Analytic Sociological Journal USE PARAGRAPHS IN YOUR JOURNALS FOR STRUCTURE, ORGANIZATION, AND CLARITY Sociological Journal Guidelines and the Sociological Journal offers students the opportunity to write about connections between their own lives and sociological concepts. Students write a total of THREE responses to the prompts below. Please address the entire prompt and thoroughly elaborate on the examples discussed. Your journal entries should be well organized, well-structured, and well-written. College-level writing is expected for this assignment. Make sure to use paragraph breaks in your journals. Formatting: Please, type this assignment using Times New Roman, 12-point font, use double space, and have 1-inch margins all around. Each journal response should be between 1½-2 pages. Please include a title page and reference page/bibliography. Use the ASA (American Sociological Association) reference style. See the Quick Tips for ASA Style Guide PDF in our Canvas Shell. ONE document with the three journal entries clearly identified (e.g., 1, 2, 3). The document will be reviewed by Turnitin.com, so please, make sure to cite your sources. WRITE IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF ME (an online college student) Journal Prompts Journal #1: The Sociological Imagination and the Coronavirus: Drawing from Chapter 1, define and describe the sociological imagination. Using the concept of the sociological imagination, discuss how our society’s response to the Coronavirus pandemic is shaping your life (remember, it is society’s response to the Coronavirus that is shaping our lives, not only the virus itself*). Please address the economy, education, media, and/or family (choose two). Brief work already done for JOURNAL 1 – Journal #1: The Sociological Imagination and the Coronavirus: The sociological imagination is the capacity to comprehend how individual experiences and personal challenges are influenced by broader historical, social, and structural factors. C. Wright Mills explained it as the analysis of the interplay between an individual’s personal life story and the wider historical context in which they exist. The coronavirus pandemic provides an opportunity to apply the sociological imagination and see how a large-scale public health event can disrupt many aspects of social life. For me the key areas impacted are education and the economy. When it comes to education, most colleges and universities rapidly shifted classes online in order to promote public health through social distancing. However, this has challenged many students like myself who struggle with online formats and benefit from in-person interactions. These personal troubles connect to broader issues around educational inequality and the “digital divide.” The switch also impacts social dynamics, changing peer interactions and support systems. The pandemic’s economic fallout also shaped peoples experiences. Many have lost jobs, internships, or face greater financial need even as their tuition remains the same. This connects to macro trends like widespread unemployment, stock market volatility, rising debt, and declining GDP resulting from social distancing policies. These economic effects put personal pressure on students like myself counting on work income to fund their education. So through the sociological imagination, we can analyze how ones education and career prospects have become disrupted during the pandemic as a result of larger structural forces, despite personally doing nothing different. This demonstrates the intersection of biography and history. Journal #2, Theory and Coronavirus: Drawing from any chapter you would like, discuss the major tenets of functionalism, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionism. Discuss which theory you find the most helpful in understanding the spread of the Coronavirus and our society’s response to the virus? *Hint: Chapter 1 provides an overview of the three theories. Also, in most chapters, there are examples of how the theories are applied to various social issues. defintions in chapters- Structural functionalism, or functionalist theory, was the dominant theoretical perspective within sociology well into the mid-twentieth century. New (or neo-) functionalists continue to apply their own vision of the theory to study a wide variety of social phenomena today. There are two main principles of functionalism. First, society is conceived as a stable, ordered system made up of interrelated parts, or structures. Second, each structure has a function that contributes to the continued stability or equilibrium of the unified whole. Structures are identified as social institutions such as the family, the educational system, politics, the economy, and religion. They meet society’s needs by performing different functions, and every function is necessary to maintain social order and stability. Any disorganization or dysfunction in a structure leads to change and a new equilibrium; if one structure is transformed, the others must also adjust. For example, if families fail to discipline children, then schools, churches, and the courts must pick up the slack. Conflict theory is the second major school of thought in sociology. Like structural functionalism, it’s a macro-level approach to understanding social life that dates to mid-nineteenth-century Europe. Conflict theory posits that social inequality is the basic characteristic of society. By focusing on inequality, conflict theory helped address some of the critiques of structural functionalism. Sociology’s third grand theory, symbolic interactionism (or interactionist theory), proved its greatest influence through much of the 1900s. It is America’s unique contribution to the discipline and an answer to many of the criticisms of other paradigms. Symbolic interactionism helps us explain both our individual personalities and the ways in which we are all linked together; it allows us to understand the processes by which social order and social change are constructed. As a theoretical perspective, it is vital, versatile, and still evolving. Journal #3, Race-Ethnicity and Coronavirus: Drawing from Chapter 8, Chapter 14, AND a newspaper article* of your choice discuss how racial-ethnic inequality is shaping the spread of the Coronavirus itself (i.e., the epidemiology of the virus) in the U.S. You may focus on a specific U.S. city or state or the entire U.S. The newspaper article must be from a credible source like the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Fox, CNN, etc. – please provide a citation of your source on your reference page/bibliography. BOOK USED- The Real World | Kerry Ferris, Jill Stein SUMMARIES FROM CHAPTER 8 “Race” and “ethnicity” are words we use so often in everyday speech that we might not think we need a definition of either. But people tend to use the words interchangeably, as if they mean essentially the same thing. There is, however, a significant difference between commonsense notions of race and ethnicity and what social scientists have to say about them. SUMMARIES FROM CHAPTER 14
