Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:03 Is the annex a sociology podcast. I'm Joseph Cohen from the city university of New York. Today we talk to Seth adverted from the university of British Columbia. Both the rule of classical theory in today's graduate curriculum. Our discussion was recorded on September 5th, 2019. All right. We're here with Seth <inaudible> from the university of British Columbia, past guest expert on suicide, probably best known for his work with Anna and Mueller. Uh, it's great to see against that. It's cause you need to John. And, uh, today I reached out to <inaudible> because he had a great, uh, thread, uh, on a Twitter, uh, the other day. It was a topic that, uh, I think about a lot, the role of classical theory, uh, you know, in our instruction in our, in our, in our training curricula. And maybe we'll start off. Seth, can you, uh, give us a rundown of, uh, what your main arguments were in the thread?
Speaker 1 01:01 Sure. Um, well, so the crux of the argument, right rests on the sort of decolonization of theory courses that occurred for probably pedagogical reasons, uh, in the sixties and seventies, probably more so in the 70s, and, and then really accelerated in the 80s and so on. And the question is, well, what is classical? Right? And so, I mean, classical for most people is probably 19th century with a sprinkle of, you know, George Herbert Mead for some sort of like big four or something like that. Um, but we're talking that sociology, if you pinpoint founded in by Compton, like the mid 18 hundreds, we're now almost 200 years of theory. And so what really is classical is, is it dead people? Is golf man and more classical because they no longer write theory or is it before Talcott Parsons? Is it, uh, after that 1950s when you know, the Talcott Parsons school sort of split and like became a collectic sociology, there's really no actual definition because at the end of the day, you have 15 weeks in a classical theory class, maybe 15 weeks in a contemporary theory class.
Speaker 1 02:11 And if contemporary theories, everything after the 19th century where everything after Parsons, how do you fit that all in 15 weeks. And this has been right. This has been an issue that is like always sort of poked at me since I was a grad student, like lecturing in my like TA and the lecturing and theory courses. And so, you know, I started to to think about it and you know, the thing that drove me the, probably the most nuts is that it makes it harder because we focus on, you know, st Mark, st Durkheim's, st neighbor and those are like the big three. And it's not really that people are conflict sociologists or functionalists or symbolic interactions. It's that they're may bearings or their Crimeans and they define their entire existence based on these sort of like sacred texts. And then once we've got those three classical theory really becomes a debate about who's in and who's out.
Speaker 1 02:59 And instead of talking about what these guys were saying and what the real big ideas are, we're talking about, well, does, you know Harriet Martin now fit into this, right? We're talking about the fact that the Atlanta school actually proceeded the Chicago school and well, how do we fit that group of folks into it? We're talking about the fact that, you know, even called dune was writing, you know, five centuries before marks and, and had sort of a Marxist theory before marks. It's just so should we include him? And eventually what we get into is what I call the arms race, right? And the arms races, the finding new people for the textbook that haven't been considered. So, so Nicha gets thrown in SOC Simone gets revisited. I mean, hell, we could go back to Plato, right? I mean, Plato had the dialectic first and so it's kind of a silly arbitrary classification and, but it has real consequences for actually training people in what is the social science and not a humanities.
Speaker 1 03:53 And that really, I mean, that was sort of the spirit of the threat and you know, the focus, I mean, it was a rant and so it could go many different ways. The arms race is obviously one problem. Like the inclusivity versus exclusivity is, is a major problem. Um, but ultimately the big question is, well, what are we trying to impart to our students? And do they really learn how theory is connected to methods or actual empirical research if they're just learning classical, you know, some responses were, well, you know, I teach my students like the thread of an idea from Durkheim and so on. And I still think there's tremendous danger in teaching the classics as literal, you know, social facts because the students don't know any better. And eventually they become professors and they don't all specialize in vapor or Durkheim and they just remember, Hey, I read suicide. Or Hey, I read class stat as a partying. That was a fact. Now it's a crystallize.
Speaker 0 04:51 Yeah. Yeah. I have a question. What would like what role do, first of all, are you teaching classical theory at UBC? Is that,
Speaker 1 04:57 yeah, I'm teaching, actually teaching in like two hours, the first, the first real day of the class. So this has been like pressing in my, my brains and CSA.
