University College Roosevelt Academy Middelburg - Social Science

SSC 111 Introduction to Sociology

Content

This course is designed to introduce students to sociological thinking. Students will get acquainted with key thinkers of the sociological tradition such as August Comte, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel and Max Weber.
Furthermore, the course will mix the study of the founding fathers of sociology with a contemporary text in sociology: Zygmunt Bauman’s ‘Art of Life’ so as to encourage transversal reading and thinking. Thus, the course will sway between the theoretical roots of sociology and its contemporary questions. The students are expected to understand the current value of classical thought and learn to develop relevant and informed ways of thinking the social problems of our times.
The founding fathers of Sociology faced the necessity to understand the changes in western society with the surge of industrial capitalism, or more generally modernity in the late XVIII and the XIX Century. We will explore how much the ideas that they developed are still useful today; and more importantly we will see how the questions that they posed are still open today.
Not only do the students of this course will get acquainted with the major sociological traditions, but they will learn to develop a way of thinking and a way of building research questions in a sociologically informed way. The course will hopefully leave more open questions than answers in the student’s mind.