Social Problems: Materials

Schedule of Readings, Videos, Podcasts, & Explorations

These are the materials with which we will be engaging over the course of the semester. There are no textbooks to purchase for this course. Everything will be available to you via these links or as a PDF within a class Google Drive (which will also be linked).

You will need to bring a journal or an art pad and writing utensils (or art supplies) to class each day. (It does not need to be very big or elaborate). It will be used for in-class reflections, free-writes, and thought exercises. Occasionally, I will ask you to share your writing with the class.

NOTE: All READ and WATCH are required unless marked optional. All LISTEN and EXPLORE materials are optional unless marked required. Material may be subject to change.

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” Karl Marx

Week 1

As we all enter the classroom with different backgrounds and experiences, it is helpful for me to know a little about you! Please fill out this “About Me” form according to your comfort level. What do you think is helpful for me to know about about you? Feel free to write as much or as little as you’d like. Please complete by the end of our first week.

August 23rd: Introductions

During our first class, we introduce ourselves and get more familiar with the course expectations. All of the materials for this day are optional. However, they might be helpful for you to look over and give you something to think about as we begin this class.

• READ: Our class syllabus; “What if Sociologists Had as Much Influence as Economists?” — optional; “Why we still need to study the humanities in a STEM world” — optional
• WATCH: “Is my sociology professor biased?” — optional (Hint: the answer is yes)
• LISTEN: “Sometimes you have to say the Chancellor has no clothes.” (1 hr. 11 min.)
• EXPLORE: Our Moodle & Medium pages; “Whose land am I on?”
  — The land you’re on is the traditional territory of 3 Indigenous communities. Learn more about these communities and territories:
  1. Chahta (Choctaw)
  2. Havasupai
  3. Wampanoag

Without profit from stolen Indigenous lands, UNC would have gone broke 100 years ago

To Do: sign up for a Medium account, complete your profile, and be invited to our course publication.

August 25th: Foundations

These resources will set the theoretical foundation of the course. They might feel as if I’m throwing you in the deep end, but do your best and come to class prepared with any questions you might have. We will go through them together!

• READ: “The Promise”; “Constructing Differences”; “Five Faces of Oppression”; “The Uses of Anger”
• WATCH: “The Poor Sociological Imagination of the Rich” (4 min.); “An introduction to the discipline of Sociology” — optional but recommended for students new to sociology (5 min.); “Sociology Crash Course” (10 min) — optional but recommended for students new to sociology
• LISTEN: “Intersectionality: Identity Politics & Class Consciousness” (1 hr.)
• EXPLORE: Our Moodle & Medium pages

To Do: sign up for individual discussion questions by August 28th

Week 2

August 30th: Transphobia

• READ: “Why Sex Is Not Binary”; “The Role of Masculinity Threat in Homonegativity and Transphobia”; “Fugitive Flesh: Gender Self-Determination, Queer Abolition, and Trans Resistance”
• WATCH: “Transgender Rights” (17 min.) — (TW: mention of su*cide)
• LISTEN: “Gender Conformity” (31 min.)
• EXPLORE: Legislative Tracker

September 1st: Heterosexism — we will meet online this day

• READ: “Homophobia as a Weapon of Sexism”; “The Tragedy of Heterosexuality”; “Understanding Patriarchy”; “Patriarchy, Cisnormativity, Heteronormativity”; “From ‘Normal’ to Heterosexual” (skim)
• WATCH: “Why Gay Marriage?: Follow the Money” (4 min.)
• LISTEN: “Queer People of Color: Connected but Not Comfortable” (53 min)
• EXPLORE: “Not just Florida. More than a dozen states propose so-called ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bills”

To Do: write an encounter about Transphobia or Heterosexism & post to our class Medium page by the end of the week

Week 3

September 6th: Flex Day

We will not meet in class this day. Learn about Labor Day along with the past and current struggles and victories of workers in the United States. (This material is optional)

• READ: “Today Belongs to Workers”; “On Labor Day, where’s labor? How did American workers lose their power?”; “Unions help reduce disparities and strengthen our democracy”; “Women Are Taking Over the U.S. Labor Movement”
• WATCH: “Revolution is a Crime: The Haymarket Affair” (34 min.)
• LISTEN: “U.S. Labor History: Militant Unions, Red Scares, and Class Struggle” (1 hr. 48 min.)
• EXPLORE: Starbucks Workers United; Amazon Labor Union

September 8th: White Supremacy

• READ: “The Theory of Racial Formation”; “Racism, Colonialism, Imperialism”; “The Strange Enigma of Race in Contemporary America”; “‘Southern hospitality’ doesn’t always apply to Black people, as revealed in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery” — optional
• WATCH: “Geographies of Racial Capitalism” (16 min); “The Problem With White People” (16 min.) — optional but recommended; “Taking Responsibility for Systemic Racism” (20 min.) — optional but recommended
• LISTEN: “‘We the People’ — the three most misunderstood words in US history” (18 min.) — required
• EXPLORE: “White Supremacy Culture Characteristics” — highly recommended

To Do: write an encounter about White Supremacy & post to our class Medium page by the end of the week

Week 4

September 13th: Manifesto Day & CRG Facilitation

One CRG will be facilitating our class this day. We will also spend time brainstorming for the Manifesto project.

