I’ve recently reimagined an introductory sociology course into a digital sociology course that introduces students to social science research methods and foundational sociological concepts. In this class, students conduct a digital auto-ethnography of their social media feeds on platforms like Instagram and TikTok and use theories like C. Wright Mills’ “sociological imagination” to better understand how their individual identities, attitudes, and behaviors are shaped by social media algorithms. In another project, students conduct a content analysis of posts on varying subreddits on the aggregate platform of Reddit to get a pulse on hegemonic and counterhegemonic attitudes and practices on everything from contemporary dating culture to sports. And each week, students post to our discussion board hosted on Padlet, a site that mirrors social media platforms to make content visually engaging and interactive. Students can heart-react comments, upvote or downvote, or even insert a gif to complement their post. I’ve felt comfortable, excited even, digitizing many elements of my course, from discussion boards to annotation software and even gamification through platforms like Menti and Kahoot. 

And yet, despite teaching an introductory course with a digital sociology structure and foundation, I still struggle with what it looks like to invite and incorporate generative artificial intelligence into my classroom ethically and responsibly.  I worry about integrating AI without contemplating AI. During that roundtable session, we explored what it meant to teach sociology during the digital revolution. I vividly recall the litany of conflicting emotions that characterized the seemingly explosive emergence and accessibility of generative artificial intelligence technologies in higher education. Instructors collectively panicked, rejoiced, and feared the impact of these rapidly evolving and expanding technologies in their classrooms. In essence, my desire is to critically engage with AI in the classroom to increase my students’ prospects in this world that they need to survive in. One of the most persistent and pervasive questions for me has been: how is the proliferation of generative artificial intelligence going to impact my pedagogy and curriculum? Most importantly, how is this going to impact my students? 

While there remains pedagogical and curricular stratification in the deployment of AI knowledge and literacies, I am also concerned about the implications and outcomes of generative artificial intelligence on broader society within structural and intersecting oppressions of classism, racism, and ableism.  While I may be entertained by asking ChatGPT to generate a recipe for dinner with the three expired ingredients in my pantry or plan a weekend excursion in Philadelphia for under $200, I am worried about my own professional disposability. I worry even more about the disposability of economically dispossessed folks, people of color, and people with disabilities within a racialized neoliberal landscape where AI radically replaces and displaces humans from so many industries, such as healthcare, media, entertainment, and now education, while the mostly white and male titans of tech reap obscene profits. Will I be teaching my students to be complicit in their own demise? What about my own? AI brings with it existential and structural questions in a society where work is tethered to our being and sense of self and there are worries that AI will limit the need for university. In light of these concerns, I’ve arrived at a paradoxical point in my teaching. While I understand the utility of having my students develop AI literacy, I don’t feel comfortable, willing, or prepared enough to bring AI into my classroom in a material way. This is likely informed by my most pressing concerns: where and how does AI fit into racial capitalism? And if I bring it into the classroom, what exactly am I complicit in contributing to?  

In Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning, authors José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson guide instructors on how to think, teach, and learn with artificial intelligence. There’s a genealogy to the evolution of AI, though its ubiquity is a relatively recent phenomenon accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of pushing AI out of the classroom, Bowen and Watson suggest that educators embrace the change that is already here by reimagining creativity, assessments, and assignments. But while attending national disciplinary conferences and teaching at a public college where the student body is predominantly first-generation college students and/or students of color, I’ve noticed a discourse that concerns me. At private colleges and universities, instructors are inviting AI use into their classrooms and integrating platforms like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini directly into their curriculum. In these classrooms, instructors teach students how to create effective prompts to generate desirable outcomes and results. They also teach students critical AI literacy that includes how to discern what is useful in outputs relative to what ought to be questioned, changed, or modified and why. Instead of policing AI use, instructors teach students how to use, leverage, and develop AI skills that would prove advantageous in a future labor market where an estimated 40-60% of jobs will require AI literacy, and a projected 300 million jobs will be replaced by AI.  

