Ruth’s Sociology Resources Blog

This is a bit of fun - a video on YouTube with someone singing about being Jewish at Christmas. It’s lighthearted but it still makes you think about our cultural assumptions that everyone celebrates Christmas and also the ways in which the creation of a consumption culture has to some extent hidden the Christian religious roots of Christmas.

I eat Chinese food at Christmas

If you’re a teacher doing anything around ethnicity or religion with your students you may want to use this as a discussion starter.

I was at the Identities Conference at Warwick University on Saturday and one of the keynote speakers was Les Back talking on “Live Sociology in Dark Times”.  Basically he was talking about the role of Sociology in today’s world, he argued that Sociology promotes social dialogue, criticism and critical judgement, getting people to ask whether the way we understand the world is the only way of understanding it.

Although I thought his acceptance of the popular view that we are in “dark times” (terrorism, war, global warming etc) was a little too uncritical he did come up with what I thought were 6 very interesting key points on why we need sociology and sociological imagination in contemporary society:

1. Sociology has an ability to point to those things that cannot be said - it often points out the situations of those who remain otherwise ignored by society
2. it is required to provide a sensitivity to and respect for the uncelebrated - often the things that we take for granted
3. it creates an ethical and critical imagination
4. sociological doubt creates a necessary counterbalance to a world dominated by certainty
5. it is a discipline that hears and takes the world it listens to as seriously as we take ourselves
6. sociology has a role to act as a historical witness - looking at the implications of the past on the present and the relationship between the close at hand and the distant both in time and space.

It made me stop and think about why I am a sociologist and why it is worth being one.  Too often we are told that Sociology is frivolous or not weighty enough - I think the above gives some real weight to Sociology as an important discipline.