Discussion and Peer Reply

Course Textbook: https://d3bxy9euw4e147.cloudfront.net/oscms-prodcms/media/documents/IntroductionToSociology2e-OP.pdf

Reflect back on the last seven weeks:

• What are your big takeaways from the course? In other words, what are 1 or 2 things that you learned that you believe will stick with you after the course is over?
• Were you surprised by anything you learned in the class? Explain.
• Do you think that you’ll continue to think like a sociologist after the course? Why or why not?

Reply to this post:

My big takeaways from the course are that there are many lenses from which to examine our realities. From the very beginning of the class, the blog post about How to Think like a Sociologist really sparked my attention about how we can travel through our life experiences accepting anything for face value which can potentially be incorrect. I will definitely carry that with me after the course is over because now more than ever, in an infodemic, it is important to be critical of the information delivered through various platforms. Sometimes people can use many strategies to be convincing and in an era of uncertainty, we can become vulnerable to accepting the information delivered. Another big takeaway for me was learning more about how sociologists analyze healthcare. Before this course, I more or less thought of healthcare in black and white terms with healthcare being provided for some and not provided for others. The different sociological theories not only focus on different aspects of the healthcare system such as how conflict theory focuses on the inequalities from the dominant group often relegate people in the subordinate group to lifestyles that result in poor health such as in the case of food desserts. And in symbolic interactionism how health and the concepts of medicalization and demedicalization call into question how diseases and conditions are constructed and given their respective treatment plans.