Bringing It All Together: The Sociological Imagination

Abstract

A capstone course in the broadest sense draws together theoretical and empirical work from disparate areas in sociology, serves as a bridge to graduate work in the discipline, and helps students to assume more active lives as citizens and consumers of knowledge. More specifically, I believe that a capstone course should be constructed to help students achieve the following goals: 1) envisioning what constitutes important sociological questions; 2) seeing the range of answers that sociologists have offered to these questions and advancing explanations of their own; 3) recognizing how social theories can be subjected to empirical testing; 4) understanding the partiality of sociological questions, explanations, and empirical tests; 5) perceiving how different subfields in sociology are related to each other; 6) discerning the place of sociology in the broader liberal arts curriculum; and 7) becoming aware of the choices that face us in the worlds in which we live. In the discussion below, I elaborate on and illustrate the implementation of each of these goals in the capstone course that I teach.