Curriculum Outlines:

For students admitted in Fall 2011 and later

For students admitted in Fall 2010 and prior

Information about the Thesis Course: SOC 491 - Sociological Practice II

Minors for Sociology Students

Faculty Course Responsibilities

Curriculum Overview

We live in a riddling time . . .

In Canada today, our media and our politics continually say young people are our most important citizens, yet when we look at education, childcare, and employment we find exactly the opposite: what does this mean?

People everywhere talk jubilantly about our "leisure society," and how everyone can relax and be creative, thanks to the miracle of technology; yet men and women are working harder now than ever before in history, for payoffs that are more and more difficult to earn: what does this mean?

We love to celebrate our multicultural and diverse society, yet immigrant minority populations persist in suffering unemployment, crime, disease, and a lack of social benefits: what does this mean?

Our culture celebrates love, play, happiness, and friendship on a regular basis, yet mass media, in both news and fiction, bombard us with images of the most horrific violence: what does this mean?

Everything we do and everything we think is connected to our existence in society. Our personal relations are social relations. Our ideas and assumed truths are social ideas and social truths. Our beliefs are socially structured, as is our vision of history and how we project the future.

At both the broad, structural level (as we work and understand the world in the context of social institutions like the family, the school, the multinational organization, and the media) and the more intimate experiential level (as we live daily life in the modern world), it is society that has the most profound influence on our position, our ability to act, and our view of the world. More than ever before, Canadians are living in a world shaped by urban forces of population density, high technology, and diversity.

This four-year Bachelor of Arts is aimed at students who wish to study the theories and methods of Sociology and to become intellectually flexible and equipped to address a wide range of questions and problems. Given that the contemporary Canadian city is the dominant social environment in our lives, how do we comprehend our experience there, our history, and our possibilities for the future in the context of racial, ethnic, educational, sexual, class, gender, and age diversity? How do we map demographic characteristics together with communication patterns and ideologies? How, in short, do we read and build strategies for changing our social world?

How do we read our world in order to understand it? How do we read cities? How do we read entertainment? How do we read the workplace? How do we read cultural history? How do we read interpersonal relations? How do we read the power structure and status hierarchies? How do we read technological development? How do we read the many systems that organize our culture--education, religion, family, media, employment, kinship?

In your first year, you will be introduced to the ideas and strategies that social scientists use to understand the world around them. You’ll have the opportunity to develop your sociological imagination by thinking about how things like the media, religion, corporations and families influence your everyday life. In your courses, you will meet and work with students in other arts programs: Criminal Justice, English, Geographic Analysis, Politics and Governance, and Psychology. You will also be able to explore other subject areas, such as music, history, philosophy or the natural sciences.

In later years, you will learn more about diversity – how and why we classify people by sex/gender, race/ethnicity, social class, disability and sexuality, and why it makes a difference. You will also be introduced to theoretical ideas that are useful for describing society and the research methods that social scientists use to test their ideas, including statistics. In your senior years, you’ll use a sociological lens to explore a broad range of topics, such as the global economy, work relationships, immigration and citizenship, the entertainment industry, and the lives of children and youth. You will also have the opportunity to put the theories and research methods you have learned into practice by doing your own research project in order to discover something new about the world.

Meanwhile, in all our courses, there will be focus on the development of various skills: the ability to read literary, numerical, and computerized languages; the ability to negotiate with others and work on teams; the ability to do self-motivated and curiosity-based research.

Number of courses: 40 (all one semester long)
Degree granted: Bachelor of Arts (Sociology)