Speaker 0 05:07 So what do you think we're, what, what do you think the payoff is of having, uh, a classical theory course in the core curriculum for the doctoral students? So, you know,
Speaker 1 05:17 okay, at, at the PhD level I get the, I get the need to create some sort of signposts or shared cultural reality. And you know, that was like one of the first reactions to my initial posts where I was like, I'm just throwing the classics out was, you know, but then you're going to poorly trained your grad students where Durkheim vapor and Marx are the key integrating force of the discipline. And you know, I thought about that and I was like, if that is true, if that is the one thing that's really tying us together, then that's ridiculous. I mean, that's kind of a silly thing. And so I see the need for say, a history of social thought course and, or history of sociology course. And I don't think there's anything actually wrong with, you know, biologists thinking about Darwin or psychologists thinking about their history or even anthropologists going back to bolus or you know, um, levy Strauss or any of the sort of mid century British guys. But the question is, is are we teaching it as theory or are we, which has a very precise definition in the sciences. Where are we teaching it as history of sociology? And we teach it as theory.
Speaker 0 06:29 Yeah. I, I, we're, and we're particularly backward looking discipline, not, not in a pejorative sense, just as a distributor. Somebody did a study at Ohio state years ago, I remember it was like a citation study. I forget who the name was, but we're particularly like, we cite classical literature even in our current research a lot. Right? Is, am I right about that or wrong about that?
Speaker 1 06:52 I think that's absolutely right. I mean, I just, you know, I write in suicide and you virtually can't not cite Durkheim. Even if your study has nothing to do with him, you'll have a reviewer, I'll be like, wait, where's Durkheim? And you're, and you know, it's actually kind of a joke between Anna and I, but it's a true reality. It's as if people can't divorce what they learned about the classics from what's actually happening 150 years later.
Speaker 0 07:17 Yeah. I always have an oppression about our colleagues that like if they know of anyone who is even tangentially related to the topic at hand, they're very quick to invoke it tend to be well read or to chime in or something cause we love chiming in. But w what as an expert on suicide, how good is Durkheim as, as a guide to the topic? Like is this a, is this, is this a good theoretical basis or is it really faulty in some ways? What's your view?
Speaker 1 07:46 Well, so their Durkheim is, is sort of, I guess, I mean he's really an interesting sort of paradox or maybe sort of the classic example of the good and the bad. I mean there's good his argument that social factors matter is absolutely right and you know, but of course, uh, which social factors matter and, and how they matter was something he struggled to deal with. So, you know, he posits the idea that the structure of social relationships shape the structure of suicide and social relationships are shaped by integration and regulations. Two great dimensions that create, you know, the neat little fourfold box. But, um, you know, he commits the ecological fallacy, right? As we all know in the sense that he's studying suicide rates. So he's studying population level variation. And assuming that those population level variation can explain individual level factors, like why one individual chooses to die by suicide, which is obviously, you know, a tremendous mistake because there's just no way to say, okay, that Protestants are weekly integrated, but how do you know which Protestant or which particular church is going to have the most suicides or who's vulnerable to it?
Speaker 1 08:53 You, you just, you just can't really see it. Um, and so Dirk has a really good starting point for thinking about what does sociology potentially offer to something that is still considered to be a highly interpersonal, highly psychological phenomenon like suicide. But you know, I mean, he suffers from the same things that almost every classical sociologists do. Like vapor. Unlike vapor is he imprecisely defined, you know, I really beg somebody to find out what regulation means. Right? Sometimes it seems to be norms that sometimes it seems to be, you know, um, the breakdown of norms. At other times he's talking about, you know, um, sort of bizarre norms that never allow people to ever adjust to their society. Uh, some have interpreted to be the clash of different norms from different social systems. Um, and then at other times, you know, he's talking about regulation is deeply tied to integration.