This sits in stark comparison to the role of AI in some public colleges, especially ones that are predominantly working class and of color. In these classrooms, AI use is often met with at least skepticism and, sometimes, outright derision. Fears that students will outsource critical thinking and plagiarize their assignments inform the policing, restricting, and regulating the use of AI in many classrooms. Instead of moving forward, many classrooms implemented seemingly archaic curricular changes that included a return to classrooms of yesteryear, like in-class examinations and essays–even oral exams–to assess students’ acquisition of topical content. This remodeling, which is often punitive and fear-based, is suggestive that institutional culture holds a not-so-quiet belief that working-class students and students of color are duplicitous and not to be trusted with emergent technologies, and it also leaves these students underprepared to navigate an increasingly digitally oriented world. As an economically dispossessed mixed-race, first-generation college student myself, I refuse to have internalized classism and racism guide how and when I introduce AI into my classroom. There are some public colleges that offer hope, such as City College CUNY where courses are being offered on the intersections of AI and society. These courses teach students how to “critically examine the cultural, economic, and social impacts of AI, considering topics like ethics, power dynamics, automation, and the future of work.” And while I’m comfortable discussing and debating AI with my students, I’m not ready to bring AI to life in my classroom.

Alyssa Lyons earned her PhD in sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her teaching and research interests revolve around education, racism, sexuality, social class, and gender. She has published in Contexts and the Journal for Ethnic and Migration Studies. She currently blogs for Everyday Sociology.

Teaching social theory is just plain fun. For me, it’s an opportunity to see our world in a multidimensional way. Who needs a comic book multiverse when you can look at social phenomena through different perspectives? Inspired by sociologist Arthur Stinchcombe, one of my favorite things to prompt theory students with is to present them with a news item and ask them to discuss it through different perspectives: “A good sociologist can find three plausible explanations for why they see a particular social phenomenon.” I like to remind students that ‘three’ works particularly well because it syncs up with the three big umbrellas of social theory (Conflict Perspective/Marxism, Structural Functionalism, and Interpretive), but it doesn’t have to be so simplistic.

Why do we have a housing crisis in a country with such great prosperity? Why do people shirk vaccinations and accept other drugs so readily? Why do we have such a massive incarcerated population in the United States when crime has decreased? These are complex questions that demand nuanced answers.

‘Multiverse’ as a term wasn’t coined by Marvel impresario Stan Lee but by the sociologically-attuned American philosopher William James in 1895. In his essay, boldly titled “Is Life Worth Living?” James offered the term to remind us of the “plasticity” of what we see, and to suggest how we can see a world that God has created but also one that sciences like evolutionary theory can reveal. (It’s actually quite a fun read.) Today, we know the “many worlds theory” as a problem of quantum mechanics and, as I often tell my students, “I’m not that kind of doctor.”

For sociology, James is one of the key figures who helped lay the foundation for one of the cornerstone theories of contemporary sociology: Symbolic Interactionism. James’ philosophy, called pragmatism, was based on the concept of the “social self” as a social construction, arguing that human nature arises from real-world social interactions and that these interactions are a worthy unit of analysis. He proposed that our thoughts are generated as a “stream of consciousness” and that meaning is constructed through experiences. Pragmatism lives on through George Herbert Mead and symbolic interactionism. James’ philosophy asserted that there was not a single self but multiple ones that arise from interaction—an idea that lived on through Charles Cooley’s ‘looking glass self’ and Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. (Read more, here.)

Of course, as fun as it is on the big screen (and maybe less fun in physics books), I do not think it’s sociologically useful to imagine that there are multiple universes floating out there with multiple versions of myself teaching math or literature instead of sociology. What I do think is sociologically interesting is just how much people from different life experiences can have very different interpretations of the same phenomenon. The idea of the multiverse as a sociological concept—which I assuredly wasn’t taught in graduate school—does not mean the many worlds depicted with multiple comic book heroes and villains.

