Friday, September 7, 2018

What is sociology and Being a Sociologist / Week 1 / Cindy Paskalina Kweesar


Summary
First recoined by Aguste Comte on 1883, Sociology continues to develop until now and has a lot of variety of true definitions. In general, sociology is the study of society. But what is society? Based on Oxford Dictionary, Society can be described as “The community of people living in a particular country or region and having shared customs, laws, and organizations”. This definition means Sociology have a lot of broad topics to learns. Sociologist learn everything from politics, culture until your music decision.

Studying sociology as a human being will be an advantage as we become one step ahead to understand life. Start from asking “Why” and “How”, sociologist is trying to understand the social patterns that occur in society. Finally those pattern will be used to predict events that will occur and maybe prevent bad things in the future.

To be able to get a good answer from "Why" and "How", I found that a sociologist is in dire need of an ability to have a sociological perspective (https://youtu.be/YnCJU6PaCio). Sociological perspective required us to seeing both “the general in the particular” and “seeing the strange in the familiar”.

General in particular means we have to take a moment and think an event in a wider context. For example, Sociologist doesn’t only learn about our decisions of politics, but they also learn about how a lot of factors like gender, religion, race, etc. heavily influenced our decisions.

Next, “seeing the strange in the familiar”. We always see events happens as it is supposed to happens. We never questions everything, since we always live in this certain way. But on the other way, sociologist have to exit this views and try to see everything objectively. See everything as a strange things, so it will easy to question everything.

What was interesting/what did you learn
Interestingly because of its broad topic, understanding the world through the world of sociology open up our way to study other studies. Sociology topics like race, social class, and organization become a great foundation for studying business, Medical, Psychology, and many more.

Discussion Point
On one of the Week 1 reading, it said that most students (between 80% and 92%) were still dissatisfied about the information about this field study. These statistics concern me, because after a lot of developments happened in sociology studies, it is kind a regretful that most of the student do not get what they expected to. So as a one of the sociology students, what can we do to improve sociology learning resources and more importantly to popularize this study area in the future?

1 comment:

  1. I found your post is really interesting. I see that you mention a sociologist need to have an ability to view something from a sociological perspective, but how important do you think it is? Do sociologist have to see everything from a sociological perspective?

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