Looking for an interesting SLS affiliated course to finalize your spring schedule?  SLS is pleased to highlight a new elective course being offered by affiliated faculty Kate Pride Brown.  

“To understand…any person, his whole life, from birth, must be reviewed. All our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that has ever happened to us is an ingredient.” So said Malcolm X as he told his life story to the writer Alex Haley. Every person is shaped by the society that surrounds them. When you link together biography (a particular life story) with history (the culture, politics, economics and social forces of a place and time) then you can acquire the “sociological imagination.” This term, coined by C. Wright Mills, encapsulates the best of what sociology has to offer – a perspective that allows us to see the imprint of society on the life trajectory of a single individual. In the Spring 2023 semester, I am teaching a new elective class: “HTS 2813: Special Topics – The Sociological Imagination.” The course pairs a broad survey of sociological knowledge and theory with a deep-dive examination of the life of Malcolm X, a brilliant and highly controversial religious, civil rights, and Black nationalist leader from the early 1960s. Using Alex Haley’s book, we will explore a number of important social institutions, such as race, class, gender, family, education, criminal justice, religion, social movements, and mass media, to see how they helped shape Malcolm X, how his life might be though to exemplify (or potentially contradict) sociological knowledge in these broad social institutions. In addition to learning about sociology and Malcolm X, students will hopefully come away with a richer understanding of themselves and how their own biography has been shaped by history and the various social forces that surround them. Such a toolkit will benefit students wherever their own life trajectory may take them.

See the course description here.