Welcome to Fall Semester 2017 and to my SOCI 475 students.

Hi folks! Welcome to Sociology 475 - Senior Seminar. As you know, the framework for this class is public sociology. We are going to think about how our sociological perspective, social science research methods, and sociological analyses can be useful outside of academic spaces. Our course blogs will be our practice of communicating our sociological perspectives on the social problems about which we are interested to a public audience.

Here is the prompt for our first blog post:
In two to three paragraphs, consider what draws you to sociology and how you might use it in the future. Begin your post by telling us something about yourself and why it matters to you.

Throughout your post, answer the following questions:

• How would you define sociology? What is the sociological perspective? 
• What is useful about sociology? What are the benefits of the sociological perspective? 
• How can it be used outside of academic walls?

A note for Criminal Justice Studies students:

• Your answers might be somewhat different as you think about how the criminological (and sociological and feminist) perspectives about crime, punishment, policing, etc., are and could be useful for nonacademic audiences. 

For folks who are visiting: Here is a Wikipedia page about Public Sociology (not a scholarly source, but very useful!).