University of Vermont - Spring 2025
Developing Sociological Theory
People have lots of ideas about how society works: explanations for why the social world is the way that it is, why things tend to unfold as they do. Every day you and I use these ideas – both implicit and explicit ones – to make predictions and decisions about what to do in our local social worlds. Unfortunately, many of these ideas are different varieties of bad. They’re bad because they are often wrong. Or, unhelpful because they are deeply incomplete. Or, problematic because they are based on our sharply limited experience. Or, because they fail to account for an accumulated basis of sociological knowledge generated over hundreds of years of scholarly and practical work. Sometimes these ideas are just common sense and therefore do not help us understand the social world in new and more useful ways.
So how do we develop ideas that are good, useful, increasingly correct, rigorous, or otherwise interesting about the social world? The academic discipline of sociology is in the business of creating sociological theory: explanations for why the social world is as it is, how social situations unfold, why so many dimensions of social inequalities exist and persist, and what might be done to create social change. This course will explore some foundational theoretical approaches and expose you to the craft of making, using, and critiquing sociological theory.
This course will begin with some very basic questions, like: Why theorize? What counts as theory? And, Where have these ideas come from? We’ll progress through studying some of the key works of three important social thinkers: Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl Marx. Towards the end we’ll read and discuss some more contemporary theories of power and knowledge, and work to craft our own theoretical accounts of a sociological puzzle that matters to us.
We live in a risky world. Accelerating and compounding crises seem to threaten human health at unprecedented scale. Some all too familiar examples of these grave threats include Covid-19, cholera, smallpox, influenza, HIV/AIDS, Ebola, Zika, diabetes, cancer, mpox, and major mental illnesses. These health crises simultaneously challenge our political institutions to respond, disrupt our economic and social lives, and produce conflict in ways that can be unpredictable and unsettling. At the same time, we also seem to live during perhaps the healthiest and most prosperous period of all human existence. Global averages of life expectancy have steadily risen over the past two hundred years, as have incomes and wealth, though in exceedingly unequal ways. How should we make sense of these puzzling patterns that appear to point in opposite directions? What leads some of us to be insulated from these threats and others to be constantly and forcefully exposed?
This course will analyze a range of historical and contemporary global health crises through the lens of the social construction, unequal distribution, and efforts to mitigate risk: our inevitably social and political efforts to make sense of an uncertain and likely dangerous future. We privately enact ideas about risk when we decide to drive the speed limit, get vaccinated, or avoid things we believe could be dangerous. We publicly construct and govern risk when we advance public health policies that constrain ‘individual agency’, create rules that regulate technology, or otherwise seek to coordinate to promote population or community wellbeing. The tensions between public and private understandings and practices of enacting risk are what often make global health problems into full scale crises.
By examining a series of contemporary and historical case studies of global health crises – and the changing and heterogeneous modes of socially constructing, scientifically defining, and politically governing risk – we can perhaps make better sense of our current moment and how we might, or ought, to think about our own uncertain future.
University of Vermont - Fall 2024
University of Vermont - Spring 2024