Archive: Mar 2013

Below is an activity I’ve seen used a few different ways.  The activity helps to illustrate the issue of mate selection for forming a family; it also gets students thinking about gender, sexuality, and the life course. 

First, have students think about their expectations of what their immediate family will be like someday. What are their plans for the future?  Or, if they are already married or in a domestic partnership, what is their family like?

Then, have students draw a future mate randomly from the list below, which has been adapted from several versions of this exercise.  The trick is that the draw is indeed random, so there will be same-sex, interracial, or other couples.

1. A middle-class, white man who travels three weeks each month for his job and has three kids from a previous marriage of whom he has custody. Currently, he has a live-in nanny but would rather have a full-time parent in the home for his kids.
2. A wealthy, African-American woman who owns a publishing business in Chicago.
3. A working class, Latino man from Costa Rica who wishes to live near his family in his home country.
4. An upwardly-mobile white woman who wishes never to have kids or at least not to care for them herself. (If you want kids, you will have to be the sole parent.)
5. A female, Presbyterian minister whose first job assignment is in central Kansas.
6. An African-American male professor who has tenure at Harvard.
7. A English man who wishes to live in the US but cannot get residency for 3-4 years as a result of the immigration waiting list for English citizens into this country.
8. A white, male Florida “cracker” whose family has owned a fishing business in Everglades City for two generations. He plans to adopt the business in five years and needs to continue working for the business until that time.
9. Martha Stewart’s sister, a middle-class, white woman who plans to be a homemaker.
10. An Indian woman (US resident) whose parents are planning to arrange a marriage for her with someone other than you.

Students must suppose they will fall in love with this person within five years and plan to form a family with them.  Then, they should think about the following questions:

How will their future plans be affected by this selection? What will their other family members think?  Where will they live? What about kids?  What is the likelihood that they would actually consider marrying this person?

Check out the myriad posts on Soc Images about marriage and family, and consider coupling one or two with this exercise!

TSP’s Kyle Green recently spoke with Mary Joyce about digital activism.  This short podcast would be great in a class on media, transnational activism, or a variety of other topics.  Most, if not all, students will be able to connect to the material, making it relevant to their everyday lives and a great addition to a lecture.  Here are some questions to accompany the podcast.

1. What is digital activism?
2. Have you participated in anything that could be considered digital activism recently?  Did you consider your participation as “activism” at the time?
3. What are the strengths of digital activism?  Can you think of any pitfalls?
4. As a related post on our sister blog, Cyborgology, points out, the United Nations declared that disconnecting people from the Internet violates their human rights.  Do you think access to the Internet should be a human right?  Why or why not?

Note that the project’s website also has some tools that could be utilized for the lecture, including a visual summary of their preliminary findings.

Office Hours recently chatted with  Shai Dromi about his recent article, Penny for your Thoughts: Beggars and the Exercise of Morality in Daily Life. The article focuses on how people experience and understand interactions with needy people begging for money on the street.

This article (or interview only) would be great for use in a sociology course because it skillfully addresses how the concept of morality is constructed when we are faced with people that need help. Dromi finds that passersby–whether they decided to help the beggars or not–represented their own behavior as being appropriate and moral. Use the following questions to help students better understand this concept and to facilitate a classroom discussion on this topic:

1. How is this research different than past research on beggars?  How has past research framed the beggar-passerby relationship?

2. Where was this research conducted? In your own city, how often do you see people begging for money on the street?

3. Was there a common interaction among the people Dromi interviewed and the beggars? Did this surprise you at all?

4. How did the people Dromi interviewed describe their choices to help or not help the beggars in terms of their moral character? How did these strategies help them to maintain their perception of themselves as moral persons? What does this tell us about the concept of morality?

5. How did the passersby attempt to identify the “authenticity” of the beggars? What type of clues did they look for? How did these markers of “authenticity” influence whether they helped the person or not?