Sociology paper

Pedagogy: The aim of this reflection is to make an inventory of your emotional learning this quarter, and to detail the kinds of active emotional growth that you are willing to consider making moving forward.

How to complete the project: Write a paper between 1300 and 1500 words in length (approximately 5-6 pages, but please use word count rather than pages). The paper does not require any citations, but it must be thoughtful, well organized, and beautifully edited for spelling, punctuation, and writing mechanics.

Background

This quarter, we have examined emotions from many perspectives. Some have been highly theoretical (e.g., exchange and dramaturgical theories); some have engaged other disciplines such as evolutionary biology and psychology (e.g., theories of primary/secondary emotions, how the brain interprets emotions, and trauma/recovery). Still others have taken an emotional view on contemporary social problems and cultural phenomena (e.g., The Coddling of the American Mind and Hochschild’s analysis of gender and emotion management in family life). We have also worked with the intricacies of specific emotions such as anger, hate, anxiety, love, resentment, and jealousy.

Context-setting Knowing that the finer details of learning mostly fade from our minds over time, your job in this paper is to examine the 4 or 5 things that you think will stick with you. You’ll consider what you can do with them to A) enhance your own happiness and well-being, and B) harness your ability to work as effectively as possible on the social issues that matter most to you.

While it might – at first glance – seem somewhat unsociological to focus on your own emotions, it’s not. Your level of comfort in working with your emotional experiences ties in directly to your capacity to make the kinds of contributions that are central to the work of sociology. As they say at the beginning of every airplane flight: “if the cabin pressure drops suddenly and oxygen masks come down, put your own mask on first.” Your emotional well-being is equally key to your being able to assist others.

Before you write:

1. Begin by brainstorming without your notes (don’t skip this step; it will tell you what already seems to have more staying power in your mind). Come up with 6-8 points/topics that you found surprising, engaging, fascinating, or upsetting. They can be things that you thought about prior to the course but reconsidered in light of our discussions, or they can be things that you learned for the first time. All that matters is that they feel deeply salient to you.

2. Next, go back through the syllabus and your reading and lecture notes from the quarter. Jot down anything else that sticks out as potentially rich but didn’t come up in your initial from-memory inventory.

3. From your list, choose the 4 or 5 topics that pull you most strongly.

How to write:

1. Start with an introductory paragraph that lays out the intention of your paper. In this paragraph, please include an overview of the 4-5 topics you’ll discuss as well as a description of the personal and social issues that are most important to you at this time. In what ways would you most like to participate in transforming inequalities? In short: what is at stake for you in grappling with your emotions?

2. The rest of your paper can be easily organized in a linear format as follows (or, if you prefer, you can employ a creative organization structure as long as you still hit all the main points). Each of your 4-5 topics should take up about one page or 250 words of writing. Here’s what to include for each:

• State the topic explicitly. • Explain your history with it: if it is something you have been wrestling with or interested

in for years, explain what role it has played your life up to this point. If it’s a new discovery, explain why it stuck out in your mind.

• Describe how you thought about it before (if at all), and in what ways your thinking has changed over the last ten weeks. You can think of this in terms of insights and/or intellectual connections that you have made with aspects of your life, the social world, things you have been studying in other classes, etc.

• If you have already taken specific action(s) as a result of your insight or learning process, describe the action(s) and the impact of the action(s) on your well-being and on your capacity to work on the social issues that are important to you.

• If you have not already taken specific action(s), describe the action you could envision taking and speculate on what impact you imagine it would have on your well-being and on your capacity to work on the social issues that are important to you.

• If you’re talking about an action that you have not yet taken, please also address the obstacles (internal or external) that you could anticipate encountering, and what specific steps you might take to push through them.

3. Finish your essay with a concluding paragraph in which you lay out a vision for your emotional future. Think of this as a mission statement for your life. Here are some questions to consider (you don’t have to answer all of them; these are just suggestions):

• How do you want others to see you? • How do you want to see yourself moving forward? • What kinds of relationships would you like to have with other people? • What aspects of your emotional life are you most anxious about confronting? • How would your life be different if you were able to confront them? • Looking back from old age, what kind of difference do you want to have made? How

does your relationship to emotion play into that?