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Apr 29, 2024
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SOC 189W PO - The Sociology of Lived ExperienceWhen Offered: Spring 2018.
Instructor(s): A. Goffman
Credit: 1
Much of sociology focuses on demographic trends and large-scale quantitative measures of society, like changes in the employment rate, motor vehicle accident rate, immigration rate, or unplanned pregnancy rate. But running through sociology is also an abiding interest in how people viscerally, emotionally, and physically experience the world as they live it. What is it like to lose a job, get hit by a bus, leave your home country, or have a child? For that matter, what is it like to move from high school to college, live with social anxiety disorder, be one of the only people of color in a majority white space, or realize that you like women instead of men? The experiential realm is the topic of this course. We will read in phenomenology and the sociology of emotions, ethnography and memoir, as well as in psychology, economics, philosophy, and literature. We will talk about laughter and sadness, union and marginality, triumph and defeat, jealousy and anger, windfall and loss. Running through the course are a few underlying questions: do experiences like losing a job and winning the lottery have anything in common? What are the limits of our ability to put ourselves in other people’s shoes, to understand how other people feel and think? How do people experience times of great instability and change? Are positive and negative experiences spread unevenly across the population? What are the risks and rewards of sharing our own experience or learning and writing about the lives of others? And finally, has social media fundamentally altered what it means to be in the world? Students will keep weekly experience journals and conduct four interviews over the course of the semester. In the first part of class, we discuss the assigned readings. In the second part, students read a piece of their journal or interview transcript aloud. The final paper is based on the data that each student collects. This course is good for anyone who wants to reflect on their life and learn about the lives of others. It is also good for anybody who wants to write creatively, in narrative form. There are no pre-requisites; students with no background in sociology will do just fine. Letter grade only.
Satisfies the following General Education Requirement(s), subject to conditions explained in the Degree Requirements section of this Catalog:
Area 2
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