Has anyone else done this with a similar disability? If so, what was your experience, and what are your recommendations?

Also, I'm in my 20s, I'm not an older person doing a phd. I just got arthritis pretty young

Summary

The Second Amendment functions not as a check on state-corporate “tyranny” but as an ideological, electoral, and legal mechanism that reinforces state and elite power, diverting politics into culture-war conflict rather than economic representation.

Instead of a constitutional right, it’s better understood as a revocable privilege granted to gun owners who largely operate as loyal auxiliary supporters of the state’s monopoly on “legitimate” violence.

The legal profession’s role, in this account, is to furnish the epicycles (some more benign than others) through which doctrinal refinements and historical just‑so stories obscure this distribution of armed loyalty and culture‑war distraction.

I am interested in reading about AI mediated communication though a critical theory lens, specifically about how people communicate with chat bots for therapeutic and personal relationship purposes. Does anyone have any articles they’d reccomend? Thanks!!

I'm serious. You look at doctor's offices, cop phootage, how people act on the internet, how your coworkers act at every job you've been to, how every roomate you've had acts, how your family acts, how people act in school classrooms, how every customer acts at work, people putting graffiti, people on the street late at night, every story throughout history, duels to the death over nothing.... is humanity largely comprised of like batshit insane people? is it like 30%~?

Edit:
Last night I was listening to a story about losing your mind. It was so symetrical. So fulfilling. So perfect. Every setup had a payoff, and everything, every beat, every detail of the story, was integral to the web. It was my favorite story, because the writing itself, the structure of it, was so beautiful. So I started telling my partner who was listening to the story with me. It reminded me, and i said as much, of principles of design. The colors, contrasting, fighting, clashing, flowing, going together, smooth, sharp. The groups of small things with a gap, and groups of big things. Bubbles in cartoons, ceramic animal figures being laid out to an invisible specification in my dad's back yard. Patterns on a fursona. There is a form. An underlying principle. Something all of this points to. a perfection, a beauty, a payoff to every question. I saw this when i was on mushrooms. I saw the payoff. It was god. And she loves us.

My partner said "you're crazy." i said "what?" and she said "you are completely insane. You never make any sense." I think she's right.

Insanity is so prolific because its so tempting. Insanity is packing everything up and tying the loose ends together with an erroneous narrative you make up yourself, or endlessly pursuing something to tie to the ends when your way of putting together the puzzle pieces doesn't complete the puzzle, or just being content leaving one side unfinished in favor of having as many pieces put together as possible. That's why genius is so close to madness. Or maybe i'm just making things up to satisfy my need for the world to be simple. again right now.

I've decided to stop using screens, and doing other things that make me feel less grounded. Focus on reading, playing music, and interacting with other people. It helps me.

Thank you for your comments.

it’s a complex topic and most people only want simple answers and will knee jerk against they very notion of the term. is there a softer name for it? has anyone had success at communicating it to someone who hasn’t taken college classes?

I had the chance this year to take a few sociology classes in college and to be part of a small discussion group focused on philosophy and social theory. That experience really changed the way I think about how these subjects are treated online.

It made me reflect on how, ever since “activism” became more visible on social media, sociology has often been reduced to something like a side quest, an accessory to arguments rather than a discipline in its own right. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a good thing that sociological ideas are reaching a wider audience. But at the same time, it feels like a lot of the core concepts (frameworks, terminology, and even entire theories) lose their depth and precision when they’re compressed into easily digestible formats like short posts or video essays.

What stands out to me is the confidence with which people speak on these topics online. There’s this tendency to present opinions as if they were grounded in a solid understanding of the field, "universal truth about society" when in reality sociology is incredibly complex, layered, and often internally contested. Even among trained sociologists, there isn’t always consensus, so seeing people flatten these debates into definitive takes can feel frustrating.

I’m not even a sociology major, but I still find myself wondering: do people actually understand the concepts they’re using? Or are these ideas just being repurposed as rhetorical tools?

Of course, everyone is entitled to have opinions and critiques, especially when it comes to media and culture. That’s part of being human. But there’s a difference between engaging critically and positioning oneself as an authority on cultural or sociological analysis without acknowledging the depth of those fields.

I guess what bothers me most is not that people are interested in sociology, but that the way it’s often discussed online strips it of its nuance, its rigor, and ultimately, its meaning.

