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Introduction to Sociology Movements and Change
Consider the following reflection:
I remember when I first became active in social movements seeking racial, class, gender, and sexual equality for all in the 1990s. While I would like to say I did this for moral or practical reasons, my teenage mind had yet to consider such reasoning. Rather, like most people, I became involved due to emotional pulls based on my own life experiences.
I first learned about movements while I attended support groups for transgender people seeking to reconcile their gender with their religious beliefs. In so doing, I learned very quickly that the problems I thought were mine alone were actually shared by many people. Instead of continuing to believe I was damaged, I learned in those meetings to recognize the ways existing social structures damage certain groups, which led me to become active in protests and other social movement activities seeking to make life better for those living in the margins of society. Introduction to Sociology Movements and Change
While special to me, my experience is rather common (as the histories of people like Alice Paul and Bayard Rustin illustrate). Like me, most activists begin fighting structural inequality because they feel the pain of oppression in their own lives, but it is due to their efforts that many of us walk around every day without knowing that: women were starved almost to death by the American government so other women could vote; African-Americans were beaten, killed, set on fire, and tailed by the FBI so they could vote and go to school; sexual minorities were institutionalized, imprisoned, and killed on public streets so they could have jobs, families, and educations; or that once upon a time something as simple as a lunch break or a fire escape was unheard of in most American workplaces introduction to Sociology Movements and Change.
Like I did as a teenager, ask yourself what rights do you have that other people died for, and what rights do other people currently lack that you could be helping them achieve?
We will conclude the course by thinking about social problems – the kinds of things that are addressed by social movements and are often at the center of social conflicts. We will examine how the problems of society – and the way people respond to them – are crucial elements not only of how societies change but in fact what societies are.
Social Movements
As you now know, societies – especially large, modern ones – are exceedingly complex and therefore filled with tensions and problems. Social movements are the way members of a society attempt to address these problems. Movements can take a number of forms – revolutionary or reformist, organized or diffused over a vast array of social media posts – but they are a key element in modern societies and often a major engine of change.
Below is a recommended video in which an animal rights activist discusses at length the controversial but unavoidable concept of “disruption” as it relates to social movements and social change. As you watch, read, and learn about social movements, consider some collective action efforts you’ve heard about. What kind of movements were they? What was their purpose? What sort of action did they engage in to reach their goals? How do they fit in with the theories you’ve learned in this course?
Conflict and Social Change
Conflict is something we all think about – probably worry about. And you might assume that sociology gives us answers, or at least some guidance, as to how to fix the problems that create conflict. But in this section, we will consider conflict not only as a problem, but as a constituent element of social life that may be very difficult – and, in some perspectives, undesirable – to avoid.
In this section, you will read a summary of the work of Lewis Coser on “the functions of social conflict.” But before you do that, you should learn a bit about conflict from the perspective of the first person to study it empirically – Karl Marx. Introduction to Sociology Movements and Change, Marx believed that conflict was created by stratified social structures, but that the goal of history was to abolish it. You may be surprised to learn what he really thought about how societies work and how they should work.