1870 Census listing all Kings in Clinton Co NY

Protected: A Final Exam

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Protected: A Take Home Exam

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PowerPoint Examples

Student PowerPoints are posted here.

caste-system-in-brave-new-world-by-kent-turtz

 

Student Commentaries!

There’ve been some great commentaries written for our sociology class.  Read them here, put yours here!

A book for those who liked the lecture on organization and institutions

Take a look at  “Social Networks and Organizations”.  You can read the first few pages online at Amazon.com.

Michel Foucault

For those of you who want a challenge here is a website dedicated to Michel Foucault, a structuralist/poststructuralist sociologist.  If you are so inclined… ENJOY!

Thoughts on Sidewalk

Everyday, people walk past street vendors in New York City without even noticing that the vendors exist.  How many people stop and think about these street vendors and understand what their lives are all about?  Mitchell Duneier explores the social world of street vending, and he conveys the complexity of urban life and the “sidewalk”.

             Before reading this article I believed that all street vendors lived a simple life.  I thought that the average vendor was a homeless person who worked individually and competed against other vendors at his or her own stand on the sidewalk in order to survive and to try to make the best living possible.  Through personal experiences, numerous interviews, and research on sidewalk life, Duneier illustrated that sidewalk life is very complex and that my assumptions were completely wrong.  Duneier observed that sidewalk life is crucial in urban areas and that the sidewalk is the place where a sense of mutual support must be felt between vendors if they are going to successfully live together.  I also found out that vendors are very often mistreated by the police.  Duneier revealed that police throw vendors’ merchandise, clothes, tables, and other belongings into the trash when the vendors leave their stands.  Vendors depend on one another for social support, and they look out for each other’s best interests.  This article completely changed my viewpoint of urban street vending.  I now know that street vendors are individuals who work together to survive in a larger society, the “sidewalk”.  One way to get a true sense of what vendors go through may be to do what Duneier did, and become a vendor yourself.

C Laber Soc 101

Drugs and the fate of girls

This article from Newsweek gives us a sense of the far reaching effects of the criminalization of drugs. 

The Tyranny of Nodes

All scientists struggle with the challenge of describing the material and non-material worlds in mathemathical terms. The wonder of it is that so much has already been put into equations and that these equations do a reliable job of representing reality. 

Social scientists have longed for a way to produce these wonderful mathematical tools for their own disciplines.  One theory and method that has proved to be a fairly hopeful path is Social Network Theory.  There are problems here as with all theory, and for most of us the math is mindboggling so we rely on the programs that do the work for us (a problem in itself).  Still this is a fascinating subject even if the fine details leave us clueless. 

Once in a while a researcher writes something that is relatively easy to understand about the work they are involved in. This social networking blog is such a case, especially if you read all the way through the discussion so that you can see how Dr. Martin Luther King used the concept of nodes (inherent in social networking theory) without even realizing it in his beautiful “Let Freedom Ring” speech.

Before you go to the blog see if you can find the nodes in this excerpt.  Don’t worry if you can’t.  This is not a test.

And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.
Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.
Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.
Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.
But not only that.
Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.
Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi,
from every mountainside, let freedom ring !