Teaching a course on the topics of crimes such as murder and mass-shooting, among others? Here is your resource for finding syllabi and assignments from ASA Trails!

Looking for a material to share with students or a resource to help you in your mentoring endeavors? Check this resource, “Majoring in Sociology: A Pathway to Opportunity” from ASA!

When I began teaching undergraduate courses in Bangladesh, my primary goal was to complete the curriculum on time and deliver the course material effectively. But it didn’t take long for me to realize that many of my students were victims of oppression, facing their everyday hardships, and therefore, the fight for social justice seemed far away for them. I recall that many of my students in the Introduction to Environment and Society class came from climate-vulnerable areas, such as flood-affected or Haor basin regions, where floods, agricultural failures, and inadequate infrastructure frequently interrupted their travel for schooling, even interrupting their everyday life and well-being. I recall a student sharing how his entire family had been forced to relocate a couple of times due to flooding, which caused a delay in his education. The narratives and experiences of my students subsequently enabled me to see that instructing environment-related courses in these circumstances necessitated empathy and a curriculum that linked classroom knowledge to students’ everyday lives. To situate these lived experiences within a comprehensive sociological framework, I taught students about Ecologically Unequal Exchange theory from environmental sociology. This theoretical framework clarifies how global trade dynamics systematically intensify environmental degradation and climate susceptibility in Global South nations, while disproportionately favoring industrialized countries in the Global North. I believe that such theoretical understanding is crucial for developing knowledgeable and active citizens who can contribute to local, national, and international initiatives for environmental and social justice, especially in countries in the Global South.

During the first week of my Environmental Justice class at Utah State University, where I am now a PhD candidate, I asked my students to write about the meaning of environmental justice from their perspectives. Their reactions,  influenced by their individual, institutional, and community histories, demonstrated varying degrees of self-awareness and intrinsic motivation. I also noticed many of them mentioned that they are not familiar with the topic and are interested in learning from this course. For instance, one of the students mentioned in a one-week discussion post, “I had not previously considered the connection between my consumption and pollution in another nation.” Another student mentioned in a different week’s discussion post, “I think what is most interesting to me about this week’s readings was how in the dark I was about the topic. I feel like there really hasn’t been much news coverage on the pollution dumps in low-income places. This is probably for a reason because it’s an issue that some don’t really want to be fixed”. This experience inspired me to create course modules that delve more into Environmental Justice (EJ), covering its historical background, addressing how it relates to climate justice, and discussing its connection to larger movements for economic, racial, and social justice worldwide. In this way, I view teaching as a moral responsibility to educate students, empower them to critically engage with environmental injustices, and envision ways to make a difference in ensuring social justice for all. 

These varied teaching environments have enhanced and influenced my pedagogical philosophy. My goal as an instructor is to increase students’ knowledge, enable them to examine complex environmental problems, and empower them to take real action both in and outside the classroom. Learning experiences in both settings (the Global South and Global North) have shaped my evaluation techniques and mentorship strategies for students, considering their varied life experiences. First, I found that education serves as an instrument for promoting social justice, and second, teaching is a reflexive and evolving practice that always needs to be assessed based on cultural responsiveness. 

While teaching in Bangladesh, I presented material on environmental injustices, highlighting how development projects often do not benefit all groups in society equally, which resonated particularly with many students from lower-income backgrounds. A student noted the number of demolitions of slums in urban regions every year, attributing this phenomenon to development programs that mainly benefit the metropolitan elite. She said that she witnessed many families being uprooted overnight without being given any compensation or support for relocation. Although my students are unable to voice their dissatisfaction with urban development projects—which serve the interests of the urban elite at the expense of lower-class people—they take these environmental injustices more personally and find a safe space in class to express their voice, where they can expect empathy and understanding from their teacher and peers.  Conversely, instruction in the USA classroom appears to cultivate a heightened comfort with critical debates and discourses, despite numerous students lacking direct experience with environmental injustice. For example, I observed that many of my students in my environmental justice class addressed environmental injustices experienced by communities they may not have been a part of when they submitted their final assignments. One of my students talked about environmental racism in Cancer Alley, where she mentioned “the pollution and Cancer Alley is overwhelmingly concentrated in one area, which happens to be predominantly black. The health problems caused by the chemical plants and refineries like cancer. Respiratory illness and birth defects are largely born by these communities. This creates an unfair situation where the people who are most vulnerable to environmental harm are also the ones least able to protect themselves”. Another one wrote on Great Salt Lake dust injustice and mentioned that “the toxic dust from the Great Salt Lake is sadly affecting some people more than others. The citizens who live closest to the major dried-up areas of the lakebeds seem to take the brunt of the issue. Another concerning aspect of this is the minorities who are highly targeted most likely cannot afford the medical bill associated with diagnosing, preventing, or taking care of disease. This is a common cycle among cities and it pushed the derogative of “the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer”.