READ: “The Combahee River Collective Statement”; “The Transfeminist Manifesto” (pages 1–10); “The Queer Nation Manifesto”; “Manifesto of the Erased”

September 15th: Wealth & Poverty

• READ: “The wealthiest 1% has taken $50 trillion from working Americans and redistributed it”; “Silver Spoon Oligarchs”; “What the Rich Don’t Want to Admit About the Poor”; “Why Do Americans Care about Income Inequality?” (skim); “Fifty Years Later: From a War on Poverty to a War on the Poor”
• WATCH: Racial Wealth Gap (16 min.); Inequality Is (interactive) — optional but recommended
• LISTEN: “What It Means to be a ‘good’ rich person” (49 min.); “The Toxic Intersection of Poverty and Stress” (1 hr. 17 min.) — recommended
• EXPLORE: Wealth Shown to Scale — required (works well on mobile devices); Play “Spent” — required (CW: May be triggering for individuals who have direct experience with economic precarity. Please see me for an alternative if you do not feel comfortable completing this assignment.)

To Do: write an encounter about Wealth & Poverty & post to our class Medium page by the end of the week

Week 5

September 20th: Ableism

• READ: “Disability as Inequality”; “The social model of disability: thirty years on”; “A Deadly Poverty Trap: Asset Limits in the Time of the Coronavirus”; “Police Violence Is a Disability Justice Issue”
• WATCH: “My Body Doesn’t Oppress Me, Society Does” (5 min); “Ableism is The Bane of My Motherf — ’ Existence” (5 min)
• LISTEN: “Disability Justice, Covid-19, and Black Lives Matter” (30 min)
• EXPLORE: Disability Visibility Project

September 22nd: Care Work

• READ: “Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women”; “Introduction” from The Care Manifesto; “Wages of Virtue: The Relative Pay of Care Work”; “Crisis of Care?”; “The Unreasonable Expectation of American Motherhood”
• WATCH: “The Unpaid Work That GDP Ignores and Why It Really Counts” (17 min.); “Care Work Is Essential Work. It’s Also Climate Work.” (7 min.) — optional
• LISTEN: “Birth of a Broken System” (1 hr. 5 min.) — highly recommended
• EXPLORE: Childcare Deserts

To Do: write an encounter about Ableism or Care Work & post to our class Medium page by the end of the week; Submit your manifesto topic(s) to me.

Week 6

September 27th: Housing

• READ: “How the Criminalization of Poverty Perpetuates Homelessness”; “The Rent Eats First, Even During a Pandemic”; “The Eviction Economy”; “On Hostile Design”; “Do Not Feed the Animals: The Dehumanization of America’s Homelessness”
• WATCH: Evictions (19 min.)
• LISTEN: Black Unhoused Lives Matter (1 hr. 10 min.) — recommended
• EXPLORE: Invisible People; The Eviction Lab

September 29th: Manifesto Day & CRG Facilitation

One CRG will be facilitating our class this day. We will also spend time in our CRGs working on the Zine project.

READ: “The Poor People’s Manifesto”; “Radical Psychiatry Manifesto”; “Wages Against Housework”; “Manifesto for Housing Justice: Fighting the Pandemic of Capitalism and Racism”

To Do: write an encounter about Housing & post to our class Medium page by the end of the week

Week 7

October 4th: Immigration

• READ: “NAFTA and Gatekeeper”; “The root cause of Central American migration? The United States.”; “ICE Illuminates America’s Backslide Into Fascism”; “American Extremism Has Always Flowed from the Border”; “Emphasizing the ‘Complex’ in the ‘Immigration Industrial Complex’” — optional; “The Secret History of Family Separation” — optional but recommended
• WATCH: The Facility (46 min.) TW: images and description of inhumane detention conditions
• LISTEN: “A Century of Immigration Policy in the United States” (33 min.)
• EXPLORE: Immigration Enforcement History in the US and NC — recommended; Simulated dendrochronology of U.S. immigration (1830–2015) — optional

October 6th: Food & Farm Work

• READ: “Because they are connected”; “What Happens if America’s 2.5 Million Farmworkers Get Sick?”; “The Next Pandemic Could Come From an American Factory Farm”; “The US food system creates hunger and debt”
• WATCH: What everyone gets WRONG about farm work (20 min.)
• LISTEN: “Meatpacking’s coronavirus problem” (27 min.)
• EXPLORE: How Much Do You Know About Farm Workers?

