SOC 462 Applied Social Change

Overview of Course

From political protests to signing petitions to volunteering in soup kitchens to making documentary films, efforts at social change are happening all around us. This course brings a sociological perspective to explore the wide range of action that people, organizations and communities take to effect social change. That means that we seek to understand the systemic injustices that such groups are trying to solve. This helps us evaluate how to best go about changemaking: different approaches serve different purposes. We will focus on two broad categories of changemaking: activism and intervention, evaluating the pros and cons of each for given types of issues that groups want to change. We will focus on the value of data in understanding the problems to be solved and understanding social attitudes about those problems that might hinder or support particular types of change to actually take place. We will learn practical research methods and employ them in hands-on projects across the voyage. Students will collect their own original data, conduct their own original data analysis and put it all in service of changemaking.