Sociology 90W Senior Seminar

I have finished grading and updated the gradebook. Use GradeQuery to see your final score and grade.

Congratulations on finishing the seminar. It was a lot of work, and you deserve credit for your efforts. I hope you found the experience of conducting your own empirical research rewarding. I enjoyed seeing your projects develop. Everyone who finished the course displayed a satisfactory mastery of visual ethnography, and some of you did very interesting and original work. Well done!

I have feedback on your research essays. Stop by my office in the spring for a copy.

My study is on sports and social cohesion. I like sports very much. Baseball is a cool sport.

The literature says that sport is amazing.

The demographic of my neighborhood is that my neighborhood has a park.
The park is a nice place to interact with another.

I have found no findings, because I am all knowing.

Thank you all for reading my paper,

Paul Dufour

In the field of Sociology, sport and social cohesion may not be correlated with another. The Sociology of sport had been a neglected field, because sport isn’t valued as a means to study society. The problem that plagues this field is that it focuses too much on the macro level, like the politics and economics of sport associations. By looking through sport at the micro level, I hope to grasp the cultural qualities that sport possesses, such as ritual and social cohesion.

You have two choices to deliver your research report. You may post it on the site, using the slideshow content, or you may send your word processor document (MS Word, or the equivalent) to me as an email attachment.

(1) Slideshow. Click the link to slideshow under create content. Paste your report from your word processor into the body section of the form. Remember to insert [slideshow] in the body where you want the pictures to appear. Upload your photos, one at a time, as you did before for the earlier slideshow exercise. Do not write your essay in the form! Paste it from your word processor.

(2) Email. Insert the pictures into your Word file. You may put the pictures in the interpretation section or all together at the end of the document. Save the file as .doc, .rtf, .odt, or .pdf -- if you have another format, let me know in advance and I'll verify I can open such a file. Send me the file at professor@shortell.org and remember to put Soc 90 in the subject line.

If you have questions, stop by during office hours this week. I am here T, W, Th from 3:30 to 8pm.

This Sociology class was perhaps one of the most interactive Sociology classes that I had experienced at Brooklyn College. In having an objective viewpoint, this class was both alienating and cohesive.

It was a bit alienating in a sense that the blog posts could have been a bit more interactive from the class as a whole. I regret that I didn't respond to anyone's blog posts, which sort of makes me a hypocrite. I understand we have responsibilities (role as student; parent, and employee), but responding to each others work would have had benefited the class as a whole. The best Sociology class to generate online discussions is Professor Tolouse's forums. Without the use of computers, you could say that this class was basically a regular class where you sit behind a desk.

Looking back at my presentation, I realized that I had made many mistakes. To begin, I didn't use the ten minute limit to my advantage. In the future, I need to be more organized before I prepare to make a presentation. I've done speeches in front of classes before (including Sociology), but I've never done a speech/presentation such as this, because this was a presentation of what you did as opposed to someone else. I should speak slowly next time and be more clear, because I realize that the audience doesn't know what I'm going to talk about.

What matters most is if you gained anything out of your presentation. I realized my mistakes, and I hope to correct them in the future. One of my strengths is that I'm not afraid to speak in front of an audience, and that I like to stand while I make a speech. My greatest weakness is when I'm not organized, which I think I could fix. In the future, I hope to be a social studies teacher and make a contribution to the field of education. This presentation helped me make a first step in the right direction.

Here are the three pictures that I was missing in todays presentation- you can see it in Galleries- I placed them in a sub album. I am pretty sure that this is the link.

http://www.soc90.courseserve.info/?q=gallery&g2_itemId=3195

The first picture is the community Gardens "Gentrified" Sign.

The second is the sign at the Gym window with the "we are not going anywhere" affirmation.

The third is one that I didn't discuss because of lack of time- it is the picture of a local pizzaria that was closed for about 6 weeks and remodeled- its now aesthetically sophisticated- previously it was just bare walls and old booths. While this pizzaria was made to fit into the aesthetic realm of the gentrifiers it is still not visited by these. Inclusively, after being revamped the pizzaria added many items to its menu yet it still failed to attract the gentrifiers. The local is still a site that is almost exclusively used by natives. By the way, the prices remained the same- therefore it is the owners who will have to foot the bill by cutting their profits.

I've added in points for the demographic profile. Use GradeQuery to see your score. I'll pass back written feedback on Tuesday.

Some of you have not turned in the demographic profile. Indeed, some of you have not yet turned in the literature review. Together, they are worth up to 45 points, so you can't pass the course without doing them. I can't grade what I don't have — get me your work as soon as possible.

I would like everyone to make an appointment with our writing tutor, Anna Szymanski, within the next two weeks. Bring your literature review draft or your demographic report with you so that Anna can give you some advice about your writing. She may recommend additional appointments. I encourage you to take advantage of her assistance.

Your interpretation of data requires that you make a sociological argument about the aspect of culture you are investigating. A sociological argument is a kind of assertion that offers an explanation of some aspect of the social world. It is not enough to simply describe it. You must explain it.

The difference between description and explanation when applied to visual data can be subtle. When you describe, you are stating what is the case. So, with visual data, you are calling attention to aspects that are visible in the photos or for which the photos serve as a point of departure. When you explain, you are drawing connections between elements in the data which make the sociological meaning of the phenomena clear and understandable. Sociological explanations turn empirical facts into social facts — that is, parts of social patterns.