1. How does heavy metal’s visual culture (as embodied by album covers, promotional photos and posters) “encode” gender? How does this subculture’s gender codes compare with those of the “commercial realism” found in mainstream advertising?
2. What are social institutions (like Politics, Education, Religion) and why are they a good way to examine the links between macro-sociological “social structures” and micro-sociological daily life?
3. What questions and concerns about gender roles are revealed as educational, political, and religious institutions converge over the issue of female virginity, as depicted in Jessica Valenti’s film The Purity Myth?
4. What does Jessica Valenti’s feminist analysis reveal about the religious and political roots of the social movement promoting abstinence education and a return to traditional gender roles for women and men?
5. Under what social conditions are virginity pledges most and least likely to delay or prevent adolescent pre-marital sex?
6. How does the symbolic-interaction paradigm help us understand virginity pledges as an important ritualistic aspect of a non-normative identity movement?
7. Why is it advantageous for social movements and subcultures to maintain a “minority” status?
8. What is demography and why are sociologists interested in studying population dynamics?
9. What is “gentrification” and what can we learn about “urban renewal” and the social experiences of people living in urban areas like Red Hook, Brooklyn from the film A Hole in a Fence?
10. Why did Max Weber worry that urban living leads to “disenchantment” and how do we typically attempt to “re-enchant” our lives in modern societies?
11. What is environmental sociology and how is a sociological perspective useful in understanding social ecology and issues such as resource depletion, pollution, and environmental movements?
12. Why do sociologists study collective behavior in order to better understand social change?
13. What defines a “social movement” and what are the four stages that social movements typically go through?
14. What defines a grassroots social movement and what is “astroturfing?” What kind of social movement is the Tea Party?
15. What does the documentary The Billionaires Tea Party reveal about the empowering and bureaucratic aspects of social movements?
16. Why is it so important for the Tea Party participants to believe that they are part of a grass roots movement?
17. What is Globalization and what consequences does it have for societies and the people living in them?