierarchy, we’re not biased
○​ But we are biased when we side with the powerless
●​ Sociologists are often ignored or in trouble because they refuse to give credence and
deference to the existing system of credibility
○​ This means questioning the entire established order

Sociology Week 6 Notes

Stigma: Symbolic Pollution & the Semiotics of Social Life

Semiotics
●​ Charles Peirce/Ferdinand de Saussure
●​ Concerned with meaning
●​ Study of signs/signification
●​ Is meaning arbitrary?
Signs
●​ A sign is something which stands to someone for something in some respect or
capacity
●​ Any sign contains a basic division between signifier and signified
●​ Connection between signifier and signified is arbitrary
●​ No logical connectoon between signifier and signified, therefore we learn what is
signified

2 basic leves of signification of signs

●​ Denote (denotation)
●​ Connote (connotation)

Meaning in social life

●​ No essential meaning of any object
●​ Nothing has meaning independently of the social world
●​ Meaning comes out of a network of relations
●​ Basic relationship is generally oppositional
○​ man/woman, black/white, sacred/profrane, pure/polluted

What do signs communicate?

●​ Status, class, race, religion
●​ Signs can communicate lies
●​ If signs can lie, then semiotics can give us a theory of the lie
●​ Myths
●​ Consumption in order to capture the signified

Connecting meaning and power ~Roland Barthes

Fixing meaning and ideology ~Stuart Hall

Meanings in Social life

●​ Assigning meanings to people, places, things is a social process
●​ Symbols evoke feelings, they move us emotionally, and also move us to act
●​ The meanings of symbols are enmeshed in a relational field

Symbolic classification
●​ Basic binary structure of meaning
●​ Sacred/Profane, Pure/Impure
●​ Sane/Insane
Marked/Unmarked
●​ The unmarked is unremarkable
●​ Academic studies departments
●​ Defamiliarizing deeply embedded meanings

Erving Goffman (1922-1982)

Stigma
●​ Greek origin of the term
○​ Bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral
status of the signifier
○​ Cut or burned into the skin
○​ Avoid this
●​ Later meanings
○​ Christian - signs of grace/proximity to God
■​ Eg: catholic ‘stigmata’
○​ Bodily signs of physical disorder

The Stigmatized
●​ A stigma is a single trait that can turn us away from the person
●​ Forms
○​ Physical deformity - visible, obvious, explicit
○​ Tribal stigma - race, nation
○​ Blemishes of character - diagnosis, conviction, abuse

Categorization - Labelling Theory

●​ Categories are an ordinary part of social life
●​ First appearances and assessment of social identity
●​ Reduction of whole person to a tainted part
●​ Falling, shortcoming, handicap = bad, dangerous, weak
●​ The label organizes our orientation

The stigmatized as discredited persons

●​ Stigma discredits the hodler
●​ ‘An undesired differentness’ (Goffman, 1963: 15)
●​ Serves to confirm my usualness
●​ Provides grounds for discrimination
●​ A sixth sense
The everyday life of stigma
●​ Unsolicited feedback
●​ Think of people who, without asking for it, receive commentary, thoughts, feedback
from strangers

Stigma and self-perception

●​ Centrality of shame
○​ Awareness of possessing something defiling
●​ Search for correctives (often secretly)
●​ Constant insecurity
○​ Uncertainty about others
○​ What do they really think
●​ It’s alot about you
●​ We (normals) feel that they (stigmatized) are too ready to read unintended
meanings into our actions
○​ Self consciousness of normals
○​ Words made taboo - discomfort around ordinary expression

Stigma and contexts

●​ Some are very obvious, many are more subtle
●​ How does stigma vary by context
●​ Can you have stigma in one situation and not in another?
●​ How is stigma produced?

Why hide stigma

●​ Shame
●​ Contagion effect
○​ Belief that taint rubs off
○​ Stigma as morally corrupt and corrupting

Sociology Week 7 Notes

The Sociology of Everyday Life: Mundane Spaces & Ordinary Inequality

How is inequality written into space?

