300161 Basics of Sociology (V) (WiSe 2019/2020)

Course description: In this seminar we will more or less cover and brows the last one hundred years of sociological thought. First we will be concerned with sociology´s basic concepts and some alternative ways of defining them, in the second half of this course we will be concerned mostly with the structure of modern society and its different subsystems. Here, in the seminars second half you will also be offered at least some of the essentials of most of the big shots in our discipline.
We will start with Weber´s notion of social action and Durkheim´s ideas about social facts, shortly touch on Simmel´s observations on exchange, go one with Mead´s analysis of gestural communication and symbolic interaction, put up with more detail and sophistication by going through some of Goffman´s rethinking of social interaction and end this first set of topics with a short excursion into contemporary Conversational Analysis (CA) and Pragmatics. Next, as a kind of intermediate step to get a conceptual handle on larger structures of the social world, you will be made familiar with the notions of role, institution, the social construction of reality, deviance, conflict, and social differentiation. Then we will move forward to the second part of this seminar and take more of a kind of bird´s eye view by tackling the main theoretical approaches to explain processes of social differentiation and stratification in more detail and with a view on particular subsystems of modern society. Here we will deal among others with Parsons on power, Coleman on trust and money, Luhmann on love, and Bourdieu on art. We will finish our course with another excursion, taking a look at the social construction of personhood and individuality and the different technologies of self as outlined by Foucault.

Bibliography

see Syllabus (which can be downloaded from the Lernraum)