The purpose of this assignment is to give you the opportunity to apply the sociological imagination to your everyday life: To make connections between your everyday life and the life of a historical or current social leader whose life and actions has had a broad impact on the sociocultural structures within which you live. In this assignment, you will reference appropriate Course Objectives (COs) that relate to your Socioautobiography. You can find the COs in this course listed in the Syllabus and in the weekly objectives. This assignment can be related to any and all of the COs. The Socioautobiography is a reflective paper that allows you the opportunity to explore the interconnections between biography (a slice of someone’s life), the social structure, and culture. In preparation for this paper, please read this document, Socioautobiography Assignment Guideline. At the end of the paragraph where a concept is used, indicate which COs your sociological concept refers. This should be done using parenthetical citation. An example of how to do this is provided below. The final paper will be due at the end of Week 5. It should be three-to-four pages in length and in standard APA style. Be sure to double-space your paper, and correctly use a minimum of six sociological concepts covered in the weekly readings or lecture. Your six concepts should be in boldface and underlined. Consider the following example: “As I think about my experience growing up, I realized that I was at a disadvantage compared with some of the other students. I came from a Black lower middle-class family. In my family gender did matter, boys and girls were raised with different expectations. Going to college was not going to be easy right after high school. Martin Luther King Jr had made great strides toward equal opportunity in education for minorities, but most people who went to college were White middle or upper-class high school graduates. I was fortunate I even graduated from high school. My mother never got past 6th grade as education was not a priority for women then. (CO 3 and CO 6). CO’s Listed Below 1 Given a social problem such as homelessness, use sociological imagination to interpret the problem, assess possible solutions, and illustrate how a social scientist may view this issue in a cultural context.1,7 2 Given a hypothesis such as, “Using a cell phone while driving is as dangerous as driving under the influence,” apply the scientific method and use appropriate scientific techniques in refining the hypothesis, applying operational definitions, and selecting the appropriate research method for validating the hypothesis.1 3 Given a social issue or case study involving an applied sociological situation, such as the current state of the educational, prison, health care or public assistance system in a state or province, analyze the situation from the major sociological, theoretical perspectives, determine if one theory seems more applicable to this issue than another, and provide basic guidelines for improving the system.1,2,4,6,7 4 Given a sample reading, such as Lois Lowry’s The Giver (1993), or a film such as Avatar, analyze the meaning of culture within society and demonstrate how the concepts of culture and society are inseparable. 2,3 5 Given a case study dealing with issues of the interactions of ethnic or racial groups within social organizations, identify areas of social stratification, discrimination, differentiate between racial and ethnic groups, illustrate stereotypes and analyze these interactions based on the cultural characteristics of the groups within the case study.4,5,6 6 Given the changing demographics of the United States and the globalization of markets, compare and contrast cultural differences and illustrate their impact on providing services to members of different cultures, especially non-dominant populations in the United States.3,4 7 Given a case study on a multicultural issue other than race and ethnicity, such as the aging North American population, changing family forms, marriage equality, undocumented workers, the location of religious houses of worship, etc., analyze this issue in the context of a subgroup within a larger “normative” population and evaluate the extent to which the subgroup fits in with society’s overall norms.5,6 8 Given a film involving a multicultural issue or issues, such as Higher Learning, A Class Divided, or Do the Right Thing, extrapolate at least three major and two minor sociological concepts and demonstrate in a well written essay how these concepts are sociologically related through the film’s storyline.
