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Latest update: October 26, 2000
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Things We Gotta Know in Social Theory

  1. Course Outline Sociology 355
    Modern Social Theory

    2. This is a beginning list of the basic concepts, people, ideas that I believe a student who has completed basic theory should be able to discuss coherently.

    1. New paradigm of adversarialism AND mutuality.

      2. Perhaps the most central problem we confront today is survival. Survival of our species, our earth, our sense of life on this earth. Globablization has been realized, at least to the extent that we recognize that there is but one Earth, and we are all interdependent on that Earth's resources for survival. I have chosen to take our interdependence as the starting point for our analysis of classic, modern, and postmodern theory.
      • Alterity, the concept of the "Other"
      • Survival and Dominance: From dominant discourse to transformative discourse
      • The Dilemma of Knowingness and its relation to dominance

    2. Classical theorists: Durkheim, Marx, Weber, Freud.

      • Re-Interpretations of the classical theorists in terms of new paradigms: "on the shoulders of giants"

    3. Social theorists you really ought to be able to say something substantive about:

      • Becker, Howard
      • Foucault
      • Giddens, Anthony. Structuration Theory.
      • Goffman, Erving. Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
      • Habermas
      • hooks, bell
      • Merton, Robert K. Social Theory and Social Structure, On the Shoulders of Giants

    4. Social theorists whose names you ought to recognize:

      • Baudrillard
      • Bhabha
      • Bourdieu
      • Butler
      • Chodorow
      • Garfinkel
      • Simmel
      • Spivak

    5. Schools of thought in sociology whose names you ought to recognize:

      • Functionalism
      • Conflict Theory
      • Social Interactionism
      • Social Constructionism
      • Phenomenonology
      • Ethnomethodology
      • Rational Choice Theory
      • Positivism
      • Feminism
      • Critical Race Theory, Delgado
      • Critical Theory
      • Post-Whatever
        • Postcolonialism
        • Postmarxism
        • Postmodernism
        • Poststructuralism
      • Queer theory
      • Subaltern Studies

    6. Philosophers whose names you ought to recognize:

      • Derrida
      • Habermas
      • Hegel
      • Heidegger
      • Kant
      • Lacan
      • Lyotard
      • Nietszche
      • Wittgenstein