About This Course

This course will challenge your views on a wide range of issues that affect us all. It will also excite your interest in a unique sociological way of understanding your world. The course showcases the eclectic nature of the discipline and the contemporary debates that animate it. We will analyze the globalization of culture, emerging patterns of class and gender inequality in Canada and internationally, the redefinition of sexuality, changes in the organization of families, the social dimension of environmental problems, criminal and deviant behaviour, and so on. You will learn to understand these and other pressing social issues by analyzing the way the social world is organized. We may like to think of ourselves as perfectly free but powerful social forces open up some opportunities and close off others, constraining our freedom and helping to make us what we are. By examining the operation of these social forces, sociology can help us know ourselves. The course is also about skills-building-skills useful not only for success at U of T, but beyond the walls of the university. That means you will learn about sociology not solely by reading about it, but also by practicing it.