I see the sociological multiverse as a potential intervention. Are we increasingly seeing the world in a more uni-versal, or one-dimensional, way? Alas, I think so. The social media filter bubbles through which we see the world are algorithmically-tweaked to reflect back to us the world we expect to see. This much we know. Written in the early 1960s—exactly midway between where James was writing and where we sit today—social theorist Herbert Marcuse could not have imagined a social media-infused world when he warned that mass media technology and modern consumerist life were repressing critical thought and freedom. And yet, Marcuse’s fear of the death of critical thinking is even more important today.

Students, reflecting the population at large, seem to be quick to answer the sociological puzzles I offer above. “There is a large unhoused population because people are lazy and don’t want to work.” “People don’t take vaccines because they are stupid.” “People are in jail because some people are just inherently bad people.” Maybe folks aren’t willing to say such callous things in class, but you get the idea. These are not just problems for students. Sociologists, perhaps rewarded via social media, are disturbingly too quick to find one-dimensional explanations for complex social phenomena. It’s class. Race. Sexism. In the words of one sociologist, “Fuck Nuance.”

But nuance is where multidimensionality exists. Nuance is where people of divergent opinions find commonality. For William James, “Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs ‘pass,’ so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them” (read more, here). The philosophical—rather than comic-book—multiverse challenges us not to let our own truth pass without challenge. In a call-out age, challenges come with heightened social repercussions. The need to “Call In” (please see Loretta J. Ross’ brilliant short TED Talk on the subject, or read this New York Times article) is a profound invitation from the multiverse.

Teaching theory—not one theory, but all of them—with equal passion and vigor—is the way to get students to think in that multidimensional way. A clever reader might notice that I cite sociologists who are inspired by three different perspectives: Marcuse (from a more Marxist background), Stinchcombe (from a more economic and organizational sociology), and James (who helped shape the interactionist perspective). I think this is how I see teaching not as a means of teaching students what to think, but as a way of teaching them how to think.

Jonathan Wynn is professor and department chair of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His most recent book was The City & the Hospital: The paradox of medically overserved communities and his novel, The Set Up, lands in May 2025.

As an academic, I am driven by the following commitments: liberatory knowledge, sharing power, and critical application. These values inform my teaching and relationship building with students. In the spring of 2023, as a PhD student, I was approached with the opportunity to teach sociological theory at a private Catholic university. I was both excited and terrified about the prospect. Throughout my academic journey, I have been intentional in selecting academic communities and spaces that value an emancipatory sociology. Therefore, I was a bit nervous, and had been warned by the department chair, about the possibility of pushback from students if I chose to teach “charged” theoretical perspectives such as critical race theory and intersectionality. Despite the warning that my pedagogical approaches might be “too radical” in the more conservative-leaning institution context, this classroom became a place of engaged and energized learning. I believe this was primarily the result of setting classroom norms of thoughtful disagreement and by creating opportunities for reflection and application. The students who I thought might push back against these charged theoretical topics, instead ravenously leaned in and engaged with them. 

On the first day of class, I conducted a poll with students asking them what they hoped to get out of the class. The overwhelming response from students was that they felt that theory was intimidating and complicated, so they hoped the class would help them understand theory in a more accessible and relevant way. While I had a syllabus crafted at this point, in honoring my commitment to sharing power, the students and I reviewed their feedback, concerns, and hopes for the class and made some changes. Through this first conversation with the students, we collectively set the tone for the semester, something that I believe set us up for success. 

One of the most pivotal conversations in this early discussion was on the purpose and presence of disagreement, both between social theorists and between the theorists and students’ lived experiences. In keeping with my values and commitments as a scholar, I included theorists who challenge systems of power, such as Frantz Fanon, David Roediger, Judith Butler, and more. I also chose several clusters of theorists who directly conflicted with one another. For instance, we spent several weeks discussing early racial theories in the U.S., comparing the Chicago School with the Atlanta School of Sociology and comparing Booker T. Washington with W.E.B. DuBois’ belief on racial progress of Black Americans. Through intentionally choosing theorists that were in conflict with one another, I was able to set the norm at the beginning of class that there would be disagreement. By setting and discussing this norm, I emphasized how conflict and disagreement has shaped the development of sociological theory. Once set and agreed upon, I wrote the following into our class policies:      

“This class covers topics which will challenge your thinking and ask you to critically examine society in new and different ways. You may find certain topics difficult given your unique intersectional identities and lived experiences. You certainly will not agree with all of the authors nor perspectives we cover in the class. My expectation is that you see the sociological perspective as a tool. It is an analytic and a framework that you are expected to understand and apply to various social problems.” 

