Social Problems workbook

Social Problems in the Age of Discontent:
A Manual for Sociological Thinking 

By Peter Marina

Published by Kendall Hunt

Tired of boring rubrics that turn the university education into a “rubrication” trapping you into a mass produced education? Tired of uncritical “critical” lectures of predictability.

Weary of professors stating the obvious, or assigning books that state the obvious? Skeptical of other professors telling you what to think instead of how to think? Ever want to challenge your professors who want to force their ideology and dogmatic beliefs on you?

Do you possess intellectual curiosity? Do you think beyond the proverbial box? Do you question orthodoxy and refuse conformity? Do you want to challenge authority? Do you want to transcend the ordinary?

Do you have big questions about the state of existence? Do you question our political and economic system? Do you question wars, imperialism, the military industrial complex, and system of mass incarceration? Do you question power?

If you stated yes to any of the above questions, this book is for you.

Social Problems in the Age of Discontent: A Manual for Sociological Thinking offers the student ways to think in new and highly creative ways to understand the world. It teaches the budding intellectual tools to understand the unprecedented challenges that threaten human civilization.

This book teaches students new ways to analyze the causes and symptoms of social problems including increased poverty, homelessness, social disruption, crime, suicide, depression, addiction, joblessness, mass shootings, police brutality, violence, domestic abuse, and the growing instability of work, community, family, and interpersonal relationships impacting billions of people around the globe.

We want to help bring out your full creative potential. What’s more, we want you to think independently about the world and your place in it.

Once the reader is introduced to possibilities for new ways of thinking, the book offers students a series of creative activities to understand and solve various social problems that include, among other things, the concentration of wealth and power, immigration and mass migration, mass incarceration and the criminal (in)justice system, unemployment, environmental destruction, climate change, and homelessness.

The book ends with some classical, but highly exciting assignments involving breaching experiments that allows students the opportunity to violate social norms and socially prescribed scripts to rupture social worlds. These breaching experiments show the fragility of society, and that with the right amount of human agency, we can transform the world in powerful ways.

Our political and economic elite will not solve our social problems. It is up to us, the people, to make change. Up to the task?

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