Investigating the Social World

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7
• Convenor and tutor: Margarita Aragon
• Assessment: a 2000-word comparative review (50%) and 2000-word essay (50%)

How can we make sense of the social world and the relations of power that run through it? How do we produce valid and useful knowledge about it? Under what social and political conditions is knowledge produced? What is the relationship of the knowledge producer to the worlds they make claims about? Should we investigate the social world in order to interpret it or to change it?

In this module, we will make links between sociological theory and practice, as we engage with a range of both foundational and emerging frameworks for theorising the social world. We will ask on what basis we can make claims about social reality and to what end, considering feminist, race critical and post and decolonial critiques of the social sciences. We will seek to understand ongoing theoretical debates about how sociological knowledge is produced and what it is produced for.

The module will help you understand the relevance of these debates for your own sociological projects as well as how you might apply and engage with the theoretical approaches that we consider.

Indicative module syllabus

• The history and politics of social scientific inquiry
• Conceptualisations of objectivity and subjectivity in social analysis
• Value freedom and the social scientist
• Dialectical materialism
• Power, knowledge and discourse
• Intersectionality as an analytical sensibility
• Psychosocial inquiry
• Decolonial methodologies
• New materialisms
• Digital epistemologies

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

• critically evaluate different theoretical approaches to social inquiry, assessing the differences and commonalities between them
• demonstrate in-depth understanding of the political issues at stake in sociological knowledge production
• articulate how particular theoretical frameworks underpin sociological practice.