In setting the expectation of disagreement throughout the course, I believe, students came in with an open mind, willing to challenge and be challenged. This disposition toward learning the sociological tools and engaging in thoughtful dialogue, allowed for immensely engaging, interesting, and passionate in-class discussions. Many students, energized by these discussions, shared that this space made them think differently about their own lives and the world around them. For example, one group, in engaging with Fanon, argued that gentrification is a form of colonialism, pointing to examples of it happening in the neighborhood around the university. 

Further, I wanted to pay the utmost attention to making theory learning public sociology. To me, theory is meant to help us solve social problems, and therefore the learning of theory should never be done in a classroom vacuum. In this course, I continually asked students to make connections between the theories and social reality. For example, in their final projects, students had to analyze two theorists/theories and apply their contributions to a social problem. In doing so, they also had to posit what these theorists might say are the merits and challenges to a potential solution. One student applied Horkheimer & Adorno and Herbert Marcuse to social media influencers, discussing that due to the lack of regulation and transparency around paid ad content, consumers’ needs and spending habits are manipulated. Another student in applying Patricia Hill Collins and Judith Butler looked at racialized gender bias in the legal profession and examined how a policy of universal pre-K might reduce discrimination for women of color. Through formal assignments and regular in-class discussion, I persistently emphasized theory’s role as both emancipatory and public.    

In this course, wanting to challenge the students to think differently and critically about their own privilege and the social world around them, I used much of the safety and privilege of my own identities to push students out of their comfort zones. For example, in multiple weeks of discussing race and decolonial theory, I challenged white students to examine the multitude of privileges associated with whiteness and recognize the current ways their own lives maintain racial capitalism and neocolonialism in the U.S. As a white sociologist, I believe it is my responsibility to challenge all students, but especially white students to think in this way. Given the surprisingly positive and engaged response of students in this more conservative institutional context, I wonder how often their worldviews have been challenged like they were in this class. 

Despite coming in with some fear and reservation regarding the student population and their reception to my teaching style and content, I was, simply put, blown away. The students engaged thoughtfully with the content, contributed very real and honest reflections of their own positionality, and applied their learning to social issues that mattered to them. In an end of course survey, I asked students to tell me one takeaway from this course. One student wrote, “this was my favorite class… I liked how comfortable the class felt to speak their mind. The classroom environment felt very welcoming and like there was no judgment. So, I felt challenged and learned so much and also, I feel like I can take what I learned and actually do something with it.” Thus, despite directly engaging with ideas which were politically charged and conflictual in nature, by approaching the class with an established norm of openness to engage in sociological inquiry through the conflict, students reported walking away with learning that was challenging and actionable.

Tess Starman (she/they) is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at Howard University. Her research specializes on intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and power at the nexus of religion and politics. She studies progressive Christian attitudes, religious exiting, and religion’s impact on political attitudes and engagement. Her dissertation, entitled, “A Corrupted Faith: The Role of Power in the Process of Christian Disaffiliation and Rise of the Religious Nones,” examines the religious exiting process and non-religious identity formation of ex-Christians. She serves as the Research Assistant for Howard University’s Initiative on Public Opinion. Tess is the co-chair of the American Sociological Association’s Student Advisory Board and serves on the Pedagogy Committee of Sociological Forum.  

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are rapidly transforming the current educational landscape, with students far outrunning faculty in their use of these tools. Current research highlights a cultural lag in higher education, a phenomenon Sociologist William F. Ogburn described in 1922. This term refers to the gap in adaptation between material (physical artifacts) and nonmaterial culture (ideas, values, etc.). Cultural lag has historically been observed during periods of technological change, like with the current shift toward AI technology. Students are embracing AI’s potential while many instructors remain hesitant due to their own biases and concerns about academic integrity (Coffey, 2023). We argue that it is incumbent upon sociology instructors to experiment with, observe, and document the use of AI in the classroom, as we are in a discipline founded on understanding cultural and societal change. Moreover, as social scientists, we are well-suited to address and experiment with AI use and adoption in our pedagogical practices. 