Speaker 1 09:48 And so, and because he never defines integration, again, we don't know exactly what Durkheim is up to. We just have these very large ideas that he's presenting. And so he's imprecise. He doesn't really define his concepts well. You know, um, some people made the argument that there's only one mechanism that it's integration and there's no such thing as regulation that's actually operating. And you know, so we take for granted the fact that there's this classical text and it has this sort of really good starting point, but we take for granted that he explained suicide and nobody knows that his student mores Holbox wrote a book about 20 years or 30 years after suicide and you know, had better data. He had, um, a much greater longitudinal data and was able to show that several of his teacher's, uh, conclusions were wrong. That there was actually much more complexity, that it wasn't safe Protestants and Catholics, but whether they were urban or rural, like Protestants or Catholics mattered a lot more for whether or not they had, you know, dead social relationships or weaker social relationships, which makes complete sets, right?
Speaker 1 10:54 Intersection of multiple variables. But of course, Durkheim can see that and no one reads all box. And so for the last century, basically we've been testing and retesting these 19th century ideas with, you know, the typical criticisms that, you know, Durkheim was sexist in the way that he thought. You know, men were more likely to die than women because women, you know, it didn't have strong moral constitutions and things like that. And it's just like, you know, I mean those, that's the problem with the classics is that they said the most random things and that's what we're going to focus on instead of what's the principle here.
Speaker 0 11:28 It's hard, right? There's like a sort of like a disjuncture between the soul of the discipline, which, or at least the soul that I like, which is highly empiricists. And yet at the same time, it's like we read into these old texts as if they're like religious texts, you know, try not parse meaning and look for, you know, hidden relationships and things like that. And I find that kind of hard to reconcile.
Speaker 1 11:49 Yeah. I, yeah, I mean, it's as if finding a new translation and finding new words will dramatically alter it or, you know, you know, finding some letters that Durkheim hadn't written to mouse or something like that will really, and you know, those are interesting things. I, I actually enjoy reading texts like that. There's a place for that kind of, um, a scholarship. But it's not theory, that's not theory. Theory again, is simply just concepts. They're relationship and statements connecting those concepts and their relationships. And, and unfortunately back then people didn't write that way. And when people do write that way today, say like, you know, John Turner's work, you know, it's three volumes on the principles of sociology or like Rodney Stark's, um, theory of religion, which has like hundreds of propositions and it's sort of like, uh, overwhelming. People just are like, Oh my God, there's all these propositions.
Speaker 1 12:39 It looks like a physics textbook from the 1950s. I must stay away from it and get back to the elementary forms and really, what did he say on page 75 or something like that. And it's just, you know, as, as Turner used to say, what we do is we go home and we take our favorite texts and we wrap it in velvet and light our incense, prostrate ourselves in front of the text and go to bed knowing, you know, that we are the worshiper of st Mark's and everyone else is wrong. And we're the worst verse eight, Durkheim and everybody else's wrong. Yeah. You know, so and I mean I don't like, I don't mean to be glib about it. And I also do, you know, I do see the value in reading these things. Some of them, but without, sorry, go ahead. Finish it up. Well with without the compliment of, okay, so we read Durkheim's suicide now what were the basic principles here? Forget the fourfold type ology, forget, you know, the, the, the types and forget all the other, you know, nonsense that is even as examples to some degree, some of them are just not right, right. What's the core of this and how do we carry that forward?
Speaker 0 13:41 You know, that, that's how I, I engaged there. I mean I'm an economic sociologist and probably the one I'm most a fan of vapor, but I think a lot of bookmarks and sometimes I wonder, you know, what, what does Mark's really know that is relevant today? I mean the economy's completely different and if you just, if you read that text as if it were written last year, I mean a lot of it is like ridiculous and I take marks to really stand as a figurehead of an era in which we became aware that like people could be dominated through economics, not just through political power, like the, it wasn't enough to purge the aristocracy and I think, I don't know how much more there is beyond that. That is yeah, is tractable today. I mean I'll admit I'm not a fan of classical theory in my department I pushed for us to purge most of our classical theory from the curriculum and in fever reasoning skills and things like that. Sure. You know,
Speaker 1 14:42 you know what every may burying would say, and I'll probably be skewered for the rest of my career for this is vapor basically did what Marx did better and far more sophistication in adding cultural things related to status. He does. So it's like, yeah, you're right. What is marked as value marks from what I understood was going to write six volumes of copy towel writes. And the joke is that halfway through the third volume he realized that he was wrong. And so he just stopped and then he died. But you know, the reality of the difference between say you know, a Marx and the Durkheim, you know, you read Durkheim's division of labor and both of them were highly idealistic about a lot of things. You know, Durkheim believe that if everybody just found their right position and they followed that right position, that society would be this harmoniously integrated, solid area space.
