Book Description

"Our students already live sociologically. They are drawn to topics of urgent sociological concern-race, class, gender, family, popular culture, health, and crime-by a need to understand the forces that shape their world, as well as a desire to change that world for the better. Yet they do not always find it easy to connect sociological concepts with real-world applications. Helping students make that connection is what we have sought to do with Living Sociologically: Concepts and Connections, Concise Edition. The task was made more urgent by the extraordinary events of 2020, which unfolded as we created the Concise version. Alongside our students - metaphorically, as we all became remote teachers and learners - we witnessed and sought to make sense of the protests and uprisings after the murder of George Floyd; the economic devastation and medical challenges of COVID-19; and the fear, misinformation, and rage leading up to (and falling out from) the presidential election. Sociology gives us both structure and vocabulary to analyze these events - and search together for not just meaning but resolution. Students naturally want to know how the study of sociology can inform their career and professional choices. Throughout this textbook, we illustrate not only the ways in which sociologists live their profession, but also the rich and surprising ways in which sociological theories inform parenting and romantic relationships, political commitments, economic decisions, cultural expressions, and religious beliefs. Living sociologically is not only interesting-it's useful. Sociology provides not only big ideas to understand social life but also concrete tools for acting in the world with purpose and meaning. Sociology helps connect the individual level with the system level, revealing a layer of reality that is not always immediately obvious. We wrote Living Sociologically because we wanted a teaching resource that was grounded in the sociological tradition but also offered a more contemporary and practical approach to the discipline. By the end of the Introduction to Sociology course, our hope is that students will be critical rather than cynical, empirically committed rather than scientifically or politically dogmatic, and attuned to social relationships as well as individual stories"--