sociology intro

Sociology is the study of human societies, their social behaviors, their practices and the interactions that happen from small to large groups of people. This week I learned that social imagination is the ability to connect individuals’ personal experiences to societal and historical forces, like being able to put yourself in the shoes of a young black man going through life during the early twentieth century while racism, discrimination and other problems were heavily rampant. For example, black men were not allowed to express their sexuality; it was considered taboo and society at the time forced them to pretend like it didn’t exist.

Paradigms are philosophical and theoretical frameworks that contain information about commonly accepted views on a subject/topic. The theoretical paradigms include the conflict paradigm, functionalist paradigm and symbolic interactionist paradigm. The interactions between human beings, different groups, and how your upbringing and the society shapes you has always been interesting to me and I think sociology is extremely important to figure out the cause behind certain things like xenophobia, ignorance, and how people of different cultures connect/clash.