Accessible Sociology Resource List
Getting students to read theory is hard. Thankfully, there are those who help the transition towards academic writing.
Introduction: Reading is Hard
Theory can be pretty dry. Part of this is the archaic language of classical theory, which is usually over a century old and often presented in translation. Additionally, many thinkers use examples that are abstract or otherwise difficult to parse. An issue in teaching, then, is creating a way to move from informal writing and social media into more academic work on theory and understanding methods and data.
This guide is devoted to accessible articles to help teach theory, or provide places to see sociologists address world events.
Sociological educators, please suggest additional sources!1
Types of Resources
Modern Writing about Sociological Theory
Contemporary writers, who write in a more recognizable style.
Example: Kieran Healy’s “Fuck Nuance”2 is a good introduction to thinking about the purpose of theory.
Sociological Magazines
The Sociological Review publishes a regular magazine.
Example: Jon Mason on the search for ‘smart’ AI given how important context is to understanding something.3
Contexts is the American Sociological Association’s quarterly magazine
Example: “Teaching Others to Teach”4 which is a 2013 thinking of how in research-focused academia, people can be given skills to be effective int the classroom.
The Conversation is a newsy publication with articles by academics. When I worked for the Scholars Strategy Network, many of our academics did public scholarship by writing about current events there.
Example: Jim Krane and Mark Finley write an accessible account of the Arab oil embargo of 1973 on the 50th anniversary.5 A key event in any course about post-war economics and the rise of neoliberalism in the late 70s and early 80s.
Classical theorists writing for magazines and newspapers. For instance, Karl Marx was the European correspondent for the New York Tribune from 1852 to 1861. He typically wrote news summaries of major events in that time6, such as the Crimean War. This is a great way to see how a theorist discusses well-known world events.
There is also a compendium of newspaper articles Marx and Engels wrote across many publications from the 1840s to the 1880s, in various languages.7
Cliffs Notes, But Good: Companion Guides
So summaries of pretty much anything you’d encounter in high school and general ed university courses once upon a time had a summary and basic points written by terribly-paid gig workers at places like Chegg and CourseHero. Increasingly these are written by AI, so they’ve moved from “bad simplifications due to time pressure” to “have no demonstrable connection to real scholarship.” However, some people have actually undertaken to write companions to challenging works that help someone work through important works of theory.
David Harvey gets his own bullet point. Harvey is an extremely important urban sociologist, but in the latter half of his career he has become a great explainer of difficult social theory. He has continually done introduction to Marxist works and the quality of these guides has gotten better and better as they are revised.
YouTube guides. A close reading of Capital Vol. 1. He has done several of these over the years- in 2008 I watched one in a lecture hall where he writes out a diagram explaining the first chapter of Capital where many Marxist terms of ideas are rapidly introduced and linked together. Here is a recent 12-part series one hosted by Peoples Forum NYC.8
Verso Guides by Harvey. There is a continually updated one for Capital Volumes I, II, and III. You can buy it here if you don’t have other access through your school.9 More information at the Google Books entry here.
Protip: Verso has an end-of-year sale and May Day sale typically where ebooks are a couple dollars each.He also has recently published (like, 2023 recently) a companion to Marx’s Grundrisse (unfinished, 1858) which is an important intermediate work between The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Marx’s early critiques and Capital (1867). Not published until half a century after Marx died, I haven’t usually heard this being used in undergraduate spaces but grad students will definitely encounter it. Verso Books link here. Google Books here.10
The Continual Search
This is largely just to get a list going. It will be continually updated with sources of accessible sociology, or sources that otherwise would be good to use in a sociological course at the introductory or elective level.
Hope everyone is having a nice day.
I’m not going to formally endorse ways to circumvent the academic publishing cartels and the very high price of a lot of this stuff without university database access, but it is available if you look around. Just use a VPN.
Healy, K. (2017). Fuck Nuance. Sociological Theory, 35(2), 118–127. kieranhealy.org. https://doi.org/10.1177/0735275117709046. https://kieranhealy.org/files/papers/fuck-nuance.pdf
Mason, J. (2023). The search continues: Content used to be king, but context is now everything – and “smart” can morph into “stupid.” The Sociological Review. https://doi.org/10.51428/tsr.ngtq5087. https://thesociologicalreview.org/magazine/june-2023/artificial-intelligence/the-search-continues/
Irby, C. A., Fuist, T. N., Rumpf, C., Jackson, C. L., Polasek, P. M., & Van Altena, A. S. (2013). Teaching Each Other to Teach. Contexts, 12(3), 84-87. https://doi.org/10.1177/1536504213499887
Krane, J., & Finley, M. (2023, October 11). Rising oil prices, surging inflation: The Arab embargo 50 years ago weaponized oil to inflict economic trauma. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/rising-oil-prices-surging-inflation-the-arab-embargo-50-years-ago-weaponized-oil-to-inflict-economic-trauma-214670
Marx, K. (2023, June 8). Articles by Marx in New-York Daily Tribune. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/newspapers/new-york-tribune.htm
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2023, June 18). Marx and Engels’ Journalism. Marxists International Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/newspapers/index.htm
Harvey, David. “Reading Marx’s Capital.” YouTube, 2019, www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlpc6eFEd8osVlCfKCrP6H2F9NJDPCcEq. Accessed 26 Oct. 2023.
Harvey, D. (2018). A Companion To Marx's Capital: The Complete Edition. United Kingdom: Verso Books.
Harvey, D. (2023). A Companion to Marx's Grundrisse. United Kingdom: Verso Books.
Interesting, thanks !
There might be interesting ressource in the "teaching sociology" journal.
I find this article, using cartography to both teach and learn sociology to be quite inspiring : https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0092055X221087230
Also, good point about the press articles. I also find interviews are a good way to enter a theory as the authors often have to reformulate, clarify, simplify, explain, give context etc.