In our classrooms, we have begun developing assignments for upper-division Sociology students that implement the use of AI technology. For instance, students in a Social Theory class were tasked with requesting a ChatGPT summary of a prominent sociologist’s theories. After completing assigned readings and participating in a class discussion on the topic, the students identified and corrected inaccuracies, omissions, and superficial interpretations within the ChatGPT summary.  Students in a Medical Sociology class used ChatGPT to create an initial research outline on the “social determinants of health and their impact on healthcare access.” The students then revised and refined the outline. Afterward, the class wrote a brief reflection about the changes they made to the original outline and why. They were asked to explain what additional information they added or omitted, how they adjusted the original structure, and what the exercise taught them about the value of human judgment in using AI technology for academic work- particularly when engaging with sociological topics! 

These assignments were followed by class discussions where students reflected on the process of working with AI technology. Many students reported that these assignments helped them identify limitations and potential pitfalls in overreliance on AI technology. They agreed that AI is useful for brainstorming but not as a replacement for good writing. They noted that ChatGPT tends to be repetitive, obtuse, and includes extraneous superficial information while omitting important details. In some instances, AI included information that students could not verify.

Overall, students found ChatGPT to be useful in organizing information but lacking in the critical analysis that comes from human insight. Students expressed more confidence in the value of their own writing skills and the expertise they developed to discern important and truthful information. They also expressed appreciation for the novelty of these assignments.  For almost all students, this was the first time they were assigned to use AI in an academic classroom. Many explained they had previously viewed AI tools like ChatGPT as shortcuts that “lazy students” might rely on to avoid putting any thought or effort into their own work. 

Moving forward, we believe it is crucial for sociology instructors to embrace and integrate AI thoughtfully and intentionally into our teaching methods. AI is reshaping many areas of society including industries, media, and education. As a result, developing ethical and responsible ways to work with it has become as essential as any other professional skill. Additionally, experimenting with AI as a teaching tool can be fun and enjoyable for instructors. It provides an opportunity for creativity, helps us remain relevant, and enables us to bridge the cultural lag in higher education.

Read more: Most students outrunning faculty in AI use, study finds (insidehighered.com)

JoAnna Boudreaux is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of Sociology at the University of Memphis. She also serves as the coordinator of the internship program. Her pedagogical approach is centered on creating a collaborative learning environment and exploring innovative teaching methods, including the integration of AI tools. She teaches courses such as Marriage and Family, Gender and Society, Medical Sociology, and Racial and Ethnic Minorities. 

Kendra Murphy is an Associate Professor of Teaching Coordinator and Undergraduate Advisor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Memphis.  Professor Murphy’s teaching is focused on helping students develop critical thinking and writing skills that they can use throughout their lives. She is best known for her creative lectures on social deviance and teaches a variety of classes including Introduction to Sociology, Methods of Social Research, Sociology of Poverty, and Sociological Theory.  Whether by discussing statistics or bringing furries into the classroom, Professor Murphy is committed to helping all of her students in developing their sociological imaginations.

Lessons from the pandemic: when students feel supported and connected, learning happens. See Senter’s Teaching Sociology article for convincing evidence.

See this Teaching TSP post on podcasting as an alternative to in-class lectures!

Sociological theory often feels disconnected from nearly everything else we teach in undergraduate courses. This is not totally an accident, but it is unfortunate. Why? Because sociological theory is the backbone of the discipline, and of the sociological imagination you hear so much about. As a scholar who studies adolescent suicide and youth suicide clusters in high schools, theory has been indispensable to all phases of the research process, especially translating findings into easily readable and actionable deliverables. Before I say a bit more about how we might rethink teaching theory,it’s worth reflecting on why sociological theory should be taught differently.