Speaker 1 15:32 But if you actually go back and reread divisionally with closely what you see is what we'll want, it's somebody's dissertation. So it's good but not great to every conclusion he draws. He actually walks it back at a later point and he's re I need recognizes he's walking it back, which of course we would never let our students do today. And their dissertations. And then three, he added that third book, which was the, the, um, the various abnormalities of the division of labor and were really what he was saying was, yes, in a perfect world the division of labor would be awesome, but here are three reasons that it doesn't work in real life. And then he, what did he do? He never returned out almost any of the concepts in that particular text because he moved into a different thinking on empirical research on how research should inform theory and where the, the good sort of theory lay.
Speaker 1 16:20 Right. And Mark's just never, he had an idea, it was in the German ideology. It really came out very pronounced in the communist manifesto. And it was in all of copy tall, just in different forms and with different sophistication. And he shifted from alienation to exploitation to make it more material. But he was added in the 60s and he was added because there was, you know, this rebellion against Parsons and functionalism and conservativism. And he's a social theorist in my opinion, is not a sociological theorist. Right. The difference is the commitment to that empirical part. Right. And for Durkheim and vapors mistakes, they were committed to it. You know, for the Atlanta school in Chicago school, we're committed to it. Zimmel not so much, but uh, you know, not even need either. I mean, he was a philosopher and he would never have denied that. But all the other private Batiste's we're thinking in terms of empirical reality except maybe purse. It's so, you know, those people make sense. But like March, just don't, I don't understand the love form other than the fact that he, he's great at parties. Right? It's a good like guy to like be like, look, we're being exploited.
Speaker 0 17:26 Well, it's a dis also a display of cultural capital sort of, you know, I, I now I, I want a Steve vac from Duke. I remember had something, and I'll let him, uh, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but I got the sense that he saw it as a little bit of a, just a chest, a rhetorical chest beating exercise where, you know, there's just a portion, the practitioners in our discipline who just like to engage in a type of, you know, verbal combat and use obscure references in deep corners of unreadable books as a way of, uh, you know, just besting each other in, in verbal debate. You, do you think if there's stuff to mind there, uh, do you think like, is there stuff that we can use when guiding our own research or is it more of these more just objects of reflection or a display of cultural capital that we need to display to get our stuff into print?
Speaker 1 18:23 One thing we don't do anymore is have specializations in theorists and those who would call themselves a theorists like myself and who did they actually specialize in theory are sort of like relics of the past. And perhaps, you know, even when Marla Zahra would argue, perhaps we should be put out to pasture, even though I think he would consider himself a theorist. Maybe I'm putting words into his mouth, but you know, the discipline struggles with say, you know, with John Turner or Randall Collins were doing in their, in their eighties work when the epistemic Wars were happening. And you know, the debates of whether it's positivism and post-positivism or even whether that matters or whatever.
Speaker 0 19:00 Just give us two minutes to describe that for us.
Speaker 1 19:03 Oh, so, so in the 80s, you know, after Parsons was gone, um, and after sort of the, the discipline started, do you know, the cultural terms started to happen with swindlers work? There was this massive shift in what people probably took for granted as theory to a debate about the science of philosophy or the philosophy of science and, um, that, that revolved around whether positivism was useful or possible in a social science. And of course, this was kind of bubbling up for several decades. And then there was sort of like Jeff Alexander's post-positivism where we're beyond that and we can go cultural, but like we can adhere to the idea of searching for facts and things like that. And then there were, you know, the postmodernists who were quite a vibrant during this time, like Steve Seidman's article and social theory in like 1990 where he's like, you know, we just need to throw our hands up.
