“Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral. ”
― Paulo Freire
Photo credit above: http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/medialibrary/chris-gampat-the-phoblographer-occupy-wall-st-shot-with-micro-four-thirds-8-of-25.jpg

Overview Social Inequality: SOC 3156 Winter Jan 3
Instructor: Kyra Gaunt, Ph.D., Adjunct Associate Professor

This course examines individual and structural explanations for the current wealth inequality gap in the United States. It looks at complex patterns of stratification and marginalization that lead to the unequal distribution of societal rewards impacting the social status of groups and individuals, such as income, housing, education, jobs, wealth, and media representation, as well as access to privacy and publicity and freedom from debt, imprisonment, and slavery. Intersectionality is offered as a critical theory required to fully comprehend the paradox of witnessing increased xenophobia and armed conflict alongside incredible online social movements aimed at democratizing justice and globalizing equal access to societal rewards.

Prerequisite: SOC 1005 or ANT 1001, and ENG 2100, or permission of instructor.

Goals

• To apply critical thinking skills, qualitative methods, and digital media literacy to critically understand topics such as student debt, reparations, sexploitation, neoliberalism, labor market segmentation, and immigration,
• To learn and be aware of the cultural, technical, and cognitive biases that distort understanding class and inequality off- and on-line.
• To explore social inequality through experiential learning by remixing, editing, and/or producing user-generated content and social commentary on social inequality for the web
• To produce scarce and useful knowledge about class and social inequality using popular songs, contemporary memes, YouTube, and Wikipedia to create, share, and broadcast our takeaways to at least 20-50 people in each of our social networks via the web.

“Human beings must have help and must transact to get the best help. The ones who transact the most effectively prosper, live longer, enjoy healthier and happier lives.”
– Kirkland Tibbels

Belief is the demi-cadence which closes a musical phrase in the symphony of our intellectual life. … Do not block the way of inquiry. ….In order to learn you must want to learn, and in so desiring not be satisfied with what you’re already inclined to think” (Charles Sanders Peirce quoted in Philips 2014, 60).