Download Making social worlds work: the production of DD308

Making social worlds work: the
production of DD308
The new third level 60 point sociology course, DD308 Making Social
Worlds, first presented in February 2008, focuses upon how people
live in the world. Chair Liz McFall explains how its three themes –
security, attachment, and conduct – will allow the course to tackle
key issues such as safety, risk, threat, fear, care, intimacy, passion,
possession, habit, order and disorder.
One of the first principles the course team agreed upon was that
DD308 should explore the ‘social’ through routine and familiar
dimensions of experience. Fundamentally, DD308 would be about
how people live in the world. At one level, the object of sociology is
society, but at a more fundamental level, sociology is all about the
links or associations between people and between people and things.
Seeking to identify and explain these links and associations, the course
team decided to base the course around three themes that could
address how individuals live ‘socially’. The next task was to decide
what precisely these themes should be. We wanted the themes to
encompass pressing aspects of social life, the kinds of things that keep
people awake at night. Numerous possibilities exist but in the end the
team chose Security, Attachment and Conduct to direct attention
towards both the routine, and some of the more unsettling, dimensions
of social life. Security was chosen to open up debate about issues like,
for example, safety, risk, threat and fear; Attachment was selected to
frame discussion about care, intimacy, passion and possession while
Conduct was chosen to structure the analysis of rules, habit, order and
disorder.
Although it didn’t seem so at the time, in hindsight, choosing the
themes was the easy part. However, deciding how to structure the
sociology the course would teach proved a much tougher prospect.
Open University courses have to be free-standing, self-contained and
of strictly limited length. It is therefore impossible to provide a
systematic overview of the discipline of sociology. Even if this was
not the case, if you were to lock a group of sociologists in a room for a
week, they would probably fail to agree what the core principles,
approaches and theories of the discipline currently are. We therefore
decided upon an approach that would not attempt to systematically
overview sociology but would centre instead upon issues of
sociological concern.
By introducing these Sociological Concerns the course team meant to
draw attention to the sorts of questions, problems or puzzles that have
preoccupied sociologists throughout the discipline’s history. While the
old joke that, unlike scientists, sociologist don’t solve puzzles they just
get bored with them and move on to new ones, probably has some
truth in it, it’s nevertheless the case that certain problems have fairly
persistently bothered sociologists.
The first of the concerns, the individual indexes the long debate about
questions of human agency. Do individuals have the power
independently to produce effects or are their actions ultimately
determined, guided or patterned by the social structures which
surround them? The second concern, mediation flags the importance of
meanings by directing attention to the variety of intermediaries whether press, TV or professional, legal and governmental institutions
- involved in making sense of social experience. Matter on the other
hand points to questions about the relationship between the social and
the material, natural world. Are material objects primarily shaped by
the social uses to which they are put or does their very material
substance in fact shape the social practices which spring up around
them?
To try and bring all this to life, the course team wanted to use a
‘trigger’ topic, a sort of introductory worked example that would
showcase how the course themes and sociological concerns could be
used. The trigger topic, some team members argued, would work best
if it drew upon a strong example, one that would immediately arrest
attention. Traditionally sociology has dealt mainly with the regularity
of social worlds in ‘normal circumstances’ but sociology can also be
applied to disordered, difficult and extreme situations. Durkheim’s
study of suicide, for instance, defined the sociological approach
through this emblematically individualistic, extreme and anti-social
act. The significance of suicide as a sociological topic was one of the
key arguments in support of the first topic seriously considered as a
potential trigger: suicide missions.
This, of course, was dangerous territory. Suicide missions raise
complicated political, moral and psychological questions as well as
sociological ones. Opinion both among contributors and prospective
students was polarized between those who believed that, however
difficult, suicide missions offered precisely the sort of topic sociology
should address and those who found the whole idea off-putting. The
course team met to debate the issue at a residential meeting in rural
Northamptonshire on the 7th July 2005. An unusually high proportion
of the course team arrived late to the meeting and as the morning wore
on it slowly started to become clear why. By lunchtime news networks
were already reporting that a major terrorist incident, most probably
the result of a suicide mission, had occurred.
London Bombings July 7 2005
The London bombings brought the idea of a trigger topic based on
suicide missions much closer to home. While suicide missions offered a
provocative case-study it became increasingly clear that the topic could well
overpower the sociology the course aimed to teach.
For this and other reasons, the course team decided on an alternative topic
that would allow the course to explore similar issues about territory,
belonging, inclusion and exclusion in social worlds. The new topic,
Passports: registering the individual, uses a seemingly mundane object to
uncover the diverse, extreme and sometimes bizarre ways individuals have
been marked, identified and registered by the social worlds they inhabit. In
doing so it introduces difficult questions about how social worlds work and
the circumstances in which they sometimes fail.
Passports; forms the first block of the course and is presented on an
interactive DVD. It features key political figures including David Blunkett
and Sir Bernard Crick discussing citizenship, a documentary shot in South
Africa exploring the passbook regime which helped support apartheid, film
examining how airports operate, and discussion by leading academics on the
use of documents, badges and clothing in controlling movement in early
modern Europe. The aim of this block, overall, is to ‘model in miniature’
how the course themes of security, attachment and conduct will be cross-cut
by sociological analysis of the individual, of mediation and of matter.
As a third level course DD308 was also designed to develop independent
study skills. The course features an innovative transferable skills
development strategy which will enable students to develop their citation,
information handling and presentation skills prior to the final project based
examinable component through a series on online activities and assessments.
These skills are crucial to the practice of academic sociology but they’re also
the skills needed for any job involving independent information handling,
presentation or project management.
In structuring the course in this way our aim was to develop a course that
demonstrated sociology could be, not just a minority interest, but fascinating
and relevant to Open University students’ needs and interests. We sincerely
hope that our students agree!