Speaker 1 19:59 Everything is relative and why are we even trying to create general principles of anything. And so sociology itself devolved into a philosophical debates more than people actually doing theory. Meanwhile, Collins and Turner, who were both at UC Riverside at the time were actually trying to do theory. One was, Turner was going from the top down and Collins was trying to build from the bottom up. Whereas interaction, ritual stuff started to really take shape. And both of them were still committed to the idea that there were, you know, scientific principles that there were things that we knew, uh, about the world around us. And we never really fully recovered from that. You know, the sort of mechanistic stuff that's come out, you know Hedstrom and like Neil grossest stuff on privatism and magnums is kind of like trying to slip this back into sociology and the cultural sociologist, you know, strong interests like basing in those Ardo it how we measure this is also returning to like the pre 1980s Wars.
Speaker 1 20:59 But you know, and this circles back to what you were talking about, like people who like to beat their chests and find these leg obscure things. A lot of what sociological theory has become is really philosophy. It's people who were steeped in SART and Nicha and you know, see the direct linkages and the indirect linkages to sociology. Because there is some link between, you know, big social theory and sociological theory and that's why the arms race even started in the first place. People started searching for like, Oh my gosh, you know, some Simone had so much to say that Dirk had really ripped off or you know, had been called dune. It's so much the same and that's really just what philosophers do, right? They're constantly searching for, you know, these sort of schools of thought. And my response is always like, okay, it's good as a human to know, say a manual con and probably to understand some of the elementary forms, it's worth knowing a manual con right?
Speaker 1 21:54 But that is a diversion from everything that the elementary forms can do in contemporary sociology. I mean that's a really cool bar or coffee shop discussion. But the elementary forms has one really simple idea and that is that knowledge and solidarity and society itself is created out of interaction and it's repeated interaction that makes it real and objective. And it's the sort of visceral feeling of being with people doing the same thing that that in reinforces that and constructs that reality. And then you know, you have Goffman Collins and ed Lawler who essentially just specify different locations in which this happens is a sort of very everyday mundane world of Goffman. The more sort of more group ceremonial spaces of Collins and the, the sort of formal organizational university that Lawler's looking at where people are doing joint tasks and build solidarity through that. And so that's it. It doesn't matter whether or not categories of content knowledge, like really informed Durkheim's ideas. It's just whether or not he had an interest. He had a theory that could actually be empirically, you know, verified and tell us something about the social world.
Speaker 0 23:10 I have a question for you about, uh, the role in theorizing today. You know, even as far even as early or as recently as the 1980s, 1990s, we academics, we're a privileged group in that we had access to mass communications. Our ideas were printed and they were distributed or we were able to talk to rooms of 200 people at once, which were large audiences back in the day. In an era where anybody can put up a blog where anybody can run a podcast and just spew off theoretical propositions that aren't really deeply rooted in research. Like is there role for academic theory today? Like can we really compete with the bloggers in the grand scheme of things? Or is this, you know, do you think that over the longterm we have to shift to what, what we're good at or what we're, you know, what were, what, what distinguishes us from the bloggers, like our empirical skills?
Speaker 1 24:06 I mean,
Speaker 0 24:07 or is that a fair, am I being totally unfair?
Speaker 1 24:10 Well, no, I mean there's, there's some, there's some truth to that, but I mean you could expand this, right? I mean the same problems in a post-fact world that we live in would play any in, it's like, do you devote your whole life to studying vaccines or cancer or the climate or you know, identity formation and you know, working for 30 years to try and find different ways to empirically verify or falsify what you believe is happening. <inaudible> someone who has a blog and says identities are this or identities are, I mean this is sort of a fatalistic attitude if you think, you know what I mean? Cause there are still people listening and policy people I think are still listening. I mean, not as much to sociologist as maybe they used to, but I think there's, there's room for it. And I really do think because academia is much like politics, that it swings in a pendulum back and forth, that there's room for theoretical work.