These class experiences in Bangladesh and the USA contexts make me realize that I need to adopt a culturally responsive teaching strategy. While in Bangladesh, I learned the importance of creating a safe space in the classroom where my students can open up, tell their stories, and feel heard and understood. What I learned from my time teaching in the United States is the importance of bridging the gap between theory and real-life examples, often encouraging students to see the world outside their positionality. Teaching in these two different cultural contexts makes me realize that teaching is an iterative practice that must change to meet the needs of the students. 

I believe that these cross-contextual insights will continue to shape my pedagogical approach, motivating me to adopt a teaching stance that fosters critical thinking skills, empowers students to become socially responsible and actively engaged citizens, and inspires them to contribute meaningfully to society in pursuit of social justice. Furthermore, I hope that future educators can utilize this insight from two diverse cultural contexts to develop their own pedagogical strategies that prioritize creating a safe learning environment where students feel valued, respected, and able to grow intellectually.

Mufti Nadimul Quamar Ahmed is a Ph.D. candidate in Environmental Sociology at Utah State University. His academic and community engagements are rooted in sustainability, environmental justice, and the lived experiences of marginalized populations, including immigrant communities in the United States and environmentally vulnerable populations in Bangladesh. Mufti’s PhD research examines how climate change and environmental issues shape Utahns’ migration decisions and fertility planning, and whether migration serves as a climate adaptation strategy for Utah immigrants. He has numerous research publications that have appeared in prestigious journals (Google Scholar) and has presented research at Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins University, and multiple local and national conferences. 

Often, instructors are tasked with career advising for our majors. Check out this review by Catherine Solomon in Teaching Sociology of The Employable Sociologist: A Guide for Undergraduates (Martinez 2023) to see if this could help you prepare for this year!

Deploying sociological theory is a core part of our teaching in cultural studies. Indeed, one of our most prominent theorists and co-founder of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, the late Stuart Hall, was also a sociologist. It is fair to say that cultural studies is about remixing a wide array of social sciences and humanities disciplines – from anthropology to philosophy to literary studies. I completed my PhD in a sociology department, where I also taught a first-year sociology course, before moving to cultural studies. The experience of shifting between these two worlds means I can speak to the value of teaching sociological theory in non-sociology classrooms. 

Recently, I developed and presented lectures for a second-year cultural studies course on consumer culture and introduced the theories of many self-described sociologists throughout the semester. This included Jean Baudrillard, Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, and Celia Lury, to name a few. Partly, drawing in sociologists reflects the magpie-like nature of cultural studies, but it also speaks to the strong contribution that sociology makes to theories of culture. Both sociology and cultural studies are contested spaces in the academy with porous boundaries. Possible key differences include some of sociology’s focus on quantitative methods, and cultural studies’ concern with representation, popular culture, and cultural artifacts, but in general – and particularly when it comes to theory – the lines are fuzzy. 

That we use so many kinds of theorists in cultural studies to help understand what culture is and how it works indicates something about what constitutes good, robust theory. Good theory speaks beyond disciplinary boundaries, offering a framework for understanding the world broadly. As I tell my students at the beginning of every semester, learning theory can help us better understand the world, and ourselves, and in turn might help guide us in how to change the world. Sociological theory is particularly useful for cultural studies because it is not interested in obscure thought experiments but is specifically intended to make sense of social life. 