●​ Availability of private space
●​ Gentrification: slums/gated communities
●​ Terirriotiral stigmatization
●​ Spaces coded as…
○​ black/white
 ○​ feminine/masculine

Are public spaces gendered?

●​ Gender-conscious appraisal of the character of public space
●​ Parks, streets, sidewalks

Paradox of women's fear in/of public space

●​ Incidence
○​ Rates of crime
○​ Likelihood of victimization
●​ Fear of crime
●​ Remember the definition of the situation

What’s distinct about interaction in public?

●​ Communication characteristics
○​ Appearance dependent
○​ Transitory
○​ Episodic
○​ Multiples social realities
●​ Beliefs about public places
○​ Insignificant
○​ Egalitarian

Elijah Anderson
●​ Child of the ‘great migration’
○​ The Great Migration was one of the largest movements of people in United
States history. Approximately six million Black people moved from the
American South to Northern, Midwestern, and Western states roughly from
the 1910s until the 1970s. The driving force behind the mass movement was
to escape racial violence, pursue economic and educational opportunities,
and obtain freedom from the oppression of Jim Crow.
●​ Urban ethnographer
○​ A place on the Corner
■​ Social disorganization
○​ Streetwise (1990)
○​ Code of the Street (1999) - ‘street’ and ‘decent’
○​ Cosmopolitan Canopy (2012)
■​ Civility
○​ Black in White Space (2022)
 ■​ Iconic Ghetto

White Space
●​ US: “The Civil Rights Movement is long past, yet segregation persists” (Anderson
2015)
●​ When present in the white space, blacks reflexively note the proportion of whites to
blacks, or may look around for other blacks with whom to commune if not bond
......For whites, however, the same settings are generally regarded as unremarkable,
or as normal, taken-for-granted reflections of civil society”
○​ “While white people usually avoid black space, black people are required to
navigate the white space as a coandition of their existence”

Perils of publicness
●​ In the absence of routine social contact between blacks and whites, stereotypes can
rule perceptions, creating a situation that estranges blacks
●​ In the white space, the anonymous black person’s status is uncertain, and he or she
can be subject to the most pejorative regard

Iconic Ghetto
●​ Iconic ghetto virtually erases the existence of black middle class
●​ The iconic ghetto and its relation to the white space form the basis of a potent and
provocative new form of racism… the new form of symbolic racism emanating from
the iconic ghetto hovers, stigmatizing by degrees black people as they navigate the
white space”

Cosmopolitan Canopy
●​ “The racially mixed urban space, a version of which I have referred to elsewhere as
the cosmopolitan canopy, exists as a diverse island of civility located in a virtual sea
of racial segregation.”

Black Feminist Thought - Patricia Hill Collins

●​ Daughter of a factory worker and a secretary
●​ Brandeis BA, Harvard MA
●​ PhD Brandeis
●​ Book: Black Feminist thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of
Empowerment
●​ 100th president of the American Sociological Association
●​ Insider/outsider status
●​ Power and marginality
 ●​ Creative use of marginality

Outsider within
●​ Consciousness as a product of phenotype
●​ Race and gender as social constructs
●​ But material conditions accompany these constructions
●​ Consciousness of position

Paradigms (Kuhn via Hill Collins)

●​ Paradigms refer to knowledge systems, they are entire constellation of beliefs,
values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a given community

Insiders
●​ Knowledge communities formed by paradigms practitioners
○​ Insider worldview: experiences in common
○​ Insiders often share similar background, training, maybe also class, race,
gender
●​ Shared taken-for-granted knowledge
●​ Thinking-as-usual
●​ But systems of knowledge are fundamentally incomplete

MAIN POINTS
●​ Inequality is threaded through everyday life
●​ Studying and reflecting on mundane elements of our lives is instructive
●​ Public spaces are interesting research sites. They can magnify existing inequalities
in seeming ordinarily ways
●​ Marginal positions can also be side of creativity

Sociology Week 8 Notes

Suicide, Solidarity, and Social Circles

Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)