Speaker 1 25:05 That theoretical work, if you asked me, should not reach the level of probably Parsons Ian abstraction and some of his work. Right? But, and you know, actually, and I, I'm not being fair to Parsons because Parsons actually read extensively and I mean, he knew a lot. He just, he just created a system that was not successful. But if anyone's ever read Nicholas Lumon, then they know that there's a person out there that has literally divorced from empirical reality. And some of us there is a right because he's basing it in other people's theories who have grounded it more empirically. But I believe a good theorist the way forward for us today is somebody who actually is well read and empirically oriented. And by empirically, I'm not saying necessarily quantitative and I'm not necessarily saying qualitative because most of my theoretical, uh, most of my imagination has come from historical work.
Speaker 1 26:02 Reading ethnography is reading about, uh, agrarian States, reading about like the axial age religions in the first millennium BCE. And then thinking about the research that I have read like William White street corner society or like Kiara Dixon's work on the flood or you know, any of the beautiful ethnographies that have been written in the last like 40 years. And now there's like a whole industry of them, which is hard to keep up with. And in those, the kernels of all of our theories are there some that we have explicitly stated, many of which that are waiting to be made more explicit, you know, and, and to me that is where sociology's theoretical strength is, is that the best works, the works that get into ASR and then last or that like are published as an ethnography and last, besides being controversial, often speak to a deeply held kernel of theoretical knowledge that we all know and somehow have either through osmosis or explicit learning, know that it exists.
Speaker 1 27:02 You know? So, for instance, Durkheim's suicide has one real principle and that is the structure of social actions, shapes, or the structure of social relationships shape the structure of social action. Okay? For him it's suicide. But as he says in the beginning of the book, this could be homicide, this could be alcoholism, this could be domestic violence, or we could go pro social stuff. This could be, you know, altruism or um, love or whatever happens to be the behavior we're interested at. That principle is a generic universal principle that exists. Whether we're talking about hunters and gatherers or hell, even Neanderthals probably operated on that same principle based on how our brains are. That principle though, doesn't just belong to Durkheim. I mean, Weber's thinking about social orders in the legitimacy of authority between people and associations of people and how that shapes their human behavior, whether it's based on values or some like instrumentality of the organization or emotions or traditions.
Speaker 1 28:01 And of course Durkheim or a vape favorite Durkheim. Marx is also, you know, I mean, he's a huge proponent of this too. It's just he has one dimension, right? That is the economic relationships that we have built into the base that produces stuff in our society, shapes how we understand people and therefore how we act. So if it's a capitalist system, we're more likely to act rationally instrumentally. Not because we necessarily do that in our nature, but because the structure shapes that. But Mead said the same thing. I mean, this is just to me a basic principle and I don't know why we can't all agree, I don't even know why there would be a debate about that being a principle then. Guess what? That's what you're teaching to your students. You could assign whatever readings you want. Yeah. Because it's not the real, it's not the readings that matter.
Speaker 1 28:47 Right? The readings are a case study in a theoretical imagination of this sort of principle instantiation of a worldview. Yeah. From a different context, a different set of eyes. Right, right. You know, and another one, you know, and I steal this from, uh, you know, one of those theorists and see this is another problem with classical contemporary, is that there's this whole beautiful grab bag of theorists from the 1920s to the 1970s who have just disappeared like Norbert Elias and uh, chills and eyes and shot and you know, all these people. But Eisenstadt wrote this, nobody reads it. This little book in the 1980s called the logic of macro sociology. And this was part of the epistemic Wars. Like people essentially were trying like Lensky and, and shot and Turner, these guys were trying to defend macro sociology against the sort of micro chauvinism that had emerged.
Speaker 1 29:39 And he wrote this book and really fascinating. He says, basically, we could boil the classics at least at the macro level to three big issues, integration, regulation, and legitimation. And you know, so the questions are, how do individuals, groups and clusters of groups tie themselves together as in ways that make society possible? You know, Zuma would say, how do we control people, um, to so that we can coordinate more diverse, heterogeneous societies by occupation, ethnicity, race, et cetera, et cetera. And how does that, of course, the consequences, both good and bad. So both the distribution of power as well as the, um, amplification of social power, you accomplish great things. And then legitimation is simply how do we create a sense of shared reality even though we know that it's not shared. And even though reality itself isn't coherent, how do people come to believe that they're American at the very base of being an American?
Speaker 1 30:37 And how do they come to believe that there are new Yorker or, or a Jew or you know, this or that. And so those three principles, again, are those three big sort of questions, invite all of the classics and all of the people that haven't been included as well as a bunch of people who have been forgotten have addressed that. Those three big things, right? And so when you boil it down to that, you give your students some really at the undergraduate level really important knowledge about what theorists are up to. Without saying that, you'll never know because we do this with shrouded masks in a special dark room and then you give your students, your grad students who may not be big theoretically thinking people may not be interested in may have a specific empirical problem that they are fascinated with, but they need theory because the discipline demands it for publication purposes. They then learn the sort of kernels of what we're up to. So when they're asking their research questions they can situate them in this much larger world of sociology and make their little case studies more important.
Speaker 0 31:42 Thinking about classical theory in the way you have like a, have you been reflecting on a, you know how you're going to approach your a classical theory class at UBC?
Speaker 1 31:50 Yeah. So you know, this morning I was thinking about looking at my lecture for my intro class, which is, you know, a mixture of this is the class is over, we're going to do, but then also what is a theory, what are theories and how do we give examples? And this kind of speaks to the fact that my, my thinking is in the next two years, how do I come up with a bunch of principles with which to teach theory to undergraduates. And so, you know, to circle back to something I mentioned earlier, uh, you know, Durkheim's suicide is just really the easy one of the easiest classics because it's literally an empirical text rather than, you know, the sort of like empirical thing in meshed in this larger world. And you know, again, we go back to his principle, which is the structure of social relationships shape the structure of suicide and those abstract concepts, relationships that then their structure and suicide and its structure.
Speaker 1 32:45 And so we begin with that and we can start with a more concrete example like that, not overly abstract. And we asked the student as well, what is a social relationship? How could we actually measure this? What would be the different ways that we could get at this? And then how would we measure suicide? So we can think about the hypotheses, the variables, the operationalization of this concept. But then we can flip it around and we can go backwards, right? And we can say, well, how can we make this more abstract? And so the student has already planted somewhere instead of being super abstract and being afraid. Well, I don't know if I have the ability to go more abstract. And you know, the really simple one simple way, which as I noted was structure of social relationships shape social action, right? That's as generic as you can get.
Speaker 1 33:29 And then you had this really cool signpost that you have created and you can go anywhere you want in the classics, anywhere you want in contemporary sociology. And you can, you can even go into real life and think about all sorts of real hypothetical examples that the students understand, like friends who, you know, um, who continue to reproduce traditional gender norms or a friend who continues to date the same type of person, even though that's a terrible mistake and they keep making that mistake over and over and they know they are making that mistake, but it keeps happening over and over. And we actually start to talk about, you know, these real encounters that people do, these real decisions that people make and think about, well, what is it about the structure of social relationships that, that shape that, you know, we don't have to go super macro and say, Oh, it's neo-liberalism.
Speaker 1 34:21 Yeah. In some cases, maybe that makes sense. But in other cases we can just say, well, you know, we'd want to know that person's family structure and we'd want to know sort of the chain of relationships that Carson has had and like how those have worked out and et cetera, et cetera at all. But if you had a class like that, students would still be excited. And they'd still get to read some of the classics, so that wouldn't be lost. But they would be opened up to this really wide world of ideas versus people. Right. Or ideas versus like mysterious philosophical things like ontology and epistemology that, you know, some graduate students and some professors still don't know what those words mean. Yeah. And they, and they, I don't think they need to personally. But
Speaker 2 35:07 you've been listening to the annex, the sociology podcast. A special thank you to Seth Aberton from the university of British Columbia. We're on the web socio cast.org/annex on Facebook, the annex sociology podcast, and on Twitter at <inaudible> annex. Our producers are with Seth Marino, Jaylene cologne and Fazio Muhammad. I'm Joe Cohen. Thanks for listening. <inaudible>.
