Social Interaction To Elaborate On Influence Of Social Factors

Write a 6-page (1500 words MAXIMUM) sociological autobiography in which you use the sociological imagination and sociological concepts discussed in class and/or your readings to explore how aspects of your life have been shaped by broad societal forces. You are being asked to write a sociological autobiography, not a standard autobiography that simply narrates events in your life in a descriptive way. A sociological autobiography emphasizes writing about your life that explores the relationship between you as a person and the social environment around you. How have you been affected by social conditions? How have social, economic, political, historical and other circumstances given rise to particular possibilities for your life? This type of assignment requires that you think about your life in ways that show how who you are or who you have become is shaped by large-scale social factors.
It is probably best to focus on a particular aspect of your life rather than try to write about your life or life trajectory in general terms. For example, you might choose to focus on a particular social institution that has played an important part in your life, such as the school system or the health care system. You might choose to write about your experiences of religious life, or your experiences of doing paid work. You might want to write about the kind of family life you have had or your experiences of engaging with various forms of media including social media. You might want to write about experiences of inequality you may have had that are based on intersections of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and disability. We suggest you organize the assignment into three sections as follows:
Section 1: Describe the experience you are writing about and put it into the context of your life as a whole. Explain why you chose to focus on it. Answer questions that convey the significance of the experience. For example: What was the nature of my experience? What form did it take? Who were the social actors involved and what were they doing? What was the broad social context of the experience? What significance has it had in my life? How do I think/feel about that experience and why do I think/feel about it the way that I do? Is the experience unique? Shared by others? In what way? Is the particular historical context of the experience relevant? How so? These are just sample questions to give you a sense of how you might write about the experience you’ve chosen to focus on.
Section 2: Reflect on your experience using one of the four sociological theoretical perspectives discussed in your text book: conflict theory, functional theory, symbolic interactionism, or feminist theory.
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In this part of the assignment you will be theorizing about your experience using one of the four perspectives mentioned above. In the simplest sense, the four sociological theoretical perspectives are “ways of seeing the world.” Each offers a different vision of the world or a different lens through which to understand the social world. Your job is to use one of the four sociological perspectives to analyze or explain your experience. You want to show how a given theoretical perspective sheds light on your experience or aspects of it, of which you were previously unaware. The following excerpt from the book A Good Book in Theory: Making Sense Through Inquiry by the Canadian sociologists Alan Sears and James Cairns should help you to think about this part of the assignment: “The aim is to show how the world we already know can look very different through the lens of particular theories, just as looking through binoculars can provide new insights on a hike through the woods” (2015:xvi).
Section 3: For the final section of the assignment you must identify one sociological journal article that deals with the aspect of your life you are writing about. The article MUST be a published scholarly sociological journal article and it is probably best to pick an article that reports on or reviews empirical research. You must describe the article with a focus on the central argument it makes and discuss how the argument and/or research findings relate to your life. Your TAs will discuss how to go about finding an appropriate article with you in tutorial. There are many ways you can produce a discussion about the relevance of the article for your understanding of your own life. You might talk about how the article reports on research that confirms aspects of your experience and explain how that is so. Or, it may be the case that the article misses important aspects of the experience you have had which you then explain. You might choose to discuss how the argument made by the authors of the article offers you new insights about your experience or how it helps you to think about your life and experiences in relation to the lives of other people.
The overall objective of this assignment is for you to practice using your sociological imagination. If you feel uncomfortable writing a sociological autobiography or you are uncomfortable about disclosing aspects of your life, you have a number of options: 1) You can write about your “self” in ways that alter events and details; 2) you can write about someone else you know or know about; 3) you can make up a fictional character about whose life you write.