In these terms, teaching theory is a form of public sociology, or what we – located in other disciplines – might more broadly call engagement. Engagement work is not just happening when we run a public seminar, it’s happening in class, every day on campus. To say that teaching theory is a form of engagement is to understand the task of translation: how can we, as teachers, not only help students to comprehend theory, but also to apply it to urgent social issues of the day, and indeed to their own lives? When I say theory can help us better understand the world, and ourselves, what does this look like? 

In class, we start with the problem we want to understand. What is consumer culture? How has it rapidly changed, and how did we get here? How might we respond? How might it be otherwise? Theory comes in as the framework for sense-making. For example, Baudrillard helps us to make sense of the excesses of consumer culture, how and why value is assigned to things, and how this maps onto class and status differentiation. Theory opens our eyes. After class, when we walk into a department store, we don’t just see objects for sale; we notice how the counters are overflowing with magical piles of products, how the store itself promises deliverance from a fear of scarcity.  

I think it is crucial to highlight the theorists themselves to students. I always try to include a biographical slide that places the theorist in the context of time and place, so that their thoughts are not simply presented as ahistorical disembodied ideas. This also functions as a good check on who constitutes the canon you’re creating – you notice more quickly if every voice you’re appealing to is a dead white man located in the Global North. It’s for this very reason I noticed this semester that I was introducing a lot of sociologists.

This year I also developed a specific assessment task to get students thinking about how the course content applied to their everyday lives. After the lecture for the week was complete, in the first fifteen minutes of their tutorials, they would be given a reflective question that asked students to directly apply the course content to their own experiences. For example, one week they were asked to reflect on a time when they had engaged in conspicuous consumption. In another week, they were asked to reflect on one aspect of cultural capital they have access to and what this says about their class position. We would practice versions of these questions in the lectures, between discussions of theory. Students would be given short breaks in the lecture to brainstorm ideas with their peers. 

Part of the reason for the design of this assessment activity was to create conditions where the possible use of AI was limited. AI is notoriously bad at reflective work, and generally answering these questions requires a level of personal understanding. It would have taken longer to work out how to instruct AI than simply answer the question. I unofficially and affectionately called this task the “have a thought” assessment, where the bar for getting a good mark was rather low. The aim was to reward students who took in the course content and (after some in-lecture scaffolding) genuinely thought about how the ideas applied to their own lives. 

I also wanted to be able to reward students with the kind of grades they might get in a science lab, through showing their basic understanding of key concepts. To return to sociology specifically, this kind of task asks students to situate themselves within a social context, to reflect on how their desires are in large part structured by the world around them. In my view, teaching theory is in part about teaching real-world applications, and we can and should test and reward students on their understanding of these applications. Building in reflective aspects to this testing helps achieve multiple goals in the age of AI. 

There is no doubt that sociologists will continue to play a key role in my teaching, in the vibrant interdisciplinary space of cultural studies. My hope is that by the same token, sociologists might also glance over to those of us in other disciplines, to see how sociological theory is being taken up, where it travels, and the good it does. 

As I write this, sociology is under attack in Australian universities, and the fate of the discipline is precarious. Macquarie University is proposing to eliminate the major and make the majority of their sociology staff redundant. The Australian National University (ANU), where I studied, is also amalgamating their sociology department and cutting staff. The vital role that sociology plays in shaping many other disciplinary pursuits in the modern university should not be forgotten. 

Sociology is the study of social life – it is essential to developing critical thinking in our student cohorts around why society is structured in the ways that it is, and the role individuals play within these structures. Sociology offers us theory, but is always applied and with thoughtful methods. It is about real people and real life. It is about imagining possible worlds and laying out a plan for how we might achieve change. Any threat to this must be urgently reconsidered, for the flow on effects it will surely have beyond the lines of disciplinary boundaries.

Hannah McCann is a senior lecturer in cultural studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Hannah’s academic work sits within the field of critical femininities, with research on topics including queer femininities, beauty culture, and queer fandom. She is the author of Queering Femininity: Sexuality, Feminism and the Politics of Presentation (Routledge), co-author of Queer Theory Now: From Foundations to Futures (available via Bloomsbury), and co-editor of Taylor Swift: Culture, Capital, and Critique (Routledge). She has a forthcoming monograph Emotions, Bodies, and Identities in the Hair and Beauty Salon: Caring Beyond Skin Deep (Bloomsbury).

