Sociology Tool: Africville

(Africville, Halifax in 1965 via Rabble.ca)

Africville was a small community in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, where the population was entirely Black. In the first half of the 19th century, this small community was treated unfairly by the government. Though many of the residents worked (ran fishing businesses, farms, and small stores) and paid taxes, they didn’t get the same benefits and services as other working Nova Scotians.

Some of the services they didn’t receive were paved roads, running water or sewers, public transportation, garbage collection, and adequate police protection. Rather, the City of Halifax placed unwanted services in the community. Some the services were a railway extension (1854), the Rockhead Prison (1854), and the Infectious Diseases Hospital (the 1870s), to name a few. Many Africville residents back then believed that the government allowed for this unfair treatment because they were anti-Black.

Confusing Social Concepts: Feminism

(I originally posted this article on my other blog, The Bamboo Post, but I thought I should post it here too because it is a sociological topic.)

Admit or not, feminists have a bad rep. They tend to be seen as crazy women who want to kill masculinity and will scream and bark false facts at all those who oppose them or deny their equal rights. But this is simply not true. Not all feminists are loud, scary, and evil, and I’m willing to bet that there are more nice feminists than there are mean ones.

However, this post isn’t about the visuals of feminists. Rather, it is about what feminism is and what most feminists fight for because it gets misconstrued quite a bit by the media.

So let’s travel back into history and look at the 3 waves of feminism.

Confusing Social Concepts: White Privilege

(I originally posted this article on my other blog, The Bamboo Post, but I thought I should post it here too because it is a sociological topic.)

Society is such a complex thing. There are so many factors that go into social issues, and many times these factors are not discussed. Journalists and social commentators tend to throw terms (concepts) around to try to explain issues, but often times, viewers don’t know what the terms mean. As well, some of these same people don’t explore the terms deeply, while some misconstrue the terms so that it will fit their agenda.

So for today, I am going to discuss White Privilege, a term that (it would seem) not many people understand, and is misconstrued a lot.

Sociology of Power: What is Power?

What is power?

Being at the heart of social stratification, many people view power as the ability to influence or control another person's behavior.

Economic Sociology: Emile Durkheim’s Division of Labor in Society

(Emile Durkheim)

In Emile Durkheim’s book, The Division of Labor in Society, he describes the differences between a society where people have similar tasks (mechanical solidarity) and a society where people have different, individual tasks (organic solidarity).

He says that in modern times, society is not gelled together by people’s similarities in tasks and beliefs. Rather, social solidarity is kept together by people’s individualism and specialties because it forces them to rely on one another, as citizens of modern society perform a narrow range of tasks.

Economic Sociology: Marx’s Materialist Conception of History

(Karl Marx)

Karl Marx, as you all should know, was a sociologist who often criticized capitalism for what it will do to society in the future. He was able to “foresee” this because he believed that history would follow a predictable course. This belief was based on his materialist conception of history, or historical materialism, a methodological approach that he used to study society, economy, and history.

Economic Sociology: Max Weber and ‘The Protestant Ethic and Capitalism’

(Max Weber)

Max Weber was raised by parents who held polar ideologies about life. His father, a bureaucrat, enjoyed the pleasures of life. His mother, on the other hand, was a devout Calvinist who lived an ascetic life and constantly pursued salvation. Because of the differences in his parent’s personality, Weber was able to experience the two sides of living, even though it affected him psychologically as the tension of having to choose a side played a great deal of stress on his mind.

In his early college career, he followed in his father’s footsteps by joining a fraternity, where he developed socially by going out and drinking large amounts of beer with his frat brothers. However, as he got older, he became more like his mother. In his late 20s, he developed a compulsion for work and lived ascetically.

It was these first-hand experiences (and extensive research in religious studies) that helped him write his most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and Capitalism (affiliate link) in 1904-1905.

What is Economic Sociology?

(Max Weber)

Economic sociology, which was coined by William Stanley Jevons in the late 1800s, is used by many sociologists to examine how the processes of the economy affect the organisms of society and vice versa.

This field of study is broken up into two periods, classical and contemporary.

FIFA World Cup and Social Stratification

John Oliver, from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, perfectly analyses the FIFA World Cup and how it affects the poor.

On his show a few weeks back, Oliver illustrated how the greedy FIFA capitalists use their power and influence to use the poor while stealing from them.

This 13 minute clip is great for explaining theories of social stratification, especially those from Karl Marx.

Must Know Crime and Society Concept: Differential Association

(Edwin Sutherland)

Social learning theories use the cognitive processes of learning through observation or a direct instruction to explain social occurrences. One example of what learning theories seek to explain is how people adopt criminal behavior.

Edwin Sutherland, who is considered to be one of the most influential criminologists of the twentieth century, explains with his popular theory (Differential Association or Learning Theory) that there are nine principles to how someone learns the attitudes, values, motives, and techniques of criminal behavior: