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Transcript
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!