Social Problems
SOCIOLOGY 11

Professor Mab Segrest
Tuesday-Thursday 9:10-10:25
Spring 2002

MabSegrest@aol.com
919-286-7071

            “Know that many personal troubles cannot be solved merely as troubles, but must be understood in terms of public issues—and in terms of the problems of history-making.  Know that the human meaning of public issues must be revealed by relating them to personal troubles—and to the problems of the individual life.  Know that the problems of social science, when adequately formulated, must include both troubles and issues, both biography and history, and the range of their intricate relations.  Within that range the life of the individual and the making of societies occur; and within that range the sociological imagination has its chance to make a difference in the quality of human life in our time.”

                                                C Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (1959)

Course Premises

Sociology, in its nineteenth-century European origins, emerged as the “scientific study of human activity.” It is marked by a way of understanding the particular (“individual”) in terms of the general (“society”).  Early sociologists (such as Auguste Comte, Emile Durkheim, and Karl Marx) set out to explain their societies, extrapolating laws that functioned socially in the same way that gravity was seen to function as a “law of nature.”  Intrinsic to this new way of thinking was a concern for social problems created by the clearly massive changes that European society was undergoing in the midst of the Industrial Revolution – what the English Romantic poet William Blake characterized as the “dark satanic mills” and Marx’s theory of dialectical materialism sought to capture as an explanatory force for the huge influence of economic factors on all forms of social organization. 

 Today we are in the midst of another huge and fundamental change in global social organization, equivalent, as our Social Problems authors point out, to the Agricultural Revolution (8000 BC) and the Industrial Revolution that birthed sociology as a practice and a discipline. This Information Age, which they say began circa 1970, brings with its own conflicts of position and interest, and is causing a massive structural transformation of economies and cultures.  These structural changes exacerbate old social problems, such as extremes of wealth and poverty, and generate new ones, such as the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on  September 11.  If early sociologists borrowed from nineteenth-century science an aura of objectivity, our legacy from the science of the twentieth century is much more relative and indeterminate.  Another legacy of the twentieth century are the political movements that the Industrial Revolution and the imperialism that accompanied it helped to generate:  anti-colonial movements of national liberation, movements for the liberation of women, movements for racial/ethnic liberation and civil rights, movements for lesbian and gay people, for the disabled.   Today’s sociology, fed by analyses from these movements, often explores conflicts between relative social positions that arise from structural inequalities and what “standpoint” we bring to the issues and forces we examine.   These twentieth century political movements and the continuing opposition to them form the ideological terrain on which students of sociology -- and all global citizens -- will understand social problems in this new post-industrial century.

This course seeks to understand contemporary social dynamics and the problems and opportunities they create as an exercise in what C. Wright Mills called the “sociological imagination.”  Our premise, with Mills, is that such an imaginative process has the “chance to make a difference in the quality of human life in our time.”

Course Objectives:  (1)   to understand the shift from industrial to post-industrial social organization, from manufacturing to information; (2) to understand the structural inequalities inherent in these shifts and their implications; (3) to identify “social problems” emerging in this climate and what is at stake in the explanations for and solutions to these problems; (4) to identify one’s own “standpoint,” seeing oneself as part of larger social and historical patterns (as both problem and solution); (5)  to understand what approaches “applied sociologists” bring to particular social problems; (6) to use all the elements of this class to understand theories and methods of sociology.

Required Texts:

D. Stanley Eitzen & Maxine Baca Zinn, Social Problems (8^th edition)

Kurt Finsterbusch, Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Social Issues (11^th Edition)

Tracy E. Ore, The Social Construction of Difference and Inequality:  Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality.

Requirements:

(1)     Assigned readings on the syllabus.  Come to class having read the material carefully for discussion and review. At times, assigned reading will be the subject of class lectures and discussions; at times it will be background.  Good note-taking will be important in this course.  I may occasionally give quizzes on the reading or brief writing or other assignments.

(2)     Team participation.  The class will be divided into 6 teams of 6-7 people each.  These teams will provide small groups for class discussion and for group assignments.  

(3)     Group Teaching Project.  Each group will teach one of six chapters (Families, Education, Health and Health Care Delivery, National Security, Crime and Justice, and Drugs).  Research should include at least ten sources, a combination of books and articles, use of the web, and interviews or surveys.  You will become, collectively, experts on your particular area of social organization and will devise together a creative and ingenious way to present the material to the class.  Reports will include written handouts of at least 5 pp and a bibliography of your sources.  Part of your research will focus on how structural changes and social problems in the particular area you are presenting manifest themselves at Duke.

(4)     Papers:  You will hand in two papers (11 pt type, 1" margins, double-spaced) on the following topics: 

Taking Sides?  You will take one of the issues from the essays we have covered in   and either take one side or the other, or offer a third position in a five-page paper.  You will answer the following: (1) what is the issue? (2) what are the differences in approach?  (3) what values or facts are being contested?  (4)  what ideological frameworks are at play?  (5)  what is your position on this question and why? 

Social Problems at Duke:  You will write an 8-page paper on a social problem at Duke.  You may write about something from the chapter  that your group taught in class, utilizing the research you did together as a group as well as additional information that you gather.  Explain (1) what problem it is you are addressing; (2) what the manifestations and history of the problem are, in US culture and at Duke; (3) what explanations for the problem are, whether there are conflicting causal explanations and what is at stake; (4) what interventions have been tried, and why? (5) what do you think would be the most effective current response to this problem and why? (6) what is your standpoint on this issue?  

(5)     Midterm and final exam:  The midterm exam will be multiple-choice, short answer, true or false, and short essay.  Questions will cover key terms and concepts of the reading, as highlighted in bold text and in chapter reviews, as well in class lectures, and will also include additional material covered in class.  The final will have a similar format, in addition to one or more essay questions (including one on your “standpoint”).    I will give out a study guide a week before each exam. 

Attendance: You are expected to come to class on time prepared for lectures, discussions, and small-group work by having read the material carefully and done your assignments.  Over three unexcused absences will affect your grade. 

Final Grade: Papers:  30%; Group Report:  15%; Midterm:  20%; Final:  25%; Daily assignments: 10%

Syllabus

Part I: Introduction

“Before you are through with any piece of work, no matter how indirectly on occasion, orient it to the central and continuing task of understanding the structure and the drift, the shaping and the meanings, of your own period, the terrible and magnificent world of human society in the [first years of the twenty-first century].”  C. Wright Mills