Category: Social Class
Social Class Videos
Social Class
People Like Us: Social Class in America — available on Kanopy via BMCC Library; Tammy’s Story is a great clip from the film for discussions of poverty.
Inequality for All — This film provides an excellent overview of economic inequality. It appears to be available on YouTube for free now
Sociological Theory Readings
Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party” (Chapter 1 “Bourgeois and Proletarian” is a good excerpt)
Thought.Co, Major Sociological Theories (by Ashley Crossman) — This is a list of major sociological theories/theoretical approaches with links to ThoughtCo articles on each.
Readings on Social Class
Visualizing Social Stratification in the US, Thoughtco.com — This is a useful overview of social stratification with charts/data.
Forced Out: For Many Poor Americans Eviction Never Ends, Matthew Desmond, The New Yorker — This is an excellent, accessible excerpt from Desmond’s book Evicted that gives a good overview of structural causes of poverty and housing insecurity.
Sinking Ship Exercise
This is a fun, low-stakes exercise that helps students understand Moore and Davis’s functionalist theory of social stratification. For in-person classes, I put students into groups of 3-5 and ask them to together “save” 6 people; for online synchronous classes, I create a Google Form and ask students to individually select their 6 people and then we look together at who the class has “saved.”
Sinking-ship-1Rich and Poor (low-stakes writing assignment)
Faculty: This is a quick writing exercise that can get students thinking about social class divisions. I like to use this as a way into discussing sociological theories of social class division (Marx, Weber, and Moore and Davis’s functionalist theory). For in person classes, students can free write on paper; for online synchronous classes students can put their responses into a Google Doc or Google form.
Instructions for students: Free write for five minutes a response to this question.
Why are some people rich and some people poor?