I would start with a simple qualifying statement. A lot of classical theory may not feel connected to the reader’s lived reality because, well, it doesn’t. When I was an undergrad and then a grad student and now a professor teaching that course, I struggled and still struggle with making some of it relevant. In some cases, it is very macro, or the theory covers a large amount of time and geographic space. Marx’s theories, for instance, are broad-stroke theories of human societies that stretch back quite far, but our brains are designed to make sense of time spans that fit lived experiences more readily. Often, what is theory and what is philosophy, ideology, or pseudoscience is not distinguishable because classical theory emerged without peer-reviewed publishing standards. This makes wading through dense texts challenging and, admittedly, boring.

That said, when my professors extracted the basic theoretical ideas and helped explain them with contemporary examples, I saw what theory could do. Theory provides us with the language for situating the self, or in C. Wright Mills’ terms, our biography within the historical, political, economic, and cultural context that enables and constrains how we feel, think, and act every day. It pushes us to not take for granted that what we know or how we interpret an event or issue or person’s behavior is “right.” Like all sciences, a good theory course should teach us that the more we learn, the less we actually know. It should motivate us to want to understand more, and to develop better tools for studying the things that interest us to create better explanations; explanations that can be used to shape policies, influence political or economic actors, or simply improve discussions we have with strangers, friends, and family.

We should cultivate more empathy because of theory. Indeed, the most public form of public sociology is simply acting towards others around us in ways that recognize the systemic sources of difference, the need for sympathy and empathy, and the effort to not create more conflict but find ways to help others recognize these differences are normal, healthy, and do not have to stymie civility and kindness.

So, what would a more practical, fresh approach to teaching classical sociological theory look like? I offer two related possibilities.

1. The biggest dilemma, in my opinion, with classical theory stems from the vagueness surrounding the term “classical.” In the most literal sense, we are talking about the earliest sociological thinkers compared to contemporary theorists. But, what makes someone contemporary? Should they be alive? Should they have been publishing in my lifetime? My students’ lifetime? What should we do with the thinkers theorizing from 1930-1970? Should we simply abandon them because they do not fit the heuristic?
   
   An alternative way to think of classical theory is the emergence of certain enduring kernels of sociological inquiry. For instance, Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life can be taught many different ways, but its most enduring insight is that emotions are the cement with which relationships, groups, and communities form and are sustained. The mechanism is repeated, stereotyped gatherings that, in turn, draw participants’ attention and emotional arousal to a central focus—an activity, a conversation, or a social object (e.g., bands or political speakers). Because this feeling is felt to be outside of our body and mind, we ascribe the source to a “third-party”: the group. Every time we gather, we feel the group.
   
   It would be easy to draw a few pages here and there from this text that highlight the imagery Durkheim employs, but couple it with more accessible, theoretically developed, and empirically grounded texts. Goffman’s Interaction Rituals, Collins’ Interaction Ritual Chains, and Lawler’s Affect Theory of Social Exchange all are indebted to this insight and all show the evolution of theoretical ideas from rough, informal premises to solid propositions. Simmel’s relational work can be brought into conversation with network theory; Weber’s work on authority and power with the myriad theories of power today; the notion of status groups found in Veblen and Weber paired with reference group theory, status expectations state theory, small groups research, and so on.
   
   In my experience, students enjoy this far more than being mired in Marx’s German Ideology or the linguistic twists and turns of Durkheim’s Division of Labor. They lose nothing, as they are still confronted by some of the original material. The distracting misogyny and ethnocentrism one would expect from 19^th century white, male writers are tossed in the trash bin for good, while central animating ideas are recovered. It has further consequences, for students, of (a) connecting 200-year-old ideas with contemporary sociological research and (b) embedding theory, as a subfield and cornerstone of a discipline, into the rest of the courses they will take for the major. That Durkheim or Weber or Du Bois’ ideas remain salient to people doing actual research and extending theories in legible ways makes the discipline feel fresh, forward-thinking, and growing rather than stale, mired in the past, and hermetically sealed.

