Sociological Imagination

Please answer all threeessay questions below. Be insightful, analytical, interpretive and comprehensive in your answers. Take the time to show me how much you’ve learned this term. Do not use any outside sources in your response.

Consider the following quote, from The Sociological Imagination: “What {he} ought to do for the individual is to turn personal troubles and concerns into social issues and problems open to reason – his aim is to help the individual become a self educating …who only then would be reasonable and free. What he ought to do for the society is to combat all those forces which are destroying genuine publics and creating a mass society – or put as a positive goal, his aim is to help build and strengthen self cultivating publics. Only then might society be reasonable and free.”
Relate Mills’ quote with the narratives shared by Ellison, Yoshino , Vargas, Chomsky. What is the connection between personal trouble and social issues? Try to make connections between ‘people and power.’

Class is a concept that is difficult for many of us to fully comprehend and address. Using three of these essays “Welfare is Not for Women” and “Thinking About Diversity”, “Gender Pay Gap” “TED Talk”, “How to Span the Racial Wealth Gap”, explain the difficulties we have comprehending and articulating an adequate framework for talking about wealth inequality.

A. Davis conveys the idea of inter-connection, or intersectionality in social activism. She articulates a structural view of society; making connections between things. For example she states “when we try to organize campaigns in solidarity with Palestine, when we try to challenge the Israeli state, it’s not simply about focusing our struggles elsewhere, in another place. It also has to do with what happens in US communities.” Davis suggests we consider the context and the relations between movements for empowerment, rights under the law, power, race, class, and find connections between social movements across the globe. King also, in his last book, addressed global issues like the war in Vietnam. Summarize Davis and King’s arguments and conclude by sharing whether you find these pleas, to broaden civil rights campaigns, persuasive as well as practical?


Extra Credit: Tell me what you learned from this course. Be very specific, site author’s, reference arguments, issues brought up in class.