What did she think she was going to get majoring in sociology?? She should be grateful anyone would hire her IN SPITE of her track record of foolish decisions.
bump
The Socjournal, www.sociology.org, A refereed e-journal of scholarly research that makes an original contribution to the advancement of sociological knowledge.
Dr. Mike Sosteric, Associate Professor, Athabasca University, [http://www.sociology.org/what-is-sociology]:
Sociology is interested in the world that you have created.
Now, I don’t know about you, but for me, that makes sociology pretty special (in fact according to August Comte, sociology was the “king” of academic disciplines). The fact that sociology takes as its starting point what we have created (i.e., the social order) is what attracted me to sociology in the first place. Before I got into sociology, I had tried several disciplines. I tried engineering, chemistry, and took an extended jaunt into psychology but was never really excited by the materials as I was with sociology.
Now, I can’t remember my engineering or psychology classes, but I still remember my first year sociology course, taught by John Conway at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan. Now here, I thought, was a discipline that explained things. In my first year I learned the leaders of sociology and the different “types” of sociology. I also learned many different explanations for things that I had always wondered about. I learned, for example, why I had such a bad experience in school as a child and why we (i.e., my single parent mom, my brother, and I) were always so poor. It was because of structured inequalities and social biases against single women (biases which still exist today). I also learned about social classes, racism, classism, capitalism, and communism. I learned about gender and socialization, social control, and a plethora of other fascinating sociological facts and theories. From the very first day, I was hooked. This is what I wanted to know about! I wanted to know about the world I had been plopped into and sociology provided that. Using the tools and methods provided by sociologists, I came to understand about the world we live in and how each individual creates it in our day-to-day acts of reinforcement.
Of course, this did not make me a very happy camper because as I learned, the world we live in is a very messed up place. We live in a world of ghastly contrasts. Hollywood stars and corporate moguls jetting around in private planes while 16,000 children a day starve to death. Women who, no matter how hard they try, often end up poor and alone while the husbands take home the pay cheque, pension, and a younger woman. The working classes who struggle to feed their family while the corporate executives grow fat on six figure salaries.
Power for some, hunger for others.
Privilege for a few, wage slavery (or literal slavery in the sweatshops and forced sex shops of the world) for the rest.
Yuck!
As sociologists revealed, it truly was a world of ghastly contrasts and the more I descended into the bowels of the discipline of sociology, the more I realized just how ghastly it all was. By the time I was done my degree, I saw there was very little that was pretty about our world. I was like the “Grim Traveller” from Bruce Cockburn’s song of the same name looking at the world and weeping at the suffering and the pain.