Listen to Jon Wynn discuss how he “tweaked the formula” for engaging different audiences by writing fiction inspired by and using sociology and social theory via this “Give Theory a Chance” podcast!

As a part of our Teaching Theory Special Series, First Publics invited Drs. Wesley Longhofer and Daniel Winchester, authors of Social Theory Re-Wired, to talk about their goals for and experiences with writing their theory reader. Drs. Longhofer and Winchester discussed the origins and inspiration for the book, and their dedication to empowering students and providing instructors with a set of tools to build a theory course that excites both them and their students.

First Publics: Tell us about the origin of this book. What inspired you to write it together?

Wesley Longhofer: Dan and I both went to graduate school at the University of Minnesota, and one of the things I really cherished about our program was the opportunity many of us had to teach. And my first course was a required social theory class for sociology majors held on Thursday nights. Not surprisingly, I thought, “Well, great, nobody’s going to want to be here.” In the class, I had nontraditional learners, new Americans who had just immigrated from Liberia, musicians in some really successful rock bands, and some really sharp students who wanted to go to graduate school. Then I had a lot of students who were like, “I just have to get through this.” And social theory was not a class known for being very approachable or accessible. So I taught it in a way that I consumed it and learned it, which meant that I drew from a lot of media and music. We would discuss Weber’s ideal types of social action using characters from “Do the Right Thing,” we would listen to Radiohead when we talked about Weber and the iron cage and The Coup when we talked about Marx –  all as a way to make the text itself more approachable. 

Then I was asked to teach an online version of it asynchronously (this was before we all became accustomed to classes on Zoom). This was around the time when Contexts came to the University of Minnesota, and Chris Uggen and Doug Hartman were the editors. I was on the graduate board and later became the graduate editor. And Contexts really taught me how to how write for a general audience. And so that’s how I wrote that online content. I took all of my lecture notes, including the film clips, song lyrics, and other media, and turned in into a text. Doug then encouraged me to turn the online content into a book and introduced me to an editor at Routledge. But after I wrote the proposal for the book, I took a job in a business school and knew I wasn’t going to be teaching social theory anytime soon. So I brought Dan on and said, “Hey, Dan, why don’t we write this together? You think about theory deeply. You’re also an incredible teacher, and you might be teaching theory in the future. Why don’t we just collaborate?”  It was serendipitous, though. Had I not taught an asynchronous online class, I wouldn’t have had the building blocks, and had Contexts not been in Minnesota, I wouldn’t have had the connection with the publisher. And so it was those two things that made it possible. Then the shape that it took really was through the collaboration.

FP: Can you talk a little bit about your choice to frame the textbook using language of technology (e.g., social theory “rewired,” system updates, etc.)? How does this framing align or contribute to your vision of making social theory more understandable to today?

Daniel Winchester: One of the things that Wes and I learned early on working with Routledge is that you have to have a justification or vision for why there needs to be yet another social theory reader on the market. There are already many out there, many of them quite good. But when Wes and I were talking about the type of undergrad theory course that we wanted to teach or would want to take, we talked a lot about making it more of a conversation about big ideas. So, that’s when this idea of the thematic structure of the book came along. The book is organized into five major themes that we argue social theorists have been discussing since the discipline began, even before the discipline began, before there was a thing called sociology. And so when we were thinking about that, we were thinking about restructuring the basic outline of a theory class. But, we also quickly realized that a lot of our primary examples, especially connecting to the present day, were about technology and how central technological change is to issues of social order, capitalism, inequality, identity, and surveillance. Technology and technological change have been a huge focus of many social theorists. Of course, social theorists today, like Ruha Benjamin, are looking at the development of AI technology. But even going back to Marx, who had a lot to say about industrialization and rapid technological change, not just for capitalist production, but even for what he thought was going to be this post-scarcity society of Communism. Max Weber, who started this conversation about how technology supercharged our society’s penchant for focusing on instrumental concerns, instrumental rationality, sometimes over more value-rational concerns. And so in some ways, technology, we realized, was an evergreen topic for thinking and theorizing about society. So, it coalesced into technology being the organizing theme for the entire product.