●​ France in turmoil
●​ Education and science
●​ Dreyfus affair
○​ Dreyfus was a 35-year-old Alsatian French artillery officer of Jewish descent. He was
falsely convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for communicating French
military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris, and was imprisoned on Devil's
Island in French Guiana, where he spent nearly five years.
Durkheim’s Main Ideas
●​ Establish sociology as the scientific study of society
●​ Moral vision: social science in service of the good
●​ Focus on what can be observed
○​ Eg. social pathology (abnormal forms)
●​ Rejecting the psychological level of explanation
●​ Solidarity is central

Durkheim’s assumptions
●​ Rejects biological determinism (physiology, racial hierarchies, drunken Irish,
Aryanism, scientific racism, etc)
●​ Ideological dangers of evolutionary thinking when applied to society
●​ Society is a collective product (contra individual/human nature explanations)
●​ All social things are expressions of the being of the social - social ontology

Social facts are ‘things’

●​ Our principal objective is to extend scientific rationalism to human behavior
●​ It can be shown that behavior of the past when analyzed can be reduced to
relationships of cause and effect
●​ Science studies things
●​ Things are objective
●​ Things have a reality outside any one individual
●​ Social facts have autonomy
●​ Social facts are supraindividual
●​ Class, race, gender, law, and institutions are manifestations of the social - they
express the being of the social

Social Facts
●​ “Ways of acting, thinking, and feeling, external to the individual, and endowed with a
power of coercion by reason of which they control him”
●​ Not biological or geographical
●​ Not individual or psychological
●​ Greater than the sum of parts
●​ Durkheim reifies the social
●​ Collective effervescence - emotion

What kind of things are social?

●​ Externally defined (outside me)
 ○​ Law
○​ Custom
○​ Ritual
○​ Beliefs
○​ Love, desire, happiness
●​ “Function independently of my own use of them”
●​ They are COERCIVE
○​ They exert some control over us, but we cannot feel them as coercive
●​ How does law work?
○​ Punitive (violation=sanction, redress, expiation)
○​ Preventive (internalization)
○​ Therefore the law is “in” everyone

Beyond written laws

●​ But coercion is not only about LAWS and the threat of imprisonment
●​ What else coerces us?
○​ Conventions
■​ Dress codes
■​ Language
■​ Schedules, driving, how to sit in class

Conformity/coercion

●​ If I conform to it (this social force) I don’t feel coerced

●​ If I try to resist, it reacts against me
●​ “We are then victims of the illusion of having ourselves created that which actually
forced itself from without”
○​ The social is in everyone

What is social solidarity?

●​ It is a social fact
●​ The feeling of being part of a group
●​ We-feeling
●​ Conscience collective/collective consciousness
●​ Dual character - inside and outside all of us

Collective conscience
 ●​ The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to average citizens of the same
society forms a determinate system which has its own life; one may call it the
collective or common conscience, it is by definition, diffuse in every reach of society”

What is the division of labour?

●​ Interdependence = the dependency of two or more people on eachother
○​ Who does what?
●​ Increasing complexity
●​ Source of civilization
●​ Art is a domain of liberty, not an obligation, its luxurious, excess beyond subsistence
●​ Variations in division of labour means variations in social solidarity, in collective
conscience

How to study the division of labour

●​ 1. What social need does it satisfy?
●​ Causes and conditions it depends on
●​ Study abnormal forms - suicide
●​ We learn about different forms of social solidarity

Two dimensions to collective conscience

●​ Integration
○​ What binds individual to collective?
●​ Regulation
○​ How does individual feel power of collective?
The Division of Labour and Forms of Social Solidarity

●​ Mechanical solidarity
○​ Traditional or rural small town
●​ Organic solidarity
○​ Modern or urban
●​ We think about/differentiate these in terms of
○​ Social organization
○​ crime/law
○​ Status of the individual

Social Pathology
●​ Biologists learn about healthy bodies by studying unhealthy ones
●​ Sociologists can learn about society by studying when things go wrong: pathology
●​ Abnormal forms - suicide
Preventing Suicide - A Global Imperative (WHO 2017)
●​ Every 40 seconds a person dies by suicide somewhere in the world
●​ Over 800,000 people die by suicide every year
●​ Yet suicides are preventable