To Do: write an encounter about Immigration or Food & Farm Work & post to our class Medium page by the end of the week

Week 8

October 11th: Fall Break — No Class

50 Ways to Take a Break — optional
“How #SquadCare Saved My Life” — optional

October 13th: Environment

• READ: “Critical Environmental Justice Studies”; “Water Justice”; “Indigenous environmental justice”; “Whose debt for whose nature?”; “Mobilizing ‘intersectionality’ in environmental justice research and action in a time of crisis” — optional; “The Rich Breath Easier than the Poor” — optional; “Capitalism Is What’s Burning the Planet, Not Average People” — optional
• WATCH: Environmental Racism (22 min.)
• LISTEN: “Waste, Colonialism, Racism, & Microplastics” (1 hr. 17min.)
• EXPLORE: Climate Time Machine

To Do: write an encounter about Environment & post to our class Medium page by the end of the week

Week 9

October 18th: Marijuana

• READ: “America’s Whites-Only Weed Boom”; “Will Drug Legalization Leave Black People Behind?”; “Did marijuana legalization in Washington State reduce racial disparities in adult marijuana arrests?”
• WATCH: “The Legal Marijuana Industry Is Rigged” (22 min.)
• LISTEN: “At War with the War on Drugs” (30 min.)
• EXPLORE: Extreme Racial Disparities Persist in Marijuana Arrests

October 20th: Manifesto Day & CRG Facilitation

One CRG will be facilitating our class this day. We will also spend time in our CRGs working on the Zine project.

READ: “Undoing Borders: A Queer Manifesto”; “The Delano Proclamation”; “The Wild Poet’s Manifesto”; “Cannabis Reform is a Social Justice Movement”

To Do: write an encounter about Marijuana & post to our class Medium page by the end of the week. Share your manifesto progress with me by the end of the week

Week 10

October 25th: Opioids

• READ: “Income Inequality and Opioid Prescribing Rates”; “Urban Governance and the Spatialization of Overdose Epidemics”; “Drug overdose deaths were so bad in 2017, they reduced overall life expectancy”; “Columbia Professor and Heroin User”
• WATCH: “America’s Deadliest Drug” (24 min)
• LISTEN: “Drugs & Addiction Pt. 2: Organizing Toward Harm Reduction” (45 min.)
• EXPLORE: The Opioid Diaries (TW: Images of needles, overdose, and death)

October 27th: Crime & Policing

• READ: “A World Without Police — excerpts”; “Asset Forfeiture Creates ‘Perverse Incentive To Police For Profit’”; “We Should Still Defund the Police” — optional
• WATCH: “Police” (33 min.)
• LISTEN: “Race, policing, and the universal yearning for safety” (54 min.); “Race, Slavery, and the Origins of Police” (52 min.)
• EXPLORE: Mapping Police Violence — required; You’ve been arrested by a dishonest cop. Can you win in a system set up to protect officers? —optional (interactive)

To Do: write an encounter about Opioids or Crime & Police & post to our class Medium page by the end of the week

Week 11

November 1st: Incarceration

• READ: “Is Prison Necessary?”; “Captive Labor: Exploitation of Incarcerated Workers”; “Planning beyond Mass Incarceration”; “Neoliberalism, mass incarceration, and the US debt–criminal justice complex”; “As California wildfires raged, incarcerated exploited for labor” — optional; “Incarceration during COVID-19: Jail shouldn’t be a death sentence” — optional
• WATCH: “Who Makes Money From Private Prisons?” (21 min) & “Prison Labor” (18 min.)
• LISTEN: “The Pandemic in Prisons: Covid-19, Repression, and the Carceral State” (37 min)
• EXPLORE: Incarceration in Real Numbers — required (works well on mobile devices)

November 3rd: Wages & Work

• READ: “The Gig Economy”; “The Hustle Economy”; “America Runs on ‘Dirty Work’ and Moral Inequality”; “75% of Middle Class Households Say Their Wages Aren’t Keeping Up With Inflation”; “A Tale of Two Thefts”; “The Cost of Thriving” — optional; “Do We Need to Work?” — optional
• WATCH: “Surviving an Unlivable Wage” (27 min.)
• LISTEN: The Great Pyramids of Gig Exploitation (20 min.)
• EXPLORE: Living Wage Calculator — recommended

To Do: write an encounter about Incarceration or Wages & Work & post to our class Medium page by the end of the week

Week 12

November 8th: Manifesto Day & CRG Facilitation

One CRG will be facilitating our class this day. We will also spend time in our CRGs working on the Zine project.