I’m researching it as a possible career path and want to get an idea of the areas I may be working in

I honestly don't know much about the course. I didn't study Sociology in Class 12 either, so I'm a confused a lot !!

I wanted to ask a few things like -

• What do you actually study in each year? Is it mostly theory or are there practicals/research too?

• Is it difficult for someone who has never studied Sociology before?

• What kind of student usually enjoys this course?

• What are the career options after graduation? (Private jobs, government exams, higher studies, NGOs, research, etc.)

• If you could go back, would you still choose Sociology Honours? Why or why not?

• What are the biggest pros and cons of this course that no one tells freshers?

This is our local recurring future-planning thread. Got questions about jobs or careers, want to know what programs or schools you should apply to, or unsure what you'll be able to use your degree for? This is the place.

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In this piece from Works in Progress, it traces how marriage customs across 186 culturally independent societies track almost perfectly with resource structures: who inherits, how wealth is stored, and whether you're a pastoralist or farmer.

Some specific stats worth noting:

Among 186 culturally independent societies, 31 were monogamous, 153 polygynous, and 2 polyandrous

When France imposed equal inheritance partition after the Revolution, it became the first European country to exhibit declining fertility — because families had to limit children to avoid over-dividing estates

The Himba of Namibia are pastoralists, where 49% of children are not biologically the husband's — yet husbands accept this because inheritance runs matrilineally (through sisters' sons), so their investment in non-biological children is low

Does the "marriage = resource management" frame fully explain the variation? Or does it underweight coercion, culture, and religion?

Hi y'all! Sociology PhD student here with an embarrassingly dumb question. I often see both "demographics" and "sociodemographics" used to describe basic characteristics of a study sample or population, but I've struggled to find a clear explanation of the distinction. If you use both terms, what do you mean by each? What do you include in each?

It's hard for me to think of demographics that aren't also inherently "social" in some way, maybe with the exception of chronological age and sex assigned at birth (but even sex is complicated and partly socially constructed, so.).

Hello all!

I'm a sociology PhD student teaching as instructor of record for the first time (woohoo!) and my students are learning introductory statistical analysis for the social sciences. At my university, the summer session course covers up through t tests and confidence intervals before students take the second part of the sequence with faculty in the fall and learn regressions and the like.

Instead of a sit down exam with calculations, I would like to assess my students' learning using a sociological article that can actually help them engage with real world research. However, I'm having a hard time finding articles that use t tests as the primary form of analysis. I have found a few RCTs that seem appropriate, but they are not really sociological and/or they are boring and/or they use far too much jargon for college underclassmen.

I would really love any recommendations if you have them! Any subfield would be welcome (and I would even take social psych), but I did poll my students and some of the popular areas of interest are incarceration/criminal legal system, higher education/SES/wellbeing, and homelessness. Thanks all!

What's on your plate this week, what are you working on, what cool things have you encountered? Open discussion thread for casual chatter about Sociology & your school, academic, or professional work within it; share your project's progress, talk about a book you read, muse on a topic. If you have something to share or some cool fact to talk about, this is the place.

This thread is replaced every Monday. It is not intended as a "homework help" thread, please; save your homework help questions (ie: seeking sources, topic suggestions, or needing clarifications) for our homework help thread, also posted each Monday.

This is our local recurring homework thread. Simple questions, assignment help, suggestions, and topic-specific source seeking all go here. Our regular rules about effort and substance for questions are suspended here - but please keep in mind that you'll get better and more useful answers the more information you provide.

This thread gets replaced every Monday, each week. You can click this link to pull up old threads in search.

Have others noticed a pattern with these "manosphere" debate podcasts? It seems less like genuine conversations and more like a deliberate setup. They consistently feature women aged 18–23—often influencers or content creators—to debate controversial topics, which I believe is a strategic choice rooted in selection bias. This isn't accidental. It’s about creating an environment where these women are less likely to stand their ground, especially if they are college-educated or more experienced, which might undermine the hosts' facade. These podcasts are designed for virality, not truth, using tactics like confusing questions and interruptions to make guests appear irrational. Essentially, they monetize the spectacle of young women being "trampled on' in debates, turning these interactions into rage-bait rather than genuine discussion. From a sociological perspective, I wonder whether this reflects the evolution of the attention economy into a more hostile, performative media landscape, or if it’s mainly about manipulating participant selection to produce a predetermined outcome. Would love to hear your thoughts.