WL:  We also started this project in 2009-2010, about five years after Facebook was formed but right when it was taking off. The early days of social media were a massive experiment in impression management – how do we represent the self in these technological environments? It opened up all these other conversations, too, that have also been foundational in social theory. The questions that we were asking at the time were whether technology was pulling us apart or bringing us closer together. That’s a Durkheim kind of question. So we had the title in our heads, and then I thought maybe the cover should look like a network map or a circuit board where we could illustrate all of these connections across contemporary and classical.

FP: There has been an ongoing discussion among sociologists regarding who and what theories we should highlight in social theory courses. For instance, the inspiration for First Publics, builds on the work of Michael Burawoy, who taught social theory himself and wrote on teaching living theory. In his work, he suggests that sociology is unique in its attachment to the sociological “canon” which can make teaching theory difficult, but not if we treat theory as a language and put theorists in conversation with each other. What guided your decisions in selecting contemporary extensions, as well as the contributors for system updates in each chapter?

WL: Choices have to be made, and our own biases go into making those choices. We gravitate towards things that we like (which is maybe why there’s not a lot of Talcott Parsons in there). So, a few things helped guide our decisions in the most recent edition. First was what we were hearing from instructors. It’s a book that is assigned in classes. These are the instructors who are in the trenches teaching social theory. So, what are they teaching and what do they want more of? Second was the conversations the discipline was having. What is the value of a canon? Does it box us in? Does it limit innovation? Who is being excluded? Finally, social theory has always been a response to the times, and so calls for racial justice, the pandemic, the climate crisis – these were all pushing us to ask different kinds of questions and dig deeper into theory. So, we heard that we needed more post-colonial theory, more on race and inequality, so we added Cedric Robinson. We needed more on technology, so we brought in Ruha Benjamin and Shoshana Zuboff. 

DW: We start each of the sections with what is generally thought of as a key classical theorist. A member of the so-called canon, whether that’s Durkheim for the section on social order, or Marx and Engels on the social consequences of capitalism, or Weber on the potential dark sides of modern life. But I think there are absolutely legitimate criticisms of canonizing particular social theorists. Wes and I agreed to move away from that. But, what we thought, and I still very much think this after teaching undergrad social theory now for a dozen years or so, is that there is something illuminating about being able to show students that a person who wrote 150 years ago was writing and concerned about many of the same things that they are right now. Sometimes, you have to do some work to show them that’s the case, but part of what starting with a classical theorist does is make students realize that sociology is a relevant and long conversation about issues that don’t go away, that these are things that we’re still grappling with today. It also allows students to see that these “canonical” figures had limitations and sometimes outright biases and prejudices in their way of thinking, but at the same time, they also had incredibly insightful things to say. I think being able to demonstrate those connections and the historical length of these conversations about issues of social order, about capitalism, about power, is really interesting and fun.

WL: I think part of it is that we teach theory in the way that we were taught theory. So, that becomes reified over time. It takes a long time to undo and to change that. We designed the book in the spirit of Burawoy to say that these theorists are responding to conversations of prior theorists, and let’s focus on the conversations that are both looking into the past, but also into the future. We have an alternative table of contents that if you’re really wedded to the traditional way of teaching theory and you really like the canon. It’s all there. But we want to think about it as more evergreen conversations that theorists have been having. 

FP: What are your hopes for how the textbook is used in a social theory course by instructors and by students? 

DW: I would say one of the things I hope all instructors and students are able to get from this book is the ability to have conversations. Reading a lot of theoretical work and social theory is just hard. But, I hope that in the process, as instructors are breaking down the difficult material with their students and with the book, it leads to a place where students really start to be engaged in conversations about these big ideas. So it becomes less about knowing the details of Marx’s or Foucault’s theoretical apparatus, than it is about seeing that this person has a really interesting idea about how market crashes occur, or how social disorder and disintegration happen, and that can be a point where everybody can have a chance to be a part of the conversation. Sometimes students are tired, sometimes instructors are tired, but I do hope that there are those moments where you just have these really insightful and exciting conversations about a topic that happens to be central to sociological theory. 