2. Leaning into contemporary readings has a sort of meta-effect on course design: it forces the instructor to think hard about what ideas endure and which are artifacts of the antiquated milieus in which they were written. For instance, Durkheim’s thesis in the Elementary Forms has found strong empirical support in sociology, anthropology, the ethnographic record, cognitive science, and neuroscience. This signals “sociological principle.” That Durkheim hedged on his thesis in the Division of Labor and, eventually, disputed it in the final section of the book suggests shaky ground for inclusion in a course.
   
   Imagine, for a second, that a course was built up from basic problems or questions that are partially answered through principles that continue to inform how we think, study, and write about them. Durkheim’s central problem was integration, or how do diverse groups or communities form and sustain a sense of we-ness? This question is no less important today than in 1897 or 1532 or at the rise of the earliest states some 5,000 years ago. Marx, Weber, and Durkheim—among others, also felt that the problem of regulation was essential to understanding social organization and change.  Communities face pressures to coordinate and control members, especially as they get larger, denser, and more heterogeneous. How do they do this, what are the consequences, and how do solutions often lead to change? The strength of this approach is that these questions work at most scales. I can explain integration and regulation by talking about the growth of a family. Two people fall in love and get married. What happens when they have a child? A second child? A third child? A parent comes to live with them? What are the challenges they face with growth in “population” and diversity? Where do the necessary resources come from? Who decides who gets what and how much? These are fundamental sociological questions that classical theorists and contemporary theorists continue to ask and answer, even if they often focus on “societies” or “organizations” and not the immediate social worlds we all are familiar with.

Dr. Seth Abrutyn is a Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Abrutyn specializes in youth suicide and is also a general sociologist whose research rests at the intersection of mental health, emotions, social psychology, and culture, and which has won several national awards. His overarching goals as a social scientist are to merge sociological theory with the public imagination in hopes of making accessible sociological tools in the service of solving social problems.

Having seen how many students are unaware of how to register to vote, the mechanics of voting, and why voting matters, coupled with my own naturalization as a U.S. citizen, has compelled me to make voter engagement and registration an integral part in my classes and spearhead a college-wide effort in the same realm.

There is so much potential in incorporating voter education in college classes. In addition to demonstrating to students that what they are learning in class is related to real world issues, it gives students the opportunity to practice skills they acquire in their classes. This is what employers (and grad schools) are looking for (see for example, National Association of Colleges and Employers’ Career Readiness). 

Here, I will discuss one in-class lecture and activity that bridges the study of intersectionality and voting education that I conceptualized for a Sociology of Gender class. This, along with additional assignments and activities, was developed while I was an inaugural fellow of the Civic Engagement & Voting Rights Teacher Scholars Program funded by the Mellon Foundation. 

There are many ways to introduce and explain the concept of intersectionality to students. To do so, I assign a variety of readings including, but not limited to, an article by Jan Ellen Lewis that discusses that certain women had the right to vote in New Jersey for a short time period after the American Revolution. This and other academic references are used as a launching pad for students to comprehend why universal statements such as “when women got the right to vote” (referring to the ratification of the 19^th Amendment in 1920) are not only inaccurate but fail to consider that different women have had different experiences. I provide various examples to students: Single and propertied women in New Jersey during a particular time period could vote, but lost the right to do so. The majority of Black people, regardless of gender, were prevented from voting until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Similarly, until U.S. citizenship was imposed on Native Americans through the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, they were also disenfranchised, often until 1957, since voting rights were governed by state laws. I use these examples of exclusion to explain to students what intersectionality is and why intersectionality must be part of social science and humanities research as well as policy analysis. At times, at the end of the lecture, I have asked students to create social media posts directed to a fictitious high school class in which they explain in their own words what intersectionality is and problematize why it is not helpful to speak of the “experiences of women” without applying an intersectional lens.   

In addition, I assist students to register to vote, check their voter registration status, and/or request a mail-in ballot (Centers for Civic Engagement, the League of Women Voters, or other local organizations  are usually able to assist with this.) Importantly, I also have resources available for students who are citizens of other countries. For example, Stony Brook University’s Center for Civic Justice has a country-by-country guide.

