One of your last tasks for the semester will be to write a short response (2 paragraphs) in which you do your own exercise in "Sociology World News." In other words, you will be finding something in current events that you feel is relevant to one of our topics' and write a brief explanation of how specific concepts we've discussed in class help explain what we see in the news.
The chief goal of this assignment is for you to take concepts from our class, and apply them to things that we see people doing right now. Moreover, I want you to analyze and evaluate current events with a sociological perspective. To complete this assignment, you want your response to answer 3 main questions:
1) What is your topic, and why is it important? Here you want to summarize the news story or report that you found, and briefly explain why people should care about this issue (i.e., how does this affect people, possibly yourself included).
Your news story should come from some mainstream news media outlet (network/cable news, a major newspaper), and I want you to send me either a citation or link where I can find your article/report.
2) What do we already know about this topic from sociology? This is where you will need to take key concepts we've discussed in class, and apply them to the news story you've selected.
You can apply multiple concepts to the same topic, but there must be at least one. I will be particularly impressed if you are able to apply concepts from the third section of the course, but you can use material that we've covered at any point in the semester.
3) How does a sociological perspective help us understand this topic?
Here, you want to explain the relationship between social structure and individual agency as it appears in this news story. Then, you want to explain why it is important to view this issue from a sociological perspective.
In other words, why is it beneficial to understand how social structures influence what people are doing in this news story? You want to be very clear on this, and write this explanation as if you are talking to someone who has never taken a sociology course before.