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Abagail Geving

Sociology

E-portfolio

Semester of fall 2016

Sociology Portfolio

Sociology is one of the social sciences which applies scientific methods to study human society.

The study of sociology expands knowledge of how culture, religion, and societal norms play into our everyday lives. 

Dear Society

Dear Society,

          You are incredibly judgmental towards the humans that have to live with you. From the very start of a human’s life you are controlling. Babies must be perfectly healthy to be considered a good baby, illness from birth is only an inconvenience to you. Growing up girls must like Barbie, flowers,

nail polish, dress up and pink everything, while boys must like trucks, football, getting dirty and working on cars. If any girl or boy likes the other side of things they are considered “confused” or “likely to be gay” and it is absolutely ridiculous and appalling. Going forward into the teenage years, girls are bombarded with rules and safety precautions. In school they must be completely covered with minimal skin exposed in an attempt to not distract the boys. You sexualize almost every part of the female body. Crop tops showing stomachs are disgraceful, while comfortable leggings make boys stare so obviously they are banned as well. Inequality  is at its finest with the term“Boys will be boys” right? It is okay for a guy to cat call girls because its “funny” but if a woman does it, it is trashy. If a guy sleeps with countless girls he is referred to as a player, or one of the popular guys. If a girl sleeps with countless guys she is dirty, slutty, and a whore. A teenage girl is expected to drink responsibly and always carry pepper spray at a party to keep from being sexually assaulted. If she does drink too much and becomes unconscious, that is her fault, she is basically asking to be raped, right? No, society, you are disgraceful, and demeaning, it will never be the victims fault. Judge rules in favor of rapist too often. When a guy is sexually assaulted he must keep quiet because why wouldn’t he want to have sex at any given time? He is obviously a pussy if he says no. Wrong, guys and girls can say no whenever they want. Moving on to adulthood, females must cover up if you are breast feeding because apparently according to you, that is incredibly sexual and completely wrong. Although Victoria Secret ads showing girls in only a bra and underwear are okay. Breasts were meant for feeding, not sexual items for a male’s enjoyment. The sexism doesn’t stop there, women are paid a lot less than men and defiantly not given any more opportunities than men. Rich white men run our country and try to give rules for what a woman can and cannot do with her body. It is sickening that people actually think it is okay to create laws depicting what someone does with their own body. At old age, men turn in to couch potatoes and women turn into cooks.

            Another point includes the fact that you blame black teenagers and adults for the “violence” in our country and in “their’ neighborhoods. Do you not realize that more black people are born into poverty because of the history of our country? Poverty causes violence not skin color. It is sick that a “successful” black person becomes a basketball or football player, but successful white person becomes a doctor or lawyer.

Sincerely,

Abagail Geving

Week One Sociology

Sociology Week One

This first week in sociology has brought up broad sociological terms, such as perspective. We have also been talking about global issues as well as personal issues. The butterfly effect also came up in discussion in a smaller proportion. The Allegory of the Cave displayed the wide variety of viewpoints our classroom holds, concluding in the tying together of sociological perspective and global issues.
The structural-functional approach deals with how a society goes about their life including the rules, traditions, and expectations given. Education systems, government, religious programs and family structure is dependent on how society normalizes certain traditions. The social-conflict approach deals with how people interact in society and problems that arise due to different points of view and ways of thinking. For example, race, religion, gender or social class tend to cause tension within a society. Another example of social conflict is education systems tailored to the higher class, with the best schools and colleges being extremely expensive.

The symbolic-interaction approach is both individual interactions and society as a whole interaction. This approach is about how people chose for themselves the interactions they will face with other people and or how society affects their thinking.
The Allegory of the Cave story consisted of multiple prisoners kept in darkness and only shown what a couple people presented. One day one of the prisoners was allowed to walk out of the cave to see the world, and discover that everything he had thought about the world was wrong. Upon return to the cave to tell of his discoveries he was killed. This one prisoner’s perspective on the world was only what was given to him, relating to our society and government shaping the minds of its people to support what they want best. When the prisoner was released his entire perspective changed, this happens in our world

when people choose to go to school, to educate themselves and become independent minds. When this now changed man returned to the cave to tell of his new found perspective, the prisoners were then frightened by the unknown and killed the man. In our society change is a huge, scary thing for most people so we tend to go about our lives being bossed around by whatever government we have instead of speaking out.

