Inquiries 4 Sociology

Olivier Godechot

Year: 2022/2023. Fall semester
Thursday 10:10-12:10
Reims Campus- Room I202

Like many disciplines, sociology is hard to define. There is no single canon and no dominant paradigm. However, we still find within sociology a sense of continuity and community. One basis of this feeling may be the importance of empirical inquiries on which sociological knowledge relies. Compared to other social science disciplines, sociology has the particularity of conducting –and sometimes combining– very diverse types of inquiry. It observes social milieu in situ. It constructs questionnaires. It uses administrative databases. It relies on in depth interviews. It digs in dusty archives. It set up experiments. It collects internet data.

The aim of this course is to enable students to discover a variety of inquiries, and, beyond them, sociology itself, its logic, its knowledge, its reflexivity and its imagination. They will also discover the logic, the methods, and the pleasures of inquiries. Beyond academia, in public administrations, in private organizations, in the media, in the police, inquiries are the tools through which people get to know things. They are at the heart of the knowledge society.

During this course, students are asked to prepare three exercises: two oral team presentations of two different research papers and a 200-words written discussion note of a third research paper. The first team presentation will be a 15-minutes summary of the key points of a paper, and students are asked notably to insist on the methodology and the type of inquiry. The second team presentation will be a 10-minutes criticism (both positive and negative) of a research paper (no need to summarize as it will be done by the other group). Students are notably asked to evaluate whether the empirical research design enables to answer correctly the research question. In the 200-words written discussion note, the student will individually answer the following question: “Does the research design proposed by the author(s) enable to answer convincingly the research question?”.

I randomly assigned students to papers for oral presentation, oral critique and written discussion notes. I made sure that the different assignments were separated by at least two weeks. If a student is not totally happy with the random draw for one of the three exercises, she or he can try to swap with another student. I will accept such bilateral swaps, as long as students work on three different papers for their three different exercises.

I ask students to send me the day before by email the discussion notes and the electronic diaporama both in the native format (MS Word and Powerpoint, Libreoffice Write or Impress, Google Docs and Slides) and in PDF. More difficult: I will ask students to use the following object in their emails: Inquiries in Sociology Summary [resp. Criticism or Discussion] Authors of the paper (Example: “Inquiry in sociology Discussion Engels”). When the team leader sent me an email, she should cc the students with whom she worked. Filenames of text files or diaporamas should follow the following syntax: Summary [resp. Criticism or Discussion] Authors (Example: “Summary Engels.pdf”). Don’t forget to put your names on the first page or slide of the document.

The evaluation of the exercises and class participation will count as one third of the grade of the Methods conference.

A 2-hours final exam will follow the course. Students will be asked to propose a research design in order to understand a given social phenomenon.

This course comes with a method conference supervised by Alexis Baudour. Under his guidance, students will study different aspects of the far right.

1. Thursday 1 September 2022. The logic of inquiry

2. Thursday 8 September 2022. Accessing and observing a milieu difficult to approach

Mears, Ashley, 2011. “3. Becoming a look.” and “Appendix: The Precarious Labor of Ethnography”, Pricing Beauty. The making of a fashion model. University of California Press.

3. Thursday 15 September 2022. Standardizing observations through questionnaires

Peterson, Richard A., and Roger M. Kern. 1996. “Changing highbrow taste: From snob to omnivore.” American sociological review 61(5): 900-907.

+ Questionnaire: https://www.giarts.org/sites/default/files/2008-Survey-of-Public-Participation-in-the-Arts.pdf (Appendix D)

4. Thursday 22 September 2022. The administrative tools of the social sciences

Durkheim, Emile. Suicide: A study in sociology. Routledge, 2005. Introduction and Book 1. Chapter 4 p. 74-94.

https://archive.org/details/DurkheimEmileSuicideAStudyInSociology2005

(Or French version)

5. Thursday 29 September 2022. Exploring the past

Braun, Robert. 2022. “Bloodlines: National Border Crossings and Antisemitism in Weimar Germany.” American Sociological Review 87 (2): 202-236.

6. Thursday 6 October 2022. Experimenting

Tilcsik, András. 2011. “Pride and prejudice: Employment discrimination against openly gay men in the United States.” American Journal of Sociology 117 (2): 586-626.

7. Thursday 13 October 2022. Making people talk

Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2018. “Preface”, “Traveling to the Heart”, “The Deep Story” & “Appendix A”, Strangers in their own land: Anger and mourning on the American right. The New Press, 2018.

8. Thursday 20 October 2022.Follow the network

Desmond, Matthew. 2012. “Disposable Ties and the Urban Poor”, American Journal of Sociology, 117(5): 1295:1335.

9. Thursdays 27 October 2022. Mix Methods I

Estep, Kevin, and Pierce Greenberg. 2020. “Opting out: individualism and vaccine refusal in pockets of socioeconomic homogeneity.” American Sociological Review 85(6): 957-991.

Kreager, Derek A., et al. 2017. “Where “old heads” prevail: Inmate hierarchy in a men’s prison unit.” American Sociological Review 82 (4): 685-718.

10. Thursday 10 November 2022. Mix Methods II

Engels, 1887 [1845], “Introduction” and “The great towns”, The Condition of the Working Class in England

(Or French or German version)

11. Thursday 17 November 2022. The survey 2.0

Diekmann, Andreas, et al. 2014. “Reputation formation and the evolution of cooperation in anonymous online markets.” American sociological review 79(1): 65-85.

12. Thursday 24 November 2022. Revisiting, replicating

Jones, Stephen RG. 1992. “Was there a Hawthorne effect?.” American Journal of sociology 98(3): 451-468.

LES COMMENTAIRES | COMMENTS

0 messages Ajouter un commentaire
Add a comment Contacter le Webmestre
Contact the Webmaster

[Pas de commentaires pour le moment]

Garder le fil (rss) des commentaires