Emerging Social Processes

Recommended Prerequisites

Not applicable.

Teaching Methods

This course draws from 2 teaching methods: (i) interactive lectures (ii) activities and discussions in small class sections led by recitation instructors.

Interactive lecture implies the use of a variety of strategies to interrupt the monologues of the teacher (see Burke, 2018). These include:

- “Think, Pair, Share” exercises: students respond to a question prompt by first writing their answer independently (think), then pairing up and discussing with a peer.

- “Divide and conquer” exercises: Discussion topics will be assigned to different sections of the room and discussed by students.

Learning Outcomes

After completing this course, students should:

- Be aware of the sociogenesis of emerging social processes;

- To know the basic substantive characteristics of contemporary social problems, debates and phenomena;

- Understand the mechanisms and logic of the production and circulation of ideas;

- Develop a critical approach to social issues;

- Know how to map the scales and contexts of social processes;

- To obtain sociological knowledge of core areas and substantive subjects of the discipline, developing the capacity to think critically about them;

- Understand the role of evidence in the social sciences and the application of systematic empirical research;

- Analyze specific processes (technological processes, information, tourism, environmental ...).

Work Placement(s)

No

Syllabus

The course covers a set of programmatic contents that are condensed into emerging social processes. Some of these processes are selected in each academic year to be subject to further analysis and debate. In particular, the course deals with the following processes:

- The Consent Society;

- The Big Data Society and Emerging Technologies;

- The new forms of poverty and the misery of the world;

- Technological risks, uncertainty and complexity;

- Dematerialization of the economy and society;

- Cybercrime and new forms of crime.

Head Lecturer(s)

Sara Alexandre Domingues Araújo

Assessment Methods

Assessment
Synthesis work: 30.0%
Research work: 70.0%

Bibliography

— Costa, António Firmino da (2012) Desigualdades sociais contemporâneas. Lisboa: Mundos Sociais.

— Elliott, Anthony, e Bryan S. Turner, eds. Profiles in Contemporary Social Theory. First edition. London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE Publications Ltd, 2001.

— Weinberg, Darin. Contemporary Social Constructionism: Key Themes. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014.