READ: “Nothing About Us Without Us: A manifesto by people who use illegal drugs”; “Manifesto for the Abolition of the Police”; “Building a World Without Jails”; “The People Behind the Mop Buckets”

November 10th: Education

• READ: “Neoliberalism and the Crisis in Higher Education: The Cost of Ideology”; “Racial capitalism and student debt in the U.S.”; “Student Loans, Health, and Life Satisfaction of US Households” — optional; “Harvard Students Aren’t That Smart” — optional; “The End of the University” — optional
• WATCH: “Student Loans” (27 min.)
• LISTEN: “The Life Altering Differences Between White and Black Debt” (58 min.) — recommended; “Against the Academy: Voices Countering the Academic Industrial Complex” (2 hrs. 18 min.) — recommended
• EXPLORE: “The Faces of Student Debt”; How the United States funded land-grant universities with expropriated Indigenous land (Read more about North Carolina State University)

To Do: write an encounter about Education & post to our class Medium page by the end of the week

Week 13

November 15th: Family

• READ: “The Idea of Children”; “After the Housewife”; “Covid-19 is Straining the Concept of Family. Let’s Break It.”; “Homeplace as Revolutionary Front”
• WATCH: “Family of Us” (26 min.); “An Extended Family” (1 hr. 12 min. but focus on 4:45–52:02) — optional but highly recommended
• LISTEN: “Real Families Against the Family” (59 min.)
• EXPLORE: Mapping Changes in American Families

November 17th: Healthcare

• READ: “This American For-Profit Healthcare System Would Just as Soon Kill You as Look at You”; “Why the U.S. failed to control COVID-19: incompetence, class violence, deception, and lies”; “Beyond Health Effects?”; “Social Foundations of Health Care Inequality and Treatment Bias”; “Medical Violence Against People of Color”
• WATCH: “Medicare for All” (20 min.) OR “Bias in Medicine” (22 min.) (choose one)
• LISTEN: “The Everlasting Problem” (56 min.)
• EXPLORE: Health Insurance and Years of Life Lost 2019–2020

To Do: write an encounter about Family or Healthcare & post to our class Medium page by the end of the week

Week 14

November 22nd: War

• READ: “From the Border to the Core: A Thickening Military-Police Assemblage”; “It’s Time to Rein in Inflated Military Budgets”; “Climate Collapse and the Responsibility of the Military”; “America’s Other Forever War”; “White Feminists Wanted to Invade” — optional
• WATCH: “Trans Liberation Not U.S. Invasion!” (7 min.)
• LISTEN: “PIC Abolition, the War on Terror, and the Deportation Machine” (1 hr. 25 min.)
• EXPLORE: Base Nation and/or Costs of War

November 24th: Break — No Class

These are all optional!

• READ: “No Thanks: How Thanksgiving Narratives Erase the Genocide of Native Peoples”; “For many Native Americans, Thanksgiving is a day of mourning”; “The Original Southerners: American Indians, the Civil War, and Confederate Memory”
• MANIFESTO: “Not Murdered, Not Missing: Rebelling against Colonial Gender Violence”
• WATCH: Winona LaDuke on Redemption (5 min.)
• LISTEN: Thanksgiving or Thankstaking? (1 hr. 11 min.)
• EXPLORE: American Indian Movement (AIM) site

To Do: write an encounter about War or the optional material for Nov. 24th & post to our class Medium page by the end of the week

Week 15

November 29th: Manifesto Day & CRG Facilitation

One CRG will be facilitating our class this day. We will also spend time in our CRGs working on the Zine project.

READ: “The Undercommons”; “Manifesto of the 343”; “A Manifesto for a Better Post-Covid-19 World”; “American Beasts”

December 1st: Social Movements

• READ: “Racism, capitalism and rebellion”; “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”; “Confidence comes from building movements”; “Social Change Ecosystem Definition of Roles”; “How Western media would cover Minneapolis if it happened in another country” — optional; “In Defense of Looting” — optional
• MANIFESTO: “We are all very anxious” — required
• WATCH: “How Do Rich People Control Our Movements?” (4 min.); “How Can We Win” (7 min.)
• LISTEN: “Our Own People” (54 min.)
• EXPLORE: Mapping the Sound of Protest

For the remaining days:

Continue working on your Zines, Manifestos, and finishing any work that is incomplete.

Your final Zine, Zine report, Manifesto, and self-evaluation will be due by December 8th. I cannot grant any extensions or accept late work for this part due to University-imposed constraints on final grade turn-ins. (Sorry 😬)