Sociology and Society: lecture themes, Sociology for Media Engineers

1. Initial questions: what is society?; agency and structure; people in society and society in people

2. Personal identity: the self as a performance; the self as biography; the intertwining of self and other- socialisation

3. Who belongs; who gets marginalised; social exclusion; the public sphere and privatisation…what is a public space (Bluewater)?

4. Thinking sociologically: the effects of institutions and how we cope with them…routine, everyday life, anxiety and empowerment. Total institutions.

5. Power and conflict; importance of class and other social divisions

6. Alienation and anomie; ritual as social cement; symbolic power; ideology and class conflict; traditional and modern life

7. The city as symbol of modern life; anonymity and autonomy; meeting places and new ideas (Berman)

8. The growth of consumerism, from Fordism to Post-fordism; the role of media in consumption and the economy

9. The family as key socialising agency and determinant of life chances; social class and its complexities v. the types used by sociologists

10. The changing relation of women to the family: work; the household and work; lone parents, the welfare system

11. Sociology a social science; social research and what’s involved; authentic data and generalisations

12. The management of poverty; are there solutions to poverty?; is inequality responsible for poverty?

13. Ethnicity, ‘Race’ and multiculturalism

14. Globalisation; the global and the local; glocalisation: time-space comression; disembeddedness of experience