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The Sociology of Doing Nothing: A Model "Adopt a Stigma in a Public Place" Exercise
Abstract
The "doing nothing" assignment is offered as a methodologically detailed, theoretically grounded, and easily implemented exercise for teaching students about stigma. It also provides students with the opportunity to "do" sociology and to learn about everyday interpretations of social life. This paper provides a discussion of the advantages of this stigma simulation, safety issues related to the exercise, and methods teachers can use to assess student learning. Goffman's works on stigma and Scott and Lyman's concept of "accounts" frame an analysis of student reports. A composite narrative of doing nothing highlights how the experience unfolds from beginning to end.
... Research shows (see Mooney and Edwards 2001;Scarce 1997;Wright 2000) that this type of experiential learning allows students to reach deeper and more personal understandings of sociological theories and concepts. A number of good exercises involving Goffman's approach have been proposed: Larson and Tsitsos (2013) use a "speed-dating" exercise to highlight the concept of impression management, Brown (2003) describes a classroom activity that allows students to experience the social response to embarrassment, Sharp and Kordsmeier (2008) have a teacher simulate a social faux pas to have students gain a deeper understanding of face-work and tact, Hanlon (2001) utilizes an out-of-class activity to allow students to experience the "stigma" of engaging in a public unfocussed activity, and Rabow, Stein, and Conley (1999) designed an exercise in which students take on a stigmatized 690793T SOXXX10.1177/0092055X17690793Teaching SociologyMcCoy research-article2017 1 State University of New York, College at Plattsburgh, Plattsburgh, NY, USA role by wearing a pink ribbon that signifies support for gay rights. ...
... While these activities are useful in getting students to think more deeply about Goffman's approach to public behavior, the majority of them (see Brown 2003;Hanlon 2001;Rabow et al. 1999;Sharp and Kordsmeier 2008) do not focus on routine face-to-face interactions that were the basis of much of Goffman's work and are the type of interactions most commonly experienced in everyday life. Instead, they tend to highlight atypical embarrassing interactions or deviant public behaviors in which a person gives a "ruined" public performance in front of a large audience. ...
Goffman’s dramaturgical approach is frequently used to introduce undergraduate students to the sociological understanding of human interaction. While a number of scholars have designed engaging student activities that highlight Goffman’s approach, most of these activities tend to involve atypical embarrassing interactions or norm-breaking behaviors that happen in front of a large public audience. In this way, they are unlike the mundane face-to-face interactions that were the focus of much of Goffman’s work. I have used Goffman’s notion of interactions as an “information game,” discussed at the start of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, to create a stimulating in-class exercise that involves students having a routine one-on-one interaction with another student. Responses from 170 students in four Introduction to Sociology classes suggest that students found the activity engaging and believed it gave them a richer understanding of Goffman’s approach to human interaction.
... Other in-class activities helped bring complex theories and findings to life, offering tangible illustrations of forms of inequality that are hidden in plain sight. For instance, students gathered data and reviewed findings about the impact of race and criminal record on hiring and salary decisions during our unit on race, violated social norms by doing nothing in a public space on campus during our week on norms and conformity (Halnon 2001), reviewed the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders to identify diagnostic criteria that are socially constructed during our week on mental health, mapped the friendship network for our class and used their knowledge of its structure to pass a poker chip to someone they did not know through their existing connections, and learned how knowledge is created on Wikipedia by examining the revision history for controversial pages during our week on networks and contagion. ...
Scholars of teaching and learning in sociology have argued that introductory courses should teach toward foundational learning goals instead of providing an exhaustive review of the discipline. Nevertheless, prior research has provided far more guidance on what instructors ought to teach than how they can cohesively support learning across the goals advocated. Additionally, few studies have considered whether introductory course designs adequately address students’ diverse reasons for enrolling. To address this gap in the literature, we offer insights from our experiences with a redesigned introductory course tailored to support student learning in the areas recommended by earlier work. After describing our learning goals and the elements of our course design, which are grounded in empirical findings from the literature, we present evidence for the efficacy of this design in achieving key disciplinary learning goals, serving students’ personal learning goals, and attracting new and existing majors and minors.
Instructors frequently utilize breaching experiments in an attempt to "bring sociology to life." However, an uncritical embrace of breaching experiments obscures the complexity of their possible effects on participants and subjects. These experiments have real potential to inflict deleterious consequences on individuals and groups. Additionally, the presence of videos of breaching experiments on the Internet raises questions about activities students are carrying out and publicly touting as sociological practice. By giving greater consideration to the embeddedness of the breaching experiment and its practitioners in the broader social world, students and instructors can create breaching experiments that are enlightening while still manifesting an appreciation of their effects on the experiments' "subjects" and perhaps even making a contribution to the amelioration or transformation of the structures within which they take place.
