Local to Global: The Sociological Journey
Contributing Authors of this 2020 version:
Christina Miller-Bellor, Delta College
Original Author:
Name removed at Publisher’s request
Past Contributing Authors:
Jean Ramirez, Lansing Community College
Rudy Hernandez, Lansing Community College
Aliza Robison, Lansing Community College
Pamela Smith, Lansing Community College
Willie Davis, Lansing Community College
I remember “the moment” my second semester of college. I was sitting in an Introductory Sociology class because I had flipped a coin between Soc and Psych when I was scheduling my classes. I had no idea “what I wanted to be”, but I did know that I wanted more than my current minimum wage job and I had some vague notion that a college education was the way out and up. I was working full time, paying for community college classes a semester at a time, struggling with book costs and life costs, on my own and overwhelmed. I had just paid tuition and was worried about rent, and my Soc professor explained my life in a quick blink. It was like he had a crystal ball… but no, he just had the intersecting data patterns of first generation college student, poverty, female, rural school education, and violence survivor. I wasn’t struggling because I was lazy or couldn’t budget, my barriers to success were typical and predictable consequences of the intersection of my ascribed statuses.
“The moment” felt religious. As the Soc guru was explaining the layering of opportunities and barriers to success, light shown down upon me (because I was sitting next to a big window and a sunbeam escaped the cloud cover). Music came up in the background (a movie being played in the classroom next door), and I had the revelation that what I was learning in class was a toolkit for overcoming structural barriers I hadn’t even fully conceived. Understanding the playing field is the first step to kicking butt. I went from living out of my car to college professor, and “the moment” was pivotal.
Christina Miller-Bellor and I teach at a community college because we see the potential in you. A college education is the vehicle most likely to enable upward social class mobility, especially for people from working class and middle class families. Economic stability is a goal for a lot of us, but college is expensive and debt is scary. This free textbook is a collaboration of Sociology faculty at multiple colleges and universities who want to contribute to your education and want to minimize your debt. We hope you enjoy our version of this book Local to Global: The Sociological Journey.
Sincerely,
A Delta College Sociologist
A note from Jean Ramirez, Lansing Community College:
This textbook was made possible through the Lansing Community College Open Educational Resources (OER) award program. A special thanks is owed to Regina Gong, OER Project Manager, for her vision and the support she provided us as we developed this text. Thanks is also due to the generous donation of {an un-named}, author of Sociology: Understanding and Changing the Social World, from which Exploring Our Social World: The Story of Us has been remixed and revised. In addition, we have included several subsections from Introduction to Sociology, 2ed. from OpenStax. Images in this text come from a variety of sources, with commons.wikimedia.org, pexels.com and pixabay.com, serving as primary repositories from which we have drawn. Finally, thank you to those sociology faculty and students at Lansing Community College who were early adopters of this text and who have generously offered their time and feedback to us.
This text was envisioned as an essentials text, providing coverage of the main areas of study reviewed in most introduction to sociology classes. With that said, we understand faculty may wish to tailor this text to meet their teaching objectives and the needs of their students, so please feel free to revise, remix and redistribute this text at will. We hope that this text provides faculty and students with a quality resource which aids students in achieving their academic goals.
Jean Ramirez, Professor of Sociology, Lansing Community College
LicenseExploring Our Social World : The Story of Us by Jean Ramirez, Rudy Hernandez, Aliza Robison, Pamela Smith, and Willie Davis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International License.