Could it be a reflection of how women’s sports are supported worldwide vs. in the US? In the US, most kids play sports—girls and boys. And the US is an athletic powerhouse in general, judging by the Olympics.

Perhaps women’s sports are simply supported far more in the U.S. than the rest of the world. I think that’s probably true, in some sense. For example, I wonder how many world class female athletes come out of countries like Iran, where women have “different” opportunities and civil rights.

Additionally interesting is how some countries can be consistent soccer powerhouses. Look at the smaller European countries that sometimes consistently field incredible teams. Consider Belgium, which has a similar population to the LA metro area. I’m guessing their success is somehow a product of culture and generational knowledge.

So if the US men’s team is so weak, and the women’s team is so dominant, what’s the cause? I’m guessing it’s more to do with how women’s sports are supported in other countries—less a product of some discrepancy between men’s and women’s soccer programs in the U.S.

Another factor may be that in the U.S., a smaller proportion of young male athletes choose soccer, while a higher proportion of women choose it. Maybe the U.S. men’s soccer pool of players is comparable to a place like Belgium, since soccer is such a minority sport compared to football, baseball, etc.

Interested to hear your thoughts.

This is our local recurring future-planning thread. Got questions about jobs or careers, want to know what programs or schools you should apply to, or unsure what you'll be able to use your degree for? This is the place.

This thread gets replaced every Friday, each week. You can click this link to pull up old threads in search.

I’m really curious to learn about how different cultures approach making conversation, whether it’s with a stranger or someone close. What topics do they talk about, how deep they like to go, how vulnerable they feel comfortable getting, how they approach controversies and debates… Would love to listen to a podcast or read a book on the matter! Something accessible to a non specialist.

What's on your plate this week, what are you working on, what cool things have you encountered? Open discussion thread for casual chatter about Sociology & your school, academic, or professional work within it; share your project's progress, talk about a book you read, muse on a topic. If you have something to share or some cool fact to talk about, this is the place.

This thread is replaced every Monday. It is not intended as a "homework help" thread, please; save your homework help questions (ie: seeking sources, topic suggestions, or needing clarifications) for our homework help thread, also posted each Monday.

This is our local recurring homework thread. Simple questions, assignment help, suggestions, and topic-specific source seeking all go here. Our regular rules about effort and substance for questions are suspended here - but please keep in mind that you'll get better and more useful answers the more information you provide.

This thread gets replaced every Monday, each week. You can click this link to pull up old threads in search.

Hello!

I am a proudly Autistic person, and I tried to write a paper that could help improve Autistic-Neurotypical communication. This was not my major and I only had 5 weeks in an accelerated course among others to write this. I tried to give it my best effort to use intercultural theories in my paper. I think I would like to revise this semi-rushed paper and make it something genuinely useful that could be shared. I would love to get feedback especially from other neurodivergent people who have experience in Autistic circles. Due to the rushed nature, there are most likely some big mistakes and misunderstandings.

This is a link to my old assignment.

Trigger warnings (Suicide, Abuse, Injustice).

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OlJp7oFuLAiWSBOQZ9IKRA1cXhhWR3X3/view

Have you ever seen content about Autistic culture(s)? I thought it was amazing to learn about it and other disability cultures like Deaf culture.

Granovetter's argument depended on weak ties being relatively rare and effortful to maintain, which is part of why they bridge otherwise disconnected networks and carry novel information. Social platforms have made weak-tie maintenance (a birthday acknowledgment, a like, an occasional comment) extremely low-cost, while strong-tie maintenance cost hasn't changed much.

Has sociology examined the weak-tie/strong-tie ratio once weak-tie maintenance approaches zero cost? Does an abundance of low-cost weak ties still produce the bridging benefit Granovetter described, or did maintenance cost do real epistemic work, forcing a selection effect on which weak ties survive, that disappears once cost approaches zero? Especially interested in longitudinal data on whether 'close confidant' counts move independently of weak-tie counts as platforms scale the latter.

Source anchor: Granovetter (1973), "The Strength of Weak Ties," American Journal of Sociology.