Suicide in Canada
●​ Over 10 per day
●​ Higher risks groups
○​ Men and boys
○​ People serving federal sentences
○​ Survivors of suicide loss and attempt
○​ Some First Nation and Metis groups (especially Youth)
○​ All Inuit regions in Canada

Two Dimensions to Collecitve Conscience

●​ Emilie Durkheim

Anomie
●​ No living being can be happy or even exist until
his needs are sufficiently proportioned to his
means
●​ To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state
of perpetual unhappiness
●​ Normlessness
●​ Absence of limits
●​ Terorr/dread in the face of unbridled freedom
●​ Anomie may be the defining feeling/sensibility of the contemporary world

TAKE HOMES
●​ Social facts are things
●​ Social pathology
●​ Divison of labor shapes social solidarity
●​ Forms of solidarity vary
●​ Understand suicide as a social phenomenon, not just an individual act
●​ Connecting solidarity and suicide

Sociology Week 9Notes

 Everyday Effects of Policy

What is rental pressure?

●​ We experience rental pressure at a personal and neighbourhood level
○​ But causes arent only personal and local
●​ Unearned increment = an increase in the value of land or property without labor or
expenditure on the part of the owner.

Provincial Context
●​ Ontario
○​ Residental tenancy act
○​ Rent control/decontrol
○​ AGIs

Critical researchers agree that…

●​ Housing is a right
●​ Needs of market doesnt equal needs of individuals and communities
●​ Belonging and community and important individual and collective resources

Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program and Social Quarantining in Nova Scotia

●​ Kerry Preibisch and an ‘everyday effects’ approach to studying migrant work
●​ Case study: experiences of former SAWP participants in Nova Scotia
●​ Social quarantining: spatial and temporal rhythms of isolation

SAWP
●​ Starts in 1966
●​ Severe labour market shortages in agriculture
●​ Shifts over time from Caribbean to Latin American
●​ Massive increase since early 2000s
●​ Tied to an employer
●​ Temporary

SAWP in a nutshell
●​ Migrant agricultural workers are non citizens, non permanent residents. They are
bound to a single employer, they do not have the option of finding another job, nor
the bargaining power associated with mobility. Temporary workers legal status also
 denies them the range of services and protections associated with citizenship or
permanent residency”

Centering worker experiences

●​ Social isolation characterizes the lived experience of transnational migration to rural
Canada
●​ Preibischs work highlights the need for more systematic and concerted actions to
support efforts to recognize and meet the human and social needs of Canada’s
migrant agricultural workers

Everyday Effects
●​ Studying how federal level migrant labour legislatio plays out in the quotidian
experiences of those subject to SAWP regulations
●​ Thorugh a focus on lived experience, an everyday effects approach explicitly
connects workers everyday lives to the regulatory frameworks that shape, mould,
restrict, and produce particular kinds of experiences
●​ The task of this approach is to demonstrate how specific policies and restrictions
impact workers’ everyday lives

Expereinces of former SAWP participants in NS

●​ Former participants who have since transitioned to permanent
residency/citizenship via spousal sponsorship
●​ Small sample, but partciipants free to speak and reflect on time ‘on the contract’,
have points of comparison

Social quarantining is…

●​ Constituted through the spatio temporal patterning of workers everyday lives
○​ Eg. orgnaization of workers time and housing
●​ Consolidated through restricted leisure and mobility
○​ Eg; restrictions and constraints that demand extra social labour
●​ An everyday effect of the entwining of labour and immigration policies

The Bunkhouse
●​ Constituted
○​ Experiences of not knowing anybody, having to get up early, 8 men in one
house with one stove
●​ Consolidated “free time”
○​ Always tired and working constantly, no time for yourself or rest, strict rules
●​ Pathways to sociability
 ○​ Making friends and marriage
●​ What is to be done?
○​ Build research on current workers across Canada
■​ Need larger data set and broader range of data
○​ Emphasize regional distinctions and relevance of intraprovincial comparison
○​ Advocacy and growing networks of support that exist elsewhere
■​ Learning from institutonalization of civil society orgniazations
○​ Labour mobility
○​ Pathways to residency