After taking this course, students will be able to understand and to use ideas and methods connected with the social construction of reality. They will be expected to achieve a critical competence in assessing the light its analysis throws on global and transnational behaviour.

This course is designed to familiarise students with conceptual tools relating to the sociology of knowledge that they need for studying topics such as global and transnational sociology. The course begins by examining varied respects in which human beings have observed connections between different cultures and the ways in which their inhabitants see the world; it then traces developments in the analysis of language and meaning that have led to specific understandings of social construction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  In later stages of the course, students will be encouraged to collect and analyse examples from their own reading and experience.

Lecture topics will include the following:

1.   Social influences on how we see the world:  The history of an idea

2.   Sociology and the sociology of knowledge

3.   The role of language: Hermeneutics and language games

4.   Schutz and the stranger; Berger and Luckmann

5.   Bourdieu and Foucault: Habitus and practices of power

6.   Frames, narratives and cultural scripts

7.   The sociology of science: Realism and relativism

8.   Social construction in practice 1: Examples and methods

9.   Social construction in practice 2: Examples and methods

10. Patterns of policy: Diffusing global constructions

Active participation + essay (2500 words)