What is sociology? Why am I talking about this today? I don't know when this blog post is going to go up because it has a YouTube video to go with it! Anyway, I miss tutoring and want to be able to help share my knowledge with the world and my brain doesn't stop working so let's put that out into the world hehe!
Check out the video below if you want to learn more about sociology but I'll go over a few things in here below.
So what is sociology? According to Wikipedia, "Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behaviour, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life" - it is the scientific study of society!
Who coined the term "sociology"? It was Mr. August Comte (1798 - 1857) in 1838 as he wanted to study people in society and believed that secular society was going to increase. Comte believed that the more intelligent a person was, the less likely they are to believe in God or a religion (to an extent, secular society has been on the increase; however, I don't agree that intelligent people don't believe in religion - religion is quite important to society and sociologists as a whole). And by the late 19th Century, sociology as a discipline was very widespread, even gaining popularity after WWII as say a catalyst event (check out my video above for some more details about that). Anyway, following this, there was sociologist C. Wright Mills who came up with the notion of The Sociological Imagination in his 1959 book. The Sociological Imagination is how the relationship between self and society can be understood - a sociological lens or way of looking at the world.
It's also important to flag how social context plays a role in sociology - as social context can shape a person's life. Furthermore, there are 8 basics of sociology (or 8 basic themes that many sociologists are interested in. These themes are structure, agency, stratification, society, class, culture, gender, and religion.
Structure - the social structure of how institutions are developed and how they interact with one another.
Agency - the capacity of individuals to fulfill their needs and have the resources to do so e.g., being able to marry who they want to marry
Stratification - the social categorisation or ranking of people based on things like income, wealth, education etc.
Society - "a group of people or individuals who are involved in continuous social interaction or a large social group who happens to share the same geographic territory and is often subject to the same social norms, cultural values, and political authority"
Class - things like lower class/working class, middle class, and upper class (The Proletariat vs The Bourgeouis - thanx Marx)
Culture - "Culture is a term that refers to a large and diverse set of mostly intangible aspects of social life. According to sociologists, culture consists of the values, beliefs, systems of language, communication, and practices that people share in common and that can be used to define them as a collective. Culture also includes the material objects that are common to that group or society. Culture is distinct from social structure and economic aspects of society, but it is connected to them—both continuously informing them and being informed by them" - (Cole, 2019).
Gender - gender is a social construct! GRRRRRR get it in your head. Binaries are stupid. I'm gonna do a whole video on this because it's really important to understand
Religion - sociologists study religion to understand people and it's really interesting and so much to learn about. "Sociology of religion is the study of the beliefs, practices and organizational forms of religion using the tools and methods of the discipline of sociology" - taken from wiki!
Please check out the video for more info! Much love,
Ash xx
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