How might teachers help students investigate the relationship between gender and homophobia? This article describes an exercise that uses fingernail polish to do just that. The authors uses anecdotal evidence to describe the exercise in which students pair with someone of the opposite gender and paint each other's fingernails. Additionally, the author uses a randomly selected sample of 19 students to formally evaluate the teaching goals of this assignment. Students regard the nail polish assignment favorably, with average scores ranging from 3.37 to 4.26 (out of 5). The evaluation and anecdotal evidence confirms a continuing need to address homophobia in everyday life and in the classroom. This activity offers an innovative approach to doing so.
The purpose of this article is to document how a course in the fundamentals of sociology encouraged students to rethink negative impressions about people with AIDS. Multimethod, active learning processes were utilized to introduce the sociological imagination, critical thinking, and theory and methods in sociology. The intent was to apply basic sociological knowledge to a real-world issue, HIV/AIDS in a global perspective. In the process of developing basic skills in sociology, a consistent change was noted in students' self-reported impressions about people with AIDS in each of four semesters (N = 160). Catastrophic contagion characterized their impressions at the beginning of the semester; humanizing attributes (encouragement and empowerment) replaced catastrophic contagion at the end of the semester. Implications of these findings for teaching and learning, and deconstructing HIV/AIDS stigma, are discussed.
In response to the claim that students who have received an undergraduate degree in education lack adequate preparation for postgraduate study, the designers of a masters course in research methods set an assignment at the first meeting which asked practising teachers to match Goffman's dramaturgical concepts to observation of behaviour in public. Results based on assignments from five classes were analysed from the perspective of theoretical understanding and what the collected assignments revealed about the students’ perception of the ethics of naturalistic observation. It was found that theoretical understanding was achieved and that the discussions of ethics produced findings that illustrated Goffman's distinction between ethics and etiquette.
While various theorists explain the postmodern moment or culture by pointing at an acceleration of transformations in macro-social institutions, such explanations remain often abstract and removed from everyday experience. Seeking to concretize how speed is articulated in popular texts, I analyze here the various strategies TV commercial ads deploy to inscribe speed as a normal and desirable quality of everyday life, objects, and self. Focusing on both pictorial and textual dimensions, I call the reader's attention to these strategies, and discuss the possible social and psychological consequences of the ideological orientations they articulate.
Although talk is the fundamental material of human relations, the sociology of talk remains undeveloped. This article presents an analysis of one kind of talk, the employment of accounts--statements made to explain untoward behavior and bridge the gap between actions and expectations. Accounts may be classified by content as excuses and justifications, each with its own subtypes. Excuses and justifications are socially approved vocabularies which neutralize an act or its consequences when one or both are called into question. The honoring of an account represents the restoration of equilibrium. There are also strategies for avoiding accounts. More broadly, accounts are manifestations of the underlying negotiation of identities within speech communities.
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R. is a 40-year-old, divorced, White male with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, paranoid type, chronic. Shortly after his entrance into our work rehabilitation program, R. engaged one of the authors (P.L.) in a conversation about the nature of his illness. He reported that his most disabling and pervasive symptom was a persistent inability to pursue any goal in his life. R. recognized that he had other symptoms of psychiatric illness but stated that these did not account for his disability. He explained that the voice of God that counseled him when he felt overwhelmed and his fear that God was about to kill him as punishment for his sins put life in perspective and, consequently, were sometimes as comforting as they were distressing. R. explained that what had altered his life was a process, invisible to others, that left him unable to plan out and pursue a life course. He did not know whether it was a lack of knowledge or lack of motivation and energy that left him without the inner direction he needed. All he knew was that it was "schizophrenia," and it left him unable to work or to function like other people. What R. was describing as the foundation of his illness and his disability appears to be a disturbance of volition. Interestingly, self-understanding is more consistent with several of the early formulations of schizophrenia than it is with current formulations. To explore the merits of R.'s belief about his illness we offer a review of the role that disturbance of volition has played in historical conceptualizations of schizophrenia, the current nosology, and in theories of the negative or deficit syndrome. The history of R.'s illness is then presented. Lastly, we discuss what we learned from R.'s participation in a paid work program.