FP: Some sociologists express that the connection between theory courses and public sociology is not as intuitive as other courses in sociology, especially for students. In what ways do you think your textbook encourages students and instructors to make this connection?  

WL: In writing the book, we wanted students to understand that people think in theories all the time. We may not use that language, but we all have explanations for the way the world works that are informed by our prior experiences and observations. But too often, we think that theory must only come from the academy.  Ali Meghji has this great Sociological Theory piece from last year that argues Burawoy’s idea of public sociology was perhaps too one-directional, that it was more about getting sociology out and less about getting the public in. Meghji draws upon, for example, the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, which had a pretty serious theory of neoliberalism that talked about financial markets, colonialism, and the military to explain subjugation and oppression. That’s social theory, too, in that it is a framework that draws upon lived experience to help explain a problem. So, I think if we were to redo the book again, we might want to think about some texts that don’t come from the academy that might help us get at these same kinds of questions from a different perspective. 

DW:  The way that we tried to design the book and the website was to encourage bringing people into the conversation, to, in some ways, decenter theory as this mystified conversation or rarified set of skills. As Wes said, everyone thinks theoretically about the world around them. It’s just a matter of how we build the skills and critical capacities to get people to do that better, to do it more reflectively, to do it more critically. When reading someone like Bourdieu or Dorothy Smith or Patricia Collins, we want students to see that person thinks theoretically like them, but at a level that’s really sophisticated. We think that it can get students excited about merging their own thoughts on the issue and putting them into conversation with these theorists. I think that what we’ve tried to do with this book, and what I think I try to do in most of my undergrad theory courses, is make it like you’re a part of this conversation as much as Pierre Bourdieu. 

WL: It’s also important to remind ourselves that a lot of the early theorists were public sociologists, Du Bois being probably the most prominent one. But Marx wrote that philosophers explain the world, but the point is to change it – we have got to move from the abstract to the practical. That was a public sociology kind of statement. So, this idea that theory is relevant for the public is not new. It’s actually a very old idea. 

FP: Is there anything else about the book that we haven’t asked you that you’d like to say?

WL: It’s a reader – a lot of its weight, both literally and figuratively, is just original texts. And I think this is a challenge for many instructors. How can we help students read original theory when we are constantly told that students don’t read anymore?  And we get that some instructors may not think their students need to read 20 pages of Distinction. But we also know that most instructors love reading theory and want their students to fall in love with it, too.

DW: I agree with that. Part of what makes us “old school” is that we both have a commitment to reading, and that part of what a theory course teaches you to do is to read hard things. I think students can actually take pride in that. By the end of a theory course, students can take pride in the fact that they have a working understanding and knowledge of some pretty heavy ideas that have been really influential and consequential for the development of entire societies. I mean, everybody talks about Marx all the time, but I doubt many of the people who talk about Marx and Marxism have read him. But our theory students do, so they’ll have informed ideas, criticisms, etc., from that process.

Wesley Longhofer is an associate professor of organization and management in the Goizueta Business School at Emory University. His research interests include organizations, climate change, and human rights. He currently serves as the Senior Director of Emory’s Center for Faculty Development and Excellence and Assistant Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs.

Daniel Winchester is an associate professor of sociology at Purdue University. His research examines how cultural practices shape human experience and action, with a particular focus on the study of religion. He has conducted ethnographic studies of conversions to Islam and Eastern Orthodox Christianity, respectively, and is currently writing a book analyzing how Evangelical missionary organizations produce particular understandings and experiences of “the global”. In addition to Social Theory Re-Wired, he has published theoretical work in journals like Social Forces, Sociological Theory, Theory & Society, Sociology of Religion, and Journal for the Scientific Study, among others.

If your looking for books to assign that address social and public issues and have accompanying multimedia content: check out “The Authors’ Attic” interview series by Social Problems on YouTube.

What advice would you give sociology teachers? Join the conversation with sociology graduate students who answered the question in this recent Teaching Sociology article by Sanchez and Gilbertson.

Answer the question: “why are sociologists underrepresented in the world of public policy?” with Josh McCabe in his recent ASA Footnote.