Sociology Noir: Everything in its Place

The latest Sociology Noir Adventure Mystery covers social order, control and change by asking students to solve a particularly baffling murder (not really) involving a 60 year old Cannery owner, a bottle of sweet sherry and a slightly slippery staircase (I could be wrong, but I’m beginning to sense a theme).

The Adventure has 8 possible endings, only one of which tells us the complete story and a shed-load of Sociology perspectives on order, control and change embedded in its AI-rendered ranks:

• Functionalist control agents, Parsons’ integration and latency.

• Conflict theory and its limits: Althusser’s Repressive and Ideological State Agencies (RSAs / ISAs), and Gramsci’s concept of hegemony.

• Action approaches: routines as accomplishments, labelling, Garfinkel, Luhmann and Weber.

• Feminism and social capital (the private sphere), liberal and radical feminism.

The trick, as far as teaching is concerned, is to teach these ideas through the medium of the Mystery. Once your students have completed the Adventure you can reference the various sections as a way of explaining and if necessary developing the sociological content. The Teacher Key file summarises the Sociology in each Section and the Student Recap file points students towards the sociological ideas expressed in the Adventure.

The Recap file also contains a number of suggested Comprehension questions you might want your students to tackle while the Teacher Key file contains some indicative content for each.

If you’ve missed any of the previous Murder Mystery files the basic idea is that students work their way through the Adventure, making choices that result in different outcomes only one of which, as I’ve said, is the “complete ending”. As they’re playing the Adventure students might also, quite possibly although it’s not guaranteed, be “learning some sociology”. The “sociology part” comes from the fact that the underlying sociological text is my original work – a combination of material that did and didn’t make it into a published textbook. The Murder Mystery part is provided by AI, because I couldn’t be bothered. Obvs.

If you like what you see or think it’s something you might want to use, you can Start at the Start of the Introduction To Sociology series:

1. This Sociological Life (Theoretical origins of sociology and scientific perspectives)

2. Problems, Problems (The difference between social and sociological problems)

3. Everything in Its Place

4. Curtain Call at the Lantern (Identity)

5. The Confidence Interval (The relationship between Theory and Methods)