Week Two Sociology

Week 2:

Sociology originated in the 18th to 19th century in Europe because of the industrial economy, growth of cities and new political ideas began to weaken our economy. Example: Charles dickens. The United States defiantly has problems but when using the global perspective those problems seem incredibly small when compared to other countries stricken by disease and poverty. The United States facing issues such as gun control and police brutality which other countries face as well but if compared they are in need of a lot more help than we are. Natural disasters strike our southern states most often with hurricanes, and our coasts with earthquakes but looks at quakes that have hit japan and hurricanes that hit other island countries there is no comparison as well. Children are forced to be married at ages as young as four. Police brutality is a huge problem although in other countries police ISIS. To the United States, this problem is insignificant for some reason. Positivism is an approach to understanding the world based on science. Global perspective can also be used in the other direction for example when compared to other countries such as china or Europe, our debt and financial situation is a lot worse. Our drug trade and sex trafficking is terrible when compared to that of Canada. Although again we could be a lot worse. Manifest functions are the intended consequences positive or negative of a social pattern, while latent functions are the unintended consequences. For example, when getting married an intended consequence would be having children while an unintended consequence would be winning the lottery or a loved one being diagnosed with dwarfism.

Week Three

Any issue we have in our society can be broken down into many different viewpoints. Categories of viewpoints include economic, political, family/educational, religious and environmental perspectives. For example, sports broken down into an economic perspective is a closer look at what social class and money has to do with who plays and who watches what sport. Rich players receive the most amount of praise, while there are people living on the streets that are more talented, just weren’t given the opportunity. Hockey is on the high end of expensive hobbies, and you usually see white children and white grownups playing the sport, this is because racism in our society has caused the majority of people living in poverty to be black. Then going to basketball, something kids can play in the street, the majority of players are black. There are more than these perspectives when

talking about sports, things can happen unexpectedly (latent consequences) such as injury, or unexpectedly (manifest consequences) such as financial gain and fame.

            The sugar cane picture showed how jobs function together, including the boss and the gatherer, the labor workers and the children shown helping out, to make the society work. Power, the boss affects society negatively in this picture, he is either shown watching over the workers intensely ready to punish anyone who does anything wrong or being lazy and taking a nap. The interaction in the picture shows how the children interacting with their mothers and other workers creates how people view this type of slave labor. In our world today, the labor vs. power interaction is not as extreme although there are many issues with it. 

Week Four

Culture in our world today is in no way the same country to country even state to state, but someone people seem to forget about anywhere else in our world besides where they are at and they’re own beliefs. People around the world do have many similarities although they have many more differences. There are even cultural differences in our own country, including religion, family traditions, clothing differences, and many more. A lot depends on where you are located in the world, and how you were raised. But no matter what people decide to practice, it has no weight to what kind of person they are inside. How we interact within a work environment and in relation to power dictates a lot of how a society is viewed and how it functions. Some societies have a equalized system while others have one person in command over all the rest. Social function is also important; it is a system of interrelated parts that is

relatively stable because each part has a particular function in society as a whole. Social dysfunction is the undesirable consequences of any social pattern of the operation of society. Manifest functions are the intended consequences of a social pattern while the latent functions are the unintended consequences of a social pattern. For example, a manifest function would entail serious dating turning into marriage or studying hard for a test turning into a great score in the class. Latent functions would be getting cancer later in life or an unexpected promotion at work or going back to school for a different degree. 

Week Five

           

Nature vs. Nurture debate is strong and everlasting between biologists and sociologists. “Nature” argues that the person we will someday become depends on our genetics. For example, a child born from an alcoholic mother and psychopathic father will turn out to be a criminal no matter what environment you put it in. The nurture side of the debate argues that genetics have no say in how we turn out as people. How we are raised, the tactics used, the amount of social interaction and love given when we are children, the environment we are brought up in has

everything to do with how we turn out one day and what good we do our world. John B. Watson was a behaviorist, meaning he believed that behavioral patterns are not instinctive but learned. The effects of social isolation are brutal, for example the story of Isabelle, she was denied any contact with other people, nobody talked to her and nobody loved her. As a result, Isabelle could not be rehabilitated, she was forever an outsider with about 5 words to her knowledge. Sociologists such as Freud, Piaget, Kohlberg and Erikson dictated what we know about the nurture argument today. They included topics from the levels we accomplish cognitively as we age such as sensorimotor, preoperational, and formal operational, and the development of our moral compass. The agents of socialization also play a huge role in the development of a child, responsible nurturing needs to be provided while growth. The proper love and amount of touch is important to allow the child to trust our world and feel comforted in their environment.