There are a number of resources and grants that aim to assist faculty interested in incorporating voter education into their classes. Among them are the aforementioned peer-reviewed Civic Engagement and Voting Rights Teacher Scholars assignments and syllabi, Periclean Voting Modules, Faculty Network for Student Voting Rights, The Center for Artistic Activism, AASCU’s Resources on Voting Education and Engagement, and Southern Poverty Law Center’s Learning for Justice.

Bernadette Ludwig is an Associate Professor of Sociology and the Director of Civic Engagement at Wagner College. Professor Ludwig’s research focuses on how racism affects African refugees in their ability to find refuge and in the resettlement process. Her other work investigates how community engagement can nurture students’ sense of social justice and belonging.

See Odum and Kordsmeier’s discussion about the impact teaching sociology in “unprecedented times” can have on students. While various difficulties may arise while teaching during crises, this article gives teachers ideas to craft their pedagogy for an engaged future.

For tenure track faculty with research intensive roles, balancing research and teaching can be difficult. Meanwhile, students are eager to obtain transferable skills to enhance their career prospects at the same time as community and government organizations benefit from research projects that provide useful data for their work. With these realities in mind, I set out to incorporate a community-engaged research project into my undergraduate Environmental Sociology course at Utah State University. 

I knew I wanted the project to focus on water conservation (a salient topic in Utah), particularly on the state’s rollout of the Landscape Conversion Incentive Program (LCIP)—a program that incentivizes the replacement of residential lawns with more water-efficient landscaping. To prepare for the course, I coordinated with two community partners to refine the project’s research objectives and develop interview instruments that would generate useful data for each agency: the Utah Division of Water Resources (the agency that rolled out LCIP) and the City of North Logan (the municipality closest to our campus that is eligible for the program). In addition to building this collaboration, I applied to have the course designated as community-engaged learning (CEL)  and submitted an IRB protocol with each student listed as a research assistant. 

Once the course began, students obtained their CITI certification as required by IRB. Early in the course, they read empirical and theoretical works highlighting water conservation, landscape conversion, and the cultural significance of lawns in the United States. They also learned about interview-based data collection to prepare them for the task at hand. In the meantime, I was hard at work with participant recruitment, a task I didn’t want to burden the students with. I distributed flyers at key public locations across North Logan, and set up a participant recruitment booth at North Logan City Library. Participants were offered $20 gift cards for participating in our study.  It took a couple of weeks to get participants enrolled in the project, but once we had willing participants trickling in, I paired each student with an interviewee. Students reached out to participants to schedule their interviews, carried out and audio-recorded the semi-structured interview, and then transcribed and proofed the transcriptions in Otter.ai (a transcription software). 

All proofread and de-identified transcripts were then brought into Dedoose, a cloud-based software for qualitative coding. We then held a three-day “Coding Jamboree,” in which students worked together to code all of the interviews for emerging themes, patterns and outliers. Students then individually used the coded dataset to write up individual papers connecting their findings to the literature read earlier in the term. Finally, the whole class collaborated to produce a presentation of preliminary research findings that they presented over Zoom to our collaborating agencies. 

By the end of the semester, students were CITI certified and had experience with 1) carrying out a semi-structured interview, 2) transcribing and editing, 3) coding qualitative data, 4) writing a qualitative research paper, and 5) presenting findings to state and local agencies. Meanwhile, with the assistance of my students, I collected data that I will use in subsequent reports and publications. Finally, our partnering agencies received data that will help them refine their water conservation and LCIP rollout efforts. This is why I like to think of community-engaged learning as a triple win: a win for students, for faculty, and for the community.

Kirsten Vinyeta is an assistant professor and environmental sociologist at Utah State University. Her research employs qualitative methods to study the socio-political dimensions of land and fire management, federal-tribal relations, climate vulnerability and resilience, and multispecies dimensions of human social systems. She teaches courses on environmental sociology, the sociology of climate change, multispecies justice, and social science methods.