module

Undergraduate Module Descriptor

SOC1048: Social Analysis I

This module descriptor refers to the 2020/1 academic year.

Module Content

Syllabus Plan

Whilst the module’s precise content may vary from year to year, it is envisaged that the syllabus will cover some or all of the following topics:

• Introduction: Social imagination & common sense; Revolution and Enlightenment.
• Marx: Dialectic, ideology, and science; Historical materialism; Alienation and exploitation.
• Beyond Marx: Contemporary debates and methods to study Surveillance Capitalism.
• Durkheim: The reality of social facts; The origin & development of modern society; Theory of Suicide and anomie. Contemporary methods and challenges to Durkheim’s ideas.
• The social construction of reality? Constructing ourselves and others; Nature/Culture divide. Three methodological challenges to interrogate the ‘social construction of everything’ in the work of contemporary sociologists.
• Reading Week.
• Weber: Science, value and meaning; The spirit of capitalism and rationality; Ideal types, value-neutrality and Verstehen. Beyond the ethics of conviction and responsibility, a review of contemporary Weberian sociology and its methods.
• Arendt and Foucault: Biopower; Biopolitics; Freedom and Action. Contemporary work on Biological citizenship, its methods and theoretical contributions.
• Feminism: Race; Gender; Citizenship & Power. How feminism and the notion of care are shaping current sociology, its methods and conceptual repertoire.
• Bodies and Embodiment: Theorising corpses, shamanism and modern science. Using our conceptual and methodological toolkit to understand our bodies and environments.

Learning and Teaching

This table provides an overview of how your hours of study for this module are allocated:

...and this table provides a more detailed breakdown of the hours allocated to various study activities:

Online Resources

This module has online resources available via ELE